How To Reduce Noise While Recording

Hello and welcome back to the channel today it’s all about reducing noise reverb and reflections while you’re recording and you can see from the chapter markers under the video that the first part of the video is about setting your gain and the effect this has on reverb reflections hiss and hum and the second part of the video is all about practical steps and advice you can take to reduce this reflection while you’re recording mic choice is positioning acoustic treatment that sort of stuff so I’m hoping to deal with a couple of audio myths and misconceptions in this video so let’s just jump right in the first thing we’re gonna look at is seeing how setting the gain on your audio interface or portable recorder affects the amount of reverb a noise in the recording we’re going to record high and then very very low so let’s get into it so clearly this isn’t my studio this is my very reverberant and echoey lounge I’m recording with a shotgun microphone here and I’m recording into a portable audio recorder first thing I’m gonna do is record at 55 DB of gain take a sample then I’m going to record at 25 DB and I’ll boost and lower the gain in post so that it all sounds the same and then we’ll analyze it further in just a minute initially I’m recording at 55 DB of gain and you can see the meters bouncing around there this is an audio test to hear the echo of this room I’ve just taken the gain down to 25 DB so that’s removed 30 DB this is a test to hear the echo in this room let’s now take a much closer look at and listen to the audio from that example there’s a very common myth going around that if you increase the gain as much as you can without clipping you’re going to be picking up you know more of what’s close to the microphone and less of the reflections and reverb and as you heard from that example that’s just absolutely not true what this software lets me do is see the waveform but also with this slider down here move it into more of like a spectrogram view so that you can really see where the energy in certain frequency bands is this is an audio test to hear the echo of this room this is where I reduce the gain by 30 DB in the spectrogram view you have low frequency sounds at the bottom high frequency at the top and more intensity or gain in a sound is a more intense color so more intense orange for instance if I blend between the two what I’m gonna do is select this section over here that was recorded 30 DB lower and I’m actually gonna add 30 DB in post and what you should be able to see and hear is that there is no difference at all in the noise background noise hiss hum reverb between these samples so let’s take a listen this is an audio test to hear the echo of this room and this one over here this is a test to hear the echo in this room this background noise here is virtually the same between both the samples trying to set your gain to reduce reflections or noise or make the microphone just listen to a smaller area is almost always absolutely nonsense and you should be focusing your attention on probably the later part of this video where I will actually show you how to reduce these reflections moving swiftly on to the second test this is a very simple recording of a guitar in my studio so this was not to deal with the reflections this was purely background noise I recorded at a certain level then I took 20 DB off and recorded again then another 20 DB and recorded again and what you see is too large strums here to very small ones and then to ones which you can barely see what I’ll do is quickly select this area add 20 DB select this last section and add 40 DB for 0 and what you can see and hear now especially on the spectrum mode is that in terms of noise they are all absolutely the same if one of them had a lot more noise than the other you would see a lot of light color sort of like light white or grey at the top of the frequency spectrum and if I quickly do a few little sound demos   let’s listen in just for the noise those are also close to identical the only differences can be accounted for in just my playing so again in this case trying to reduce the hiss or hum by recording at a higher gain is sort of a very futile endeavor it’s generally a good idea to record at a louder level anyway for various reasons that I’ll discuss at the end so I do not recommend recording at minus 50 DB peaking that’s not the point I’m trying to make all I’m trying to say is that trying to reduce the hiss or hum in your recording by recording much louder in the digital domain USB audio interfaces portable recorders that’s not going to work for you either so let’s move on to the practical part of the video this second part of the video is loaded full of practical stuff you can do to reduce the reverb and hiss if setting the gain isn’t gonna make a difference than what I’m not just gonna leave you with no solution what I’ve done is recording in a very large reverberant lounge with a lot of windows absolutely no treatment I tried to play a sort of a simple strummed progression and then a little bit of fingerpicking just for variety, we’ll start by taking a listen to these two examples and then I’ll have a little discussion about them   in that example the large diaphragm condenser was where I would normally put it for recording guitar and it picked up a fantastic tone from the guitar but just naturally because there’s no treatment and you know there’s tons of Windows lots of empty walls in this room and a wooden floor it means that it picks up tons of echo tons of reverberation especially on the finger picking example that can’t be helped and it is a fantastic microphone but that can’t be helped and I can’t really push that microphone any closer because the low-end just becomes overwhelming on a large-diaphragm condenser so what I did is on the small diaphragm condenser I moved that much closer to the instrument so it was picking up a lot more of the instrument and a lot less of the room you can do this with small diaphragm condensers because they don’t tend to be overloaded on the low end so much that the diaphragm is just a lot smaller however, this close mic sound did sound pretty unnatural it didn’t sound like a full balanced guitar tone it didn’t have as much noise in it like reverb but it didn’t really sound great so the next thing I’m gonna do is set up some acoustic treatment so I’ve rolled out a rug to put under the chair and I’m gonna move in two of my acoustic panels these are the same homemade acoustic panels that I used in my studio I’ve just taken them off the walls and we’ve added some little feet to the bottom of them but this is the chance where you can use anything you’ve got at hand if you’ve got blankets pillows cushions anything if you can just like put those like just on the floor around where you’re recording or maybe drape a blanket over something and put it near to you when you’re recording that’s gonna make a massive difference this is such a makeshift solution that any acoustic technician watching this will be laughing at me but this is just what we deal with in the real world remember guys we’re all you know in-home Studios bedroom studios wherever we get a chance to record we need to make the most of it with that said the treatment that you do have is best to try and put it in front of the microphone, microphones tend to reject a lot from the back anyway so try not to worry too much about that and place it sort of in front and side of the microphone so that any signal that’s going to be hitting the front of the microphone might be absorbed by those panels of those blankets on the way there so now with this treatment setup let’s take a listen   I’ll do a side-by-side comparison in just a moment so you can really hear the difference but already you should be able to hear that that’s a lot more acoustically that there’s a lot less reverb and it might be a better place to start processing that guitar and because we’ve dealt so well with the reverb I can actually move the small diaphragm condenser into one of my favorite places to record, I don’t really see other people doing this but I find with a small-diaphragm moving it above the soundhole and pointing down at the guitars body it tends to pick up the whole sound of the actual resonating guitar body which is what’s really making the sound let’s now take a listen to that new microphone position and also a side-by-side comparison with and without treatment I hope the differences between those recordings were quite apparent especially if you were listening in decent headphones it should be much more easy to pick up on that reverb and the purpose of this example is simply to show that some homemade cheap acoustic treatment or some rugs blankets etc make a much much bigger difference to your recording in a practical way than stressing out about the gain and also the mic position again makes a massive difference trying to get your microphone closer to the instrument will reduce the reverb and noise but close making a lot of instruments really doesn’t sound good unless you are very careful about the placement so I would recommend a bit of treatment and then trying to find a balance between pulling that microphone a little bit ACK you get a lot more of the instrument so then it begs the question when does it matter to set the game so there’s plenty of times when setting your game correctly is critical anyone who’s ever worked in live sound knows that you cannot just record something at minus 50 DB and send it through a signal chain and hope that it’s going to get out the PA okay so clearly live sound you need nice healthy signal levels at all parts of the chain and then recording in a more analog domain recording to tape recording to any sort of magnetic medium you can’t do that at minus 50 DB and boost it later because you’re gonna get so much tape noise and everything else being pulled up this ability to record low is really something which we can take advantage of in the digital domain but in other mediums analog or indifferent situations like live sound you cannot simply disregard good gain staging and I would never ever recommend just throwing gain staging out the window I do it all the time and finally if you are stuck with a totally noisy recording and there’s nothing you can do about it I would recommend getting some sort of noise reduction software or suite of tools this is not sponsored but I personally use rx-7 it’s sort of the industry-standard but there are many other alternatives at different price points and with different features and some of these software’s can really save the day you know just remove a bit of the history and reverb from a recording if you want to see a tutorial for how I would use rx-7 to say reduce reverb or hiss or hum in a recording let me know but for now that’s all I’ve really got for this video and thank you very much for watching you know the whole point is let’s not stress out about things that don’t make much difference if you want to make a difference get the acoustic treatment practice you might positioning techniques those things make a massive difference setting the game’s not so much of a difference anyway take care bye for now