deleting noise at end of program

[robjh22]

I was scrubbing and deleting some recorder and room noise from my new hit single, "Bulgarian Bumblebees," and now it's too quiet! The problem is that the last sound on the song is a slowly strummed E major on my HD-35, which has great resonance. I let it ring all the way to total decay before ending the program, but the end portion was picking up recorder noise as well as the guitar. So I scrubbed out to a point that seemed long enough out to capture the sound of the decaying last chord, and then "deleted" everything from that point to the end of the program. But now it goes from a nice decaying ring to suddenly the essence of nothingness. I guess I deleted too much. But if you got a noisy recorder or mike, how do you delete that ambient noice w/o cutting in to the still resonating guitar?

FYI: No, I haven't fooled with EQ to try and chop off the hiss
that you hear accompanying the decaying chord, so if that's the ticket, please elaborate.

Thanks,

Rob in Bulgaria (not really -- I'm in Texas)

 

[fretless]

working with eq often doesn´t do the trick ´cause you´re likely to mess up the signal you wanna keep. be sure to not set the "scrubbing window" too short or you (better: your ears) lose focus - and turn your monitors up a few notches! in the end it may not be possible to get it right without tricks. in this case you can try a gentle fade in the right place with the right lenght. or you work with reverb which can "blur" things up at the end. or use both together ...

just my 2 euro cents!

fretless

 

[mixsit]

Is the 'recorder' noise hiss, or mechanical noise in the room? If room noise is the problem then get some isolation between the mic and the recorder (or a tempoary cover for the equipment during quiet takes. Watch for heat build-up..) Hiss? What are you recording on? Except for small format tape, you should be able to minimize it at the sources.
Now you might try a new quicker fade. Are there any other tracks that can be faded sooner to cut back on the noise?
Wayne

 

[whosyourdaddy00]

fretless's advise sounds good, if your recorder lets you put volume envelope fades on tracks, use those (prefferably one that's not a straight line, do one that fades quick and stick that bugger at the very end.

peace

wyd

 

[jake-owa]

Yep, a smooth fade with a slight reverb tail on the end of the guitar should do the trick.

 

[Armistice]

What I do is to do the fade trick as mentioned, and at the same time do a "fade" of a low pass filter from 20kHz down to about 3kHz - even better if you can automate it, as your decaying volume reduces this will clean up some of the hiss/noise, it will also obviously affect the tone, but guitars aren't a high pitched instrument and they don't have notes up in the high end of the frequency spectrum anyway, what you get up there is the harmonics and "air", which, as you're going to be decaying volume anyway, may become less important to you.

So UNDO where you chopped off the end, try this sweeping of the EQ and then try the volume fade afterwards. I do this for exactly the same reasons you're describing as I like ringing chords to end things, and, done carefully, it can be quite effective, especially with reverb as someone mentioned, with the reverb not happening to high frequencies (presume your reverb itself has an LPF you can utilise).

Try it - see what you think!

Cheers