Getting rid of hiss...

[ianbryn11]

Whats up, Ive been listening back to a bunch of songs i recorded and i have noticed they all have a lot of hiss in them. I think it is from My lack of understanding about gain staging... Anyway, the tracks are already recorded, and i am wondering if there is way to remove the hiss in mixing or mastering without negatively effecting the quality of the music... Any plug ins good for this? somehting i may already have in the digi design or waves gold package? I dont really want to have to buy somehting, but i will if i need to.... Advice or techniques either for gain staging correcttly (usefull for next time..), or for getting rid of the hiss in mixing or mastering woud be increadibly helpfull.

Thanks
Ian

[MikeyMike]

Stop using snakes.....LOL. But seriously, you need to use balanced power units and balanced cables, this fixes the majority of hiss and noise problems at the source. Secondly, don't over process the music material and use filters to get rid of the unnecessary high frequency content on your individual tracks.

[Waltz Mastering]

Originally Posted by ianbryn11

Whats up, Ive been listening back to a bunch of songs i recorded and i have noticed they all have a lot of hiss in them. I think it is from My lack of understanding about gain staging... Anyway, the tracks are already recorded, and i am wondering if there is way to remove the hiss in mixing or mastering without negatively effecting the quality of the music

You can try to get rid of hiss around the music with out negatively affecting the sound by Gating, Editing, Fades, LP Filters

You can get rid of hiss within the sound with some negativity (there is a bit of a trade off) by using broadband Noise Reduction/Spectral Subtraction (ie: Izotope Rx, Cedar DeNoise , Sonic NoNoise,) I think Waves has X-Noise. Haven't tried it though... and I think Digi still makes Dinr.

[It'sJoeAgain]

Originally Posted by ianbryn11

Anyway, the tracks are already recorded, and i am wondering if there is way to remove the hiss in mixing or mastering without negatively effecting the quality of the music...

There is no such thing as free lunch...although you may find these options in NYC..Good luck and use good cable or equipment next time

[Jesse Graffam]

personally I use a multiband downward expander of my own design. nothing too complicated, and when used on each track it's often as good of a result as any other noise reduction method except with none of the artifacts & side-effect of FFT-style spectral-based noise reduction.

As far as something available publicly that does this... I'm not sure that there is anything. Kind of a shame since it works so well for how simple it is.

[dave-G]

If the issue here is that you have some noisy tracks you recorded and you're wondering whether to address cleaning them up a bit at the mix or in the mastering, I'd suggest handling it in the mix.

Even though NoNoise, et al can do the trick decently on a finished mix, I think you're better off taking whatever approach works best (NR software, gating, expansion, editing/fading, filtering) on only the individual tracks that actually need it, rather than infusing the entire mix with a veil of artifacts in the name of noise reduction.

Best of luck with it!
-dave

[okydoky]

Originally Posted by ianbryn11

Whats up, Ive been listening back to a bunch of songs i recorded and i have noticed they all have a lot of hiss in them. I think it is from My lack of understanding about gain staging... Anyway, the tracks are already recorded, and i am wondering if there is way to remove the hiss in mixing or mastering without negatively effecting the quality of the music... Any plug ins good for this? somehting i may already have in the digi design or waves gold package? I dont really want to have to buy somehting, but i will if i need to.... Advice or techniques either for gain staging correcttly (usefull for next time..), or for getting rid of the hiss in mixing or mastering woud be increadibly helpfull.

Thanks
Ian

hi,

if you are still mixing, and you have pro tools, see if you have digi's dinr plugin. its been around for a long time, but it works fine for guitar amp noise, which is probably what a lot of your hiss and hum is.

i don't think i would use it on a whole mix, but i'd use on guitars and it doesn't mangle the tone.

it only goes to 96kHz, but unless you're doing higher sample rate stuff it's cool. if you don't have it, you can probably get them to sell it to you cheap because its been around for awhile.


right.

[Waltz Mastering]

I had to remove some room tone/hiss from some audio for video tracks this morning and was messin around with some mb comp/exp as uncajesse was saying mixed with some other stuff and it seemed to do the trick.

As Dave and Oky were saying unwanted noise is best to get rid of at the source (track/mix) or watch your gain staging so it's minimal or as close to a clean signal as possible from the get go.

[chironomidae]

Originally Posted by Waltz Mastering

I think Waves has X-Noise.

Unfortunately, it's not included in the Gold bundle. It works well for me, but my application is usually trying to recover very poorly recorded audio for film.

[wado1942]

I think the Waves X-series has to be the worst noise reduction I've ever used. I'd almost rather play the tracks back through Dolby SR without it having been encoded that way than use X-noise.

[ianbryn11]

Thanks for the replies! I'm gonna give some of those options a try...

[prolearts]

For a solution that has a pretty low price, I would recommend checking out Izotope RX. It comes as both a set of plug-ins and a stand alone app. If you have a clean chunk of hiss (i.e. without music), you can use the offline noise reduction (I believe it's the "C" setting I use most often) to do a really quite nice and clean removal of a fair amount of hiss. It is not terribly fast (like 12 to 15 minutes for a 4 minute song on my dual Pentium new-ish PC, but it is quite transparent in terms of artifacts created and for a couple hundred bucks (or less, I can't remember), it's hard to beat. Also has many other great uses (declicking, hum filtering, etc.).

[Cellotron]

I did a shoot out between a number of broadband noise reduction softwares recently and ended up getting Voxengo's Redunoise - High-resolution audio noise reduction plugin - Redunoise - Voxengo

The gui is relatively complicated - definitely read the manual first - but I found results after doing a bit of tweaking left less artifacts than other options - some of which were a good bit more expensive.

I also agree with an earlier poster that Waves X-Noise isn't that good.

Best regards,
Steve Berson