removing digital distortion

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curtis

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I recorded a band in the studio the other day and when I brought the Pro Tools session home and soloed the Kick drum I noticed that the signal going into the board was a bit too hot, and in turn, giving off some peak distortion when the kick hits. What is the easiest way to remove slight peak distortion? I've tried low pass filters of all kinds and have had no such luck. Thanks.
 
Once it's down, you're screwed.

"Garbage in, garbage out" as my programming prof used to say.

The only thing you can do now is replace the hits manually or with something like Drumagog...
 
You didn't really say what it sounds like.

If the red lights are flashing, but it still sounds good, there's an easy solution:
ignore the red lights. Sometimes the red LED's are set to light up just before the signal actually clips, so you may not even really be clipping.

If it sounds bad, you can replace the kick track with samples, as Tim suggested. This can be done in software, but you can also use the track to trigger certain drum modules (like the Alesis D4). Be careful about latency though. Sometimes triggering and re-recording a kick will throw off the timing, so be sure and preserve the original track so you can line up the triggered track exactly. You may even find that the best result is a blend of the two.
 
curtis said:
I recorded a band in the studio the other day and when I brought the Pro Tools session home and soloed the Kick drum I noticed that the signal going into the board was a bit too hot, and in turn, giving off some peak distortion when the kick hits. What is the easiest way to remove slight peak distortion? I've tried low pass filters of all kinds and have had no such luck. Thanks.
Click to expand...

Anybody want to write an unclip plug-in? I mean, you can't really undo the clipping, but it wouldn't be even remotely hard to write a plug-in that, upon detecting a significant jump discontinuity in the first derivative (slope) of the sample stream in which the slope goes to zero (horizontal) and then later jumps suddenly negative, would automatically create a second-derivative-continuous curve that matches the two endpoints.

The effect of such a plug-in, in theory, should be that the high frequencies would get muffled very suddenly and thoroughly when you clip, much like tape saturation. Ooh. I have an idea.... :D

Sorry, too much math. I know. I'm just saying....
 
Adobe Audition (Cool Edit Pro) has a feature called 'repair transient', which will restore the clips to neat levels.
 
SoundForge has a clip repair tool. If you use it surgicly it works pretty good. Or with th pencil tool you can redraw it. But if the clipping is severe, nothing will help.
 
just trigger it... it's easy, fast, and normally done anyway...
 
zekthedeadcow said:
just trigger it... it's easy, fast, and normally done anyway...
Click to expand...

If its just the kick, yea replace it with a sampled sound, it will probably sound better anyway. NS Kit is free, but drumkit from hell has the best sounds IMO

-C$
 
Use a high pass filter set at 30hz. A flattened waveform is, for all intents and purposes a DC (0hz)transient. A low cut will get rid of the DC and possibly get rid of the splat.
 
Are all the kick hits distorted?

If not then you could copy the undistorted kicks and use them as replacements to the distorted ones, matching up the volumes as close as possible (short of clipping of course) to simulate the velocity of the kicks. A bit more tedious but you'd have the original kick sound at least.
 
sorry, i didnt know i had replies to this thread. i only have a few minutes to reply but i uploaded the kick track in mp3 format so you could hear it. its not too severe, but you can notice it in the mix.. the artist did a bit. ive got to go to work but when i get home ill try all of the things you mentioned. ive never done the replacing method, what do i need to do it and how would i do it? i downloaded drumagog so ill try that. i have several sampled kick drums to use, so finding a sample isnt an issue. i can always use beat detective in pro tools to align it all later. thanks for the replies guys.



edit: the clipping happens more at the end of the song when the drummer starts playing double/faster. a rough mix of the song is also in that dir, so check it out if you want and let me know if you can notice it that much. darn, now i really dont want to go to work..
 
Try Sound Forge w/ the clipping detector + repair plugins- Great Program!
 
curtis said:
sorry, i didnt know i had replies to this thread. i only have a few minutes to reply but i uploaded the kick track in mp3 format so you could hear it. its not too severe, but you can notice it in the mix.. the artist did a bit. ive got to go to work but when i get home ill try all of the things you mentioned. ive never done the replacing method, what do i need to do it and how would i do it? i downloaded drumagog so ill try that. i have several sampled kick drums to use, so finding a sample isnt an issue. i can always use beat detective in pro tools to align it all later. thanks for the replies guys.



edit: the clipping happens more at the end of the song when the drummer starts playing double/faster. a rough mix of the song is also in that dir, so check it out if you want and let me know if you can notice it that much. darn, now i really dont want to go to work..
Click to expand...


This may work also. In PTLE, Audiosuite under "other' their is a gain control. Select the track and bring down the gain, maybe comp to try to control the spikes. If you clipped youve cliped! The best way to resolve this is to retrack. See if it works though.
 
EndangeredFeces said:
Try Sound Forge w/ the clipping detector + repair plugins- Great Program!
Click to expand...

I don't have Sound Forge but I did try the repair tool in Audition 2.0. It didn't work.. it said I had to select a smaller portion of the audio track. I even chose less than one second to work with and it still said the same thing. What's the deal with that?

I'm recording a live LP for the band tomorrow so I'll see if they want to retrack the drums for it. If they can't I guess I'll just try to use the plugins and gain reduction in PT. Thanks. Any other suggestions are much appreciated.
 
curtis said:
I even chose less than one second to work with and it still said the same thing. What's the deal with that?
Click to expand...
It probably wants you to zoom in on the transient that got clipped. You would have to do one kick at a time, if that is the case.
 
I just did the simple copy and paste method in Pro Tools and it seems to be in sync and sounds decent.
 
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