Best Live Device to Eliminate Hiss on Audio Recording

[thelillyman]

Hi Guys,

I work as a music teacher and the other day I was asked to do some recording with some of the schools crappy mics and as a result the vocal take has a lot of hiss and rough edges - - the actual vox take itself is really good quality however I need to lessen or eliminate the hiss as best as possible and was wandering what the best Live Device was to do that?

If any one has any suggestions or ideas regarding this I would like to hear from you.

Best Regards,

thelillyman

[simmerdown]

EQ8>compression>reverb

is a standard vox treatment chain...the eq8 can get rid of the hiss

if its bad you need to use and outside editor with good noise reduction abilities, i like CoolEdit (Adobe Auditon now) for this....

[Tenshi]

If its a constant tone you can use the spectrum plug-in to find its pitch and then cut it with the EQ. You can be fairly surgical.

Trouble is though that people know what voices sound like, and if your intention is realism then chopping bits out of the frequency space, however surgical, can often colour the sound.

So, for example, I have used fairly step and gouging EQ to get rid of the hissy and noise from a crappy mic but only for FX style sounds... you dont have to be realistic or faithful for those.

Suppose it depends, also, where the stuff will end up. If it is going in a mix that would coincidentally like the vocals to be cut in the same way you EQed the noise out... then you've pulled a magic trick I guess.

[crumhorn]

Multiband Dynamics can be used for noise reduction. It's a bit crude in ableton because it only has three bands but I suppose you could use multiple devices in a rack somehow,

The idea is to get a loop of the vocal recording that is just noise on it's own

You will see the noise input dislayed on the three bands, adjust the frequencies to get a similar amount of noise energy in each band.

Click the B button and set the ratios to the lowest value possible. adjust the thresholds to just above the level of the noise signal - so that the output is very low.

Click the T button and adjust the time parameters for best results.

There is a bit of trial and error involved but it can work quite well.

[thelillyman]

Cheers guys - I'll get cracking with some of these ideas and suggestions - Once again thanks for all the help and ideas - always greatly appreciated.

Best - thelillyman

[Vios]

Gate Effect. I'm surprise this wasn't mentioned first. Properly setup you should be able to take out a lot of noise with it.

[3dot...]

gate is good only if the hiss isn't present as much on the non-silent parts...
an frequency dependent 'expander' might be a better idea..

[crumhorn]

an frequency dependent 'expander' might be a better idea..

That's what I was trying to describe above, but I didn't make it very clear.

[agent314]

If it's just straight hiss throughout, proper noise reduction is going to help significantly more than Live's devices will allow

Audacity is free and has an okay noise removal effect

If you want to host it on dropbox or somewhere, I'll run it through RX2's denoiser for you

[abluesky]

Definitely Izotope RX2. I used the Advanced version to process audio for video and it removed hiss (and clipping!) very effectively while retaining sonic quaity.

Recommended.