226: How To Reduce Or Remove Noise From Your Recordings (And How To Avoid It In The First Place)

The Self-Recording Band

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Episode show notes:
Let's get technical! Today we're gonna talk about how to handle and reduce or remove noise from your recordings. And how to keep it out of your recordings in the first place.
Usually, everything we teach is about the music. About the song. About how we can serve the song and make it connect and resonate with your audience. We try to avoid getting too technical and we don't believe that gear or plugins are the solution to most of your audio problems.
But sometimes we have to do purely technical work to remove what is distracting from the music, so we can go back to the song and fully focus on that again.
Noise is one of those distracting things. And it comes in many different forms.
So on this episode we're talking about:

• How we deal with noise at the source and keep it out of our recordings. Because capturing a noise-free signal is always better than removing the noise afterwards.
  
• Understanding noise:
  • Broadband noise vs specific frequencies
  • Why removing it is always a compromise
  • Why gating isn't enough in many cases
    
• Ways to reduce/remove noise if you have to:
  • Why stock plugins won't get you very far here
  • Why it's smart to capture a few seconds of just the noise and not cut it out until you've removed it from the rest of the signal.
  • Cutting it out manually (and or gating)
  • Removing or reducing noise with EQ
  • iZoptope RX / spectral editors
  • Noise removal plugins
  • Embracing it instead of fighting it
  • Understanding the "analog" and "noise" buttons / knobs on your plugins
  • The ground lift switch on your gear

Let's dive into this!
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For links to everything we've mentioned in this episode, as well as full show notes go to: theselfrecordingband.com/226
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