Sweetwater Sound tech support guru, Mark Harbst, provides Today’s Tech Tip.
Maximizing the effectiveness of noise reduction software.
When recording audio to hard disk from certain older synths, guitar amps, analog tape, or any potentially noisy sound source, recording a little bit of the noise, independent of the audio signal, will give you the opportunity to later isolate and remove a substantial amount of it from the source material. To do this with tape, record the noise (hiss and maybe 60-cycle hum) of the running tape before the actual recorded audio is present at the beginning of the tape. With guitar amps or synths, just record a little of the noise floor before actually starting a real take.
Making sure you have some of the noise recorded by itself gives these intelligent noise reduction algorithms a steady state signal to look at for setting their parameters optimally. By comparing the noise reduction of the soloed noise to any timbre discrepancies in the audio track you can quickly get the maximum noise reduction without changing the sound of the track. You can later go back and delete or erase the extra material.
There are many different noise reduction programs available and they are not all created equal, nor do they all serve the same purpose. Some are preset type programs with very few adjustable parameters, while others are aimed more at mastering engineers and offer a lot of adjustable parameters to let you really dig in and remove the specific kinds of noise. Consult a Sweetwater Sales Engineer to discuss the options and what software would be best suited to the type of work you’re doing.