remove hiss without removing high-hat etc...??

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Lorddiagram

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Hi - - - I am working on cleaning up an 8-track recording. My friend does not have the orignal 8-track so i am dealing with a stero mixdown. Mainly he wants me to remove the loud tape hiss. I imagine that there is no perfect way to remove the hiss with out removing sounds which occupy the same general frequencies. Are there any “magic” plug-ins to clean this pup up? Is my best bet to try to eq the hiss with a tight notch eq?

thanks

lD

http://mp3.com/imloyal
 
Soundforge has a Noise Reduction pluggin that works well. You give it a short sample of the hiss and it applies it to the whole track. Alternatively the Behringer noise reduction unit also works well.

cheers
john
 
I posted this tip elsewhere but will revisit it for you.The old cooledit97 (free)has a frequency analysis function.Choose a region of "silence" between phrases or before the track begins and take a snapshot of the tape hiss and room resonances.Put your mouse curser on each peak and it will tell you the location to within a Hz or two.Make of chart of the major peaks (in addition to the high freq. tape hiss you will see low freq. room rumble and other trash)Use a parametric EQ with a Q of about 5 cycles wide and cut the peaks back to the extent that they rise above their neighbors.
You will be amazed how even hissy old cassetes clean up with this technique.Also good with live recordings where the room wasn't so hot.

Tom
 
I tried Cool Edit Pro's Noise Reduction facility to get rid of insect noise on some of my tracks. It got rid of the insect noise, but the music was slightly altered as well. It sounded ever so slightly hollow (duh!) compared to the original - some of the warmth was gone. I'm going to try Tom's idea next.
 
I've never been happy with noise reduction plugins.It seems they remove great whacking regions of program material as well as the offending noise.That's why I came up with this tedious (but more precise )workaround.A smart computer guy could probably figure out a way to batch-script the process.

Tom
 
I haven't used it, but waves c1 has something along these lines. Basically it allows you to squish a particular frequency band, ignoring the rest. You'd have to sweep to find the freq, but it should help. They also have serveral canned setups that should get in the right neighborhood. Theoretically any multiband compressor/bate should help.
 
You should look into RayGun

You are always going to have at least a little compromise when removing any part of the sound spectrum. Analyzing the exact frequencies of the hiss and removing them with notch filters ( as described by Tom Hicks, above ) is probably the best way you can do it and be surgical about it....removing the smallest amount necessary to achieve the desired results. I have just recently used this technique with much success in WaveLab. But I have used Arboretum Systems RayGun plugin with much success also. It is exteremly simple to use...just pull down one fader and listen to the hiss go. There is a point to where you can start to hear the high end go....you just have to hit that happy medium between lowering hiss and removing character from the music. Not ideal, but fast and very good. They should have a demo version on their site. Look into it.
 
lorddiagram-

loud tape hiss never killed a good song. The magic "plug- ins" are the music and the lyrics.

hixmix
 
I could be wrong but...

I'm with John Sayers.

I think Sonic Foundry's Noise Reduction plugin basically does what Tom Hicks is suggesting. You give it a noise print, it analyzes the spectrum, plots it out on a graph, and reduces the noise accordingly.

It has different modes (NR algorithms) for you to choose from as well.

I've used it when mastering things to CD from cassette and have been quite satisfied.
 
not to disagree...but maybe I'm using it wrong

I have Sonic Foundry's noise reduction also, but had never tried it too much until you guys reccomended it here. I thought I would give it a shot, and used the default mode ( said to give the best results, I beleive it was mode 0 ) and tried it on a song that had some serious tape hiss. I had a big chunk of hiss to sample from at the beginning of the tape before the song started, about 4 seconds worth. The song starts with just a kick and snare. After getting the noise print, I used about 12db of reduction (default). Hiss was minimal, but the snare sound was crap. Am I using the wrong mode?
I went back to RayGun, just to compare. Without any adjustments except moving the NR slider down about 7db, I got better noise reduction with very minimal affect on the snare. Maybe you guys can show me what I'm doing wrong with the Sound Forge plugin. Do you have any favorite modes to use?
As I stated in the previous post, I have also had good results in WaveLab by analyzing the noise, then using Waves EQ to make a notch filter to quiet the offensive parts, and fine tuning by adjusting the Q. My only point originally was that if you haven't tried RayGun, you might be pleasantly surprised.
 
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