Removing Tape hiss

Share your favorite Ableton Live tips, tricks, and techniques.
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turbox
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Nov 12, 2019 11:07 am

Removing Tape hiss

Post by turbox » Tue Nov 12, 2019 11:20 am

Here’s a conundrum. I recently got the ol 4 track repaired, and trying to transfer as well as utilize some of these ancient recordings. While charming fer a sec (as you know some folks seek out these previous annoyances). I really want to get the best of my late friends acoustic guitar by bringing it and adding to on the digital realm. I am on an iMac, have Ableton suite, Neutron and Ozone standard which so far has only resulting in pronunciation of the hiss. Im about to play w gating and eq. Any suggestion wo blowing 1500 on more software?

jestermgee
Posts: 4500
Joined: Mon Apr 26, 2010 6:38 am

Re: Removing Tape hiss

Post by jestermgee » Tue Nov 12, 2019 12:01 pm

With a spectrum analyzer and some notch EQ you should be able to notch it out but personally I use z-noise plugin by waves which can analyse a noise section of tape and magically filter that profiled noise out the recording. Works a treat but is just the quick lazy way of doing noise reduction.

jonljacobi
Posts: 902
Joined: Sat Dec 30, 2017 3:36 am

Re: Removing Tape hiss

Post by jonljacobi » Tue Nov 12, 2019 5:52 pm

I highly recommend Izotope RX7 if you can afford it which can remove hiss with barely any damage to the audio as a whole. If you have tape flutter or other artifacts, Celemony's extremely expensive Capstan can work wonders. It's so expensive, you can rent it for a couple of days.

Audacity can do some amazing stuff, but it's not as dead easy.

pottering
Posts: 1807
Joined: Sat Dec 06, 2014 4:41 am

Re: Removing Tape hiss

Post by pottering » Tue Nov 12, 2019 5:59 pm

ISSE (free):
http://isse.sourceforge.net/index.html

Photosounder
https://photosounder.com/

Maybe Factorsynth:
https://www.jjburred.com/software/factorsynth/

With ISSE/Photosounder you can basically select the "good" sounds with a photoshop-like brush mask tool and delete the undesirable parts.

Not sure, but from my memory, ISSE is "smart" and can auto-select based on stuff you already selected saving time.

Photosounder has a nice harmonics "brush", that selects all harmonics above a selection you make, also saving time.

Though it is not really made for cleaning audio, with Factorsynth you can split the sound into several "components", and then select only the good ones.
♥♥♥

TLW
Posts: 809
Joined: Thu Aug 23, 2018 2:37 am

Re: Removing Tape hiss

Post by TLW » Tue Nov 12, 2019 7:28 pm

Audacity is definitely worth trying. Adobe Audition can do some impressive things with noise sometimes, but like all Adobe’s stuff these days it has a rental charge. You can get a free demo, but I’m not sure what, if anything, is disabled in it.
Live 10 Suite, 2020 27" iMac, 3.6 GHz i9, MacOS Catalina, RME UFX, assorted synths, guitars and stuff.

turbox
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Nov 12, 2019 11:07 am

Re: Removing Tape hiss

Post by turbox » Tue Nov 12, 2019 10:40 pm

Thanks all. Will download and try isse tonight. If thair are still issues I’ll give the other methods a go.

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