Mic Placement and noise while recording

CatMalone

CatMalone

New member
Hello,

May I ask you? I’m curious to know the answer of this question:

Let say if there is noise (in the environment or in the surrounding where I do the recording) while recording so as a precaution what I do is:

Lower down the gain and be close to the mic so that it picks up my voice more than the noise.

Q) So after recording, the gain is low in the recording. Now if I use the Amplify effect of Audacity to Increases the volume, will it also increase the noise which is in the background or will it only amplify the gain of my voice?

I did try Amplify effect and found the noise ratio was also increased then I was wondering what’s the benefit of:

“Lower down the gain and be close to the mic so that it picks up my voice more than the noise.”

If I don't use the Amplify effect then volume of recording remains low. May I ask your opinion about it?

Thanks in advance for replying ?
 
To reduce the amount of ambient noise present in your recordings there are two things that you can do: get close to the mike and sing loudly. Reducing the gain does little for you, as you have discovered.
 
It's a ratio - wanted signal to noise. Remember that there is also the inverse square law. Double the distance reduces the volume to a quarter, not a half, and if you move the mic closer, the same thing applies - the wanted signal goes up compared to the background. Gain just adjusts the wanted and the unwanted the same amount - the ratio between them stays the same. A mic that cannot be taken close can be swapped for one that has more gain forward and less gain in other directions.
 
You lower the gain just so you don't overload the mic, but also allowing you to get closer to the mic so you can be significantly louder than the background noise. You should also try to lower the background noise if you can. Move a noisy PC into a different room, or yourself, keep doors closed. And then using a dynamic microphone will further help because they are very directional so you can point microphone away from noisy sources and you can get closer normally without much proximity effect ruining the recording (like an sm57 which is hipassed at 200hz, this mic handles getting up close and personal to loud sources reall well), use ears to hear if you are getting awful boomy recordings and adjust distance to suit.

High passing somewhere between 85hz-100hz can help a bit.

This is probably the only practical things you can do to get acceptable recordings, if you still have a high noisy recording then you definitely need to think about buying a less noisier pc, or recording in a different room imo
 
Great suggestions above. To take it a step further you can get your mic settings as good as you possibly can then record a bar or two of Only the ambient noise. Use the free Reaper plugin "Reafir" to build a noise profile and remove the ambient noise from your entire vocal track. The freq. and how high the noise floor is will determine how transparent the outcome will be. I've found it to work very well , even for a low hum in one of my acoustic preamps. mark
 
Yea if the noise is consistent all throughout do this! ^
When you grab the noise profile, I found it's better to do 2 light passes to get rid of the background noise, instead of 1 heavy hit. And A/B it often because you can degrade the signal you want quite heavily without noticing I found.
 
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