Hissing, and Popping, and Clicking… Oh My!

It’s easy to go down the yellow brick road with background noise, amp hum, plosives, low frequency rumble, sibilance, crackle, click track bleed, mic bumps, etc.

Cleaning up audio is tricky and even with automated software tools it can be daunting to the uninitiated, not to mention frustrating or infuriating!  It’s like scraping barnacles off a boat!  But unlike barnacles you only have to get rid of bad audio once.  Um… disclaimer notice… if it’s a bad performance you’re better off redoing it.  There are just some things you shouldn’t or can’t polish!

Background noise, plosives and amp hum are “obvious” culprits.  And the best way to handle or eliminate them is to prevent them in the recording phase.  But what do you do when you get the the guitar tone “just so” but there’s some annoying background hum, or a fan kicks on, or somebody bumps a mic, or a vocalist creates mouth clicks during that perfect take?  And what about all those uncontrollable background sounds when recording live music or dialogue?  Arggggh!

Like most things, you can’t have you cake and eat it too.  There are always compromises to be made.  Clicks, pops, and bumps, while easily spotted visually in the waveform, can be bears to get rid of without damaging the original audio.  And the sheer number of them can be overwhelming!  The goal is to optimize the sound you want and minimize the noise you don’t.

So you set about to de-hiss, de-click, de-crackle, de-hum, de-plosive, de-ess, de-rumble, de-noise, de-rustle, de-…, de-…, de-… and on and on.  Only to discover that something has dropped out that you really wanted to be there!  Plus you want to get the gain staging right so your plugins will work optimally while at the same time ensuring that the unwanted noise is imperceptible.

A top notch, or even decent, recording environment helps prevent many of these issues.  And the bigger production and broadcast companies do the editing themselves.  But in today’s world anyone with a little know-how, a PC, tablet or phone can record pretty much anywhere.  DAW software and recording gear is simply getting better and more affordable than ever so great things are coming from home and project studios.  But without the advantages of treated rooms and sound proofing (and sometimes even WITH them) noise and unwanted sounds are ever present.  You can avoid a lot of issues by recording direct (without a mic) to your DAW.  There are some awesome tools that enable that.  But sometimes it just doesn’t give it the “organic” feeling you want… like when you mic up a favorite acoustic guitar, piano or violin.  And you just can’t go “direct” with vocals.

That’s why we do what we do.  We’ve been mixing since 2001 and experienced the terror and emotions of dealing with unwanted noise.  A lot of friends have asked how to get rid of or manage it.  After a little tutoring on what the issue can be, what to listen for, and what to do in certain circumstances they usually just want us do it for them.  They want to focus on THEIR talent not the technical aspects of mixing and noise reduction.  And of course they aren’t alone so we’re here with the experience, knowledge and skills for folks who just don’t want to deal with it on their own.