Removing unwanted noise

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glenroy

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How can i remove unwanted noise and hiss from my final mixdown stereo tracks without effecting my sound.
 
Get rid of it in the mixdown stage. Isolate which track(s) have it, and remove it there. Unless it is 'noise' during silent passages (which you can remove with a gate or with automation), you are going to affect the overall sound of the mix.
 
How can i remove unwanted noise and hiss from my final mixdown stereo tracks without effecting my sound.

If you have an isolated sample of the noise/hiss you should be able to reduce it with Izotope Rx or something similar that does spectral repair... and like MJ mentions.. ..probably best to minimize in the mix with automation, eq and gates if it wasn't caught in the recording stage.
 
What is the best noise reduction software out there?

What sort of budget are you dealing with...? A lot of the time, "a compressor is a compressor" -- With NR/AR software, the $$$ add up quickly...
 
Oh wait, "from your recording?" Sorry, I missed that part. I haven't yet, but soon will (this week?) Get a copy of Izotope RX... That's the Shizite... And a copy of FabFilter Saturn :-) I love their stuff... I would eat peanuts out of their Shizite...

It's funny because, one takes noise out? And the other puts noise in :-)
 
Hi, I'm new here. Hope it's ok to jump in. Just wondering how it was done 'back in the day'. Compressors?
 
A dinosaur was kept under the console and given food in exchange for adjusting the volume control on the fly.
 
Hi, I'm new here. Hope it's ok to jump in. Just wondering how it was done 'back in the day'. Compressors?

Compressors make the quiet stuff louder, and the loud stuff quieter. Hiss and background noise is typically quiet, so compressors tend to make it louder. If this hiss is during the "silent" parts of the track between vocal phrases, drum hits, guitar strums, whatever - a compressor will just make it worse. In that circumstance you probably want some kind of a gate to completely silence the track during these times. After it's mixed it's a lot harder to get out, if you can at all. If you must have a compressor on the track, put the gate before it.
 
Hi, I'm new here. Hope it's ok to jump in. Just wondering how it was done 'back in the day'. Compressors?

As stated above, compressors would just make it worse. "Back in the day", they did it the same way it's done now. You eliminate the sources of "hiss" and don't get any on your recording to begin with.
 
I see. Just say someone finds an old Stones recording (a rehearsal say) never heard before and they want to clean it up for release. What do they do? Just like above or something different?
 
'cleaning it up' has become a cliche. Same with "restoration". If only it was that easy.

Most serious commercial releases of audio and film sound good because it was basically that good (or better) at time of recording. To do it best you need to have access to the original masters, or the very best copies, carefully preserved, skilled staff and the proper playback gear, maintained expertly and used properly. Those things added together can make a huge difference. Actually it's more correct to say they make little or no difference because they dont interfere with the original good audio that was recorded. It's a bit like cleaning the window through which you view the scene. You arent actually improving the scene as such, just making sure nothing is in the way of viewing it as it really is. Inexpert people tend to make things worse in my experience.

If the imaginary Stones rehearsal was noisy it was probably because it was never intended for release and so not much care was taken in making a clean recording first up. You cant restore to its former glory something that never had any (audio) glory in the first place.

Which is that noisy John Lennon solo home recording that was "cleaned up" and posthumously released commercially? It's full of space monkey chatter. That's about all you can generally hope for.

Same with Free as a Bird.

Cheers Tim
 
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Magix Audio cleaning lab is easy way to clean audio up... while it may not be the best it is very good bang for the buck.
 
Here's an example of "restoration" but which really isnt restoration at all.

Some years ago the classic late 50's Miles Davis album "A Kind of Blue" was re released on CD as it's been a hugely popular release.
I believe that when digitising it, the remastering engineer somehow played the master tape back at slightly the wrong speed and so all of the CD's were off speed and pitch.
The fault was eventually noticed and the remastering was redone, this time preserving the correct speed and pitch. A new CD version was issued.
The difference here is this was a mistake made after the original recording was made and so even though 50 or so years had passed, it could still be easily corrected.

But if the original recording had had lots of noise on it, little or nothing could have been done about it. You cant unscramble eggs.
 
Hi, I'm new here. Hope it's ok to jump in. Just wondering how it was done 'back in the day'. Compressors?

Pre-emptively by recording clean tracks. I'm quite certain there is no analog equivalent of digital noise removers that make a spectral fingerprint and cancel it out.

edit: I didn't even notice there was another page to this thread stating the above already many times....oops
 
Pre-emptively by recording clean tracks. I'm quite certain there is no analog equivalent of digital noise removers that make a spectral fingerprint and cancel it out.

If there is a noise remover that makes a spectral fingerprint, it's not able to "cancel it out", It can only apply a reverse EQ to some degree or other, which will also affect the program.

It's not possible to truly "cancel out noise" except under very rare circumstances. To do so requires access to a complete copy of the noise minus the program and then "cancelling it out" from the program algebraically. That is almost never possible.
 
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