I recorded a band in the studio the other day and when I brought the Pro Tools session home and soloed the Kick drum I noticed that the signal going into the board was a bit too hot, and in turn, giving off some peak distortion when the kick hits. What is the easiest way to remove slight peak distortion? I've tried low pass filters of all kinds and have had no such luck. Thanks.

yup... thats about it...


Or...


Press Delete, then re-track it.

I can't retrack it because the drummer is pretty much unavailable to do another session. I'll try your suggestion.

Nobody makes a plug-in soft limiter for this? Seems like it shouldn't be too hard to code. As long as the overs weren't too bad.......




-tINY

Not unless you rewrite the laws of physics. A soft limiter can only prevent a signal from clipping in the first place. Once it is clipped and flat on the top & bottom, yer screwed. You can't un-clip it. You have turned a complex waveform into a simple square wave and you no longer have the information in the waveform that would tell you what the wave should be doing if it had not been clipped.


DP

But a limited waveform looks a lot like that already, just that the corners are a little more rounded (so they have less high frequency content).

For a kick drum, you could probably do this - you'd be screwed on most other insturments, though.

The trigger idea is probably the most expedient (or a side-chain opening a gate on a n oscilator).




-tINY

Maybe little tape distortion (like am track in Samplitude/Sequoia) can help to "redraw" clipping into something more musical. Let's try...

I'm afraid there is no "easy" way, unless it's a few stray hits, then you may try to redraw it with the pencil tool (which I'm not good at). The tools which mastering engineers have around, like the Cedar Declipper, or the Algorithmix descratcher, or the Cedar Retouch and Algorithmix Renovator, come closest to "fixing" clips without artifacts. Your mileage may vary. These tools are extremely expensive.

That said, a client who was mixing discovered some distortion in a bass track and ftp'ed me the bass track. I cleaned it up in about 15 minutes with Retouch and ftped it back. It's a lot better to try to fix these problems at mix time than at mastering time. Given that it's a kick drum in your case, there's probably a tool that will fix it without much artifact. If it's a lot of hits and not occasional distortion, the fix can get labor-intensive. I'm in Washington, DC this minute, and discovered that the original conservationists of the Star Spangled Banner made over one million hand stitches to try to preserve that flag! Now, in 2006, they have better conservation methods, and they've been meticulously removing every single repair stitch with a set of very sharp Fiskars scissors and tweezers. That's the way it can get if you have to repair Bass drum "clips" by hand. The Cedar declipper can do this automatically with amazing results, but it is expensive. We do not own one, but I can point you to someone who does and who can (probably) fix your bass track for a fee.

If'n all else fails....and since there is a thread about the Flaming Lips right now....add distortion to the kick and make it a production decision.

There is a "de-clipper" plug in as part of the new Cedar for Pro Tools. It is awesome!
I did a fair amount of work cleaning up audio for an arts stylee tv show, where the camera man thought that seeing red meant seeing signal. This tool would have been worth getting an mbox/PT dongle for.

The only(huge) downside is that it only works with Pro Tools for Windows. The Cedar software is quite costly, although totally a case of "you get what you paid for"

Adobe Audition has pro quality tools for these types of things. The UI is kind of sucky, but the audio quality is very good.

or instead of triggering a new drum, find the one kick hit that didn't clip, sample it, and trigger this one if you wanna keep the original kick.