Quote:
Originally Posted by cmf
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.
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.