Requesting tips on removing noise.

Posted: Thu Apr 06, 2006 7:55 pm

Hiya,

I always find noise from cpu fan seeping blatantly into my recording. I am recording through protools digi002R and into a power book. My room is small - around 6' x 7' with a sloped ceiling between 7' - 9' - and recording in another room is not only a hassle, but a technical and logistical challenge!

I tried noise gate plug-in but the cpu fan from the powerbook is just too loud and eating into some soft passage.

I also tried to postion my Rode NTK away from the powerbook but it's not of much help.

Putting a thick blanket over the powerbook and a 2" thick foam panel between the powerbook and me didn't help either.

Questions:
1. Is my 002R preamp gain tuned way too high? (usually around 2-3 o'clock)

2. Do you guys use the noise gate, and how do you guys set it?

3. How do you guys achieve clean recording from home using similar setup?

rgds,

nehpyh

Posted: Thu Apr 06, 2006 8:55 pm

This is an excellent article here: http://www.ethanwiner.com/acoustics.html#noise

I'd encourage you to check out Ethan Winer's entire site. He is a true friend to anyone recording at home. No matter what your level of knowledge is Ethan Winer is an amazing source.

Posted: Fri Apr 07, 2006 5:40 am

For now I move my computer out of the room when recording. I have long cables for the keyboard, monitor, mouse, and sound card.

My computers are pretty quiet, but not quiet enough. I plan to build a cabinet for them which I hope will quiet them enough that I don't have to move stuff around when I record.

Posted: Mon Apr 10, 2006 2:01 am

Moving the pc out of the room means you have to put the recording to some pretty long pre-play before you record. What if you have to do over dubs or several retakes? Probably running around will tire me out before I can get a decent take.

Maybe I'll build an acrylic case to cover my laptop so that I still can view the screen while recording.

Any other suggestions?

nehpyh

Posted: Mon Apr 10, 2006 2:52 am

The best suggestion is to move the computer out of the room. If it's a laptop, use an external LCD panel, keyboard, and mouse with extension cables.

However, if you really cannot do this, You might also try a summing cancellation.

(Though I'll say that I'm only theorizing here and really have never had the need to try it on this practically myself)

As you may, or may not know, a recording that is flipped/inverted and summed to itself will result in silence.

So if you record the sound of the ambient noise by itself, before recording your instrument or vocals in the room, (with the EXACT setup, levels, and mic position, instrument postion, or vocalist position you will immediately following use to record the instrument or vocals) you should be able to invert it and sum this inverted wav/aif into your instrument or vocal wavs/aifs and the noise should be cancelled out.

KJ
--------------
Kyro Studios

Posted: Mon Apr 10, 2006 5:26 am

KyroJoe wrote:

So if you record the sound of the ambient noise by itself, before recording your instrument or vocals in the room, (with the EXACT setup, levels, and mic position, instrument postion, or vocalist position you will immediately following use to record the instrument or vocals) you should be able to invert it and sum this inverted wav/aif into your instrument or vocal wavs/aifs and the noise should be cancelled out.

Two inverted waveforms will only cancel if they are exactly alike. Two noise samples recorded at different times will just be two noise samples. If you add the pre-recorded noise to your mix - inverted or not - you'll just get more noise.

If there are some components with a certain frequency - the spinning of the hard disk, a "hum" component of the fan, then you might be able to get one of those frequencies to line up well enough to get cancelation - but you might well end up enhancing something else in the process.

Recording a sample with mics in position, etc, will give you a lovely noise profile to use with noise reduction. Do you have any noise reduction tools?

The best noise reduction still won't be as good as getting the computer out of your room. If you have a monitor (LCD prefered), long cables can be quite affordable.

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