Mixing Question - Removing Buzz and Hum?
I recorded our gig last weekend on my 8-track recorder and have been listening to the tracks this week. I have a problem. Our lead guitarist's amp is making a terrible noticable buzz between songs when he is not playing. I can even hear it sometimes when he is playing, but mostly the buzz goes away when he starts to play. I can also hear a hum sometimes. All the other tracks are whisper quiet because we go direct into the board from our effects pedals. Our lead guitarist has an older amp and he mics it with a SM57. I'm pretty sure the buzz, and hum, is related to electrical problems with dirty wiring at the venue. But now I have it on his track and need to eliminate it, if at all possible. So how do I do it? I am using Cubase LE 4 as my DAW.
I have tried using an EQ curve, reducing the upper frequencies, but that also kills some of the guitar tone. I can totally eliminate the buzz, but it kills most of the guitar sound. Is there some way to analyze the problem frequency and remove that narrow band(s)?
I was thinking about compressing the track so that it would kill the buzz between songs and only let the guitar come through when he hits it for the song. I think I got that right, but I've never used compression on my recordings before. Am I on the right track there?
Are there filters that are designed to remove buzz and hum, like there are filters that are used to remove pops and clicks from vinly to digital recordings?
It would be easy just to punt on the recordings, but we played a number of new songs those nights and some of them came off pretty well. Also, we had a special guest singer on 5 songs and we probably won't ever have him singing with the band again. The rest of the recorded tracks are good enough to put some extra work on the problem track to clean it up and save the recordings. Also, in general, I am trying to learn how to \"fix\" problems on my live recordings and just get better at mixing. Any help from you smart guys would be very much appreciated. Thanks in advance.
I have tried using an EQ curve, reducing the upper frequencies, but that also kills some of the guitar tone. I can totally eliminate the buzz, but it kills most of the guitar sound. Is there some way to analyze the problem frequency and remove that narrow band(s)?
I was thinking about compressing the track so that it would kill the buzz between songs and only let the guitar come through when he hits it for the song. I think I got that right, but I've never used compression on my recordings before. Am I on the right track there?
Are there filters that are designed to remove buzz and hum, like there are filters that are used to remove pops and clicks from vinly to digital recordings?
It would be easy just to punt on the recordings, but we played a number of new songs those nights and some of them came off pretty well. Also, we had a special guest singer on 5 songs and we probably won't ever have him singing with the band again. The rest of the recorded tracks are good enough to put some extra work on the problem track to clean it up and save the recordings. Also, in general, I am trying to learn how to \"fix\" problems on my live recordings and just get better at mixing. Any help from you smart guys would be very much appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Comments
If the buzzing content is not much of a problem during the audio portion of his track, zoom in to the track and add silence to that part. Do you have WaveLab or other utilities? If your LE version of Cubase doesn't have that, you can do like Phil said and use track automation. In Cubase, you have the \"R\" and \"W\" in the track inspector.
Enable the \"W\" in the track tool and record a Volume envelope. What you do in the automation is adjust the track volume as the track is played. It will record the changes you make. When finished, turn off the \"W\" (write automation button) and enable the \"R\" (read automation) button. The track should now adjust automatically since the automation recorded any audio track changes in volume you made to that track.
In the EQ section of Cubase, (e button, you have a 4 band parametric EQ and you can apply a LOW Shelf within that eq, and dial out freq's below 80hz if needed.
Thanks, Philflood. After I posted my question, I did some more reading in my Cubase books late last night and found out that it was not compression I needed, it was indeed the noise gate function that I wanted to try. I had read about that function this past summer, but have never used it. If I get time this weekend, I plan on playing around with the noise gate feature on the lead guitar track and see if that helps. From what I have read, the noise gate is closer to what I wanted to try. Thanks for getting back on track (pun intended)!
I've never used the automation feature in Cubase yet, sounds like a good idea to learn how to use it for this project. One thing I really like about the Zoom HD16CD is that is also doubles as a control surface for Cubase. So I just switch my Zoom into control surface mode and I can use the physical faders on my recorder to adjust the levels. I like the touch and feel of a control surface better than using a mouse, but maybe I'm just old school.
Or, like you said, I can silence the lead guitar track when he is not playing. No automation needed to silence sections. However, I like the idea of learning the automation because I want to bring up his guitar during the solos and back down to normal after the solo.
\"Expensive\" is not in my current budget. However, I do have some friends with more expensive DAWs than I have, so if you could mention some of those expensive VSTs that analyze and remove those buzzing and humming noises, I might be able to find someone with the correct software.
I know that our electricity is at 60Hz, but I thought the buzzing was in the higher frequencies, not below 80Hz. As I killed the higher frequencies, the buzzing seemed to go down, but the guitar tone also suffered. I really had not thought about the buzzing being under 80Hz. I'll give that a try this weekend.
Thanks for the help guys. If this was not a one shot live recording, I'd just dump the track and do it over again. But it was a live recording and we had a special guest singer with us for a handful of those songs. It's worth some time and effort on my part to see if I can salvage something out of that performance. Obviously, the solution is not to record buzzing guitar amps to begin with. Unfortunately, the lead guitarist has less money than me so I don't see him upgrading his equipment anytime soon. I'd like to see him get even an inexpensive effects pedal with a direct out and clean up his sound. I use my GNX4, the rhythm guitar has a RP500, but the lead uses a SM57 to mic his old tube amp. The direct outs from our effects pedals are super quiet. IMHO, that is the only way to go.
But they're the ONLY recordings I have of her, and the odds I'll get to play with her again are pretty slim, let alone get her into the studio for recording. So I had to make do with what I had, which was less than great... :?
I hope to get back into the DAW tracks later this weekend and experiment with the noise gate feature. I also have written down to experiment with the automation function. It's not like we will ever make money selling these demos, but we hope to get a collage of some of our best song clips together to make a demo for booking future gigs. Just a sampler to let the owner know what we play and how we sound.
The guest singer we had was pretty good and that was a one shot deal. It's just fun to capture some of that stuff on the recordings and save it for prosperity. If I can clean up the lead guitar track, that would be great.
Shredd, I don't quite understand your sync problem with the songbird. Did you have her sing separately from the recorded music tracks? My approach, in the home studio, is to lay down at least a drum/click track before I ever lay down a vocal track. Usually, I get almost all of the music tracks down before I lay down the vocal(s). If you did the vocal track first, without a click track, I could see where it would be hard to sync up the music tracks later. You would have to accompany the singer on each track like a live setting, I guess. There are programs out there that can stretch/shrink audio to fit a grid, but I haven't used any of them. But as long as you have the original tracks, you might find some software later down the road that would sync up the vocals and music with less effort on your part. I always read about the software that I can't afford to buy right now, because in a few years it might be within my reach.
If nothing else, I'll archive these live tracks and clean them up somewhere down the road when I can afford the tools I need, and/or the technology gets to a point where you just apply your anti-buzz filter to the audio and presto magic, the buzz is gone.
I tried killing the frequencies below 80 Hz, but it really had no effect on the buzz I was hearing. The buzz is in the upper freqs. I was hoping to find a program that would analyze just the buzz portion/clip of the audio and display which freqs were present, so that I could apply a narrow band cut to those problem frequencies and leave the rest of the guitar track alone. At any rate, the noise gate function cleaned up almost all the most annoying background buzz. Clean enough that I am happy with the end product.
The more I learn about the mixing/mastering process, the more I enjoy it. Again, thanks for the help.
I hope it's not bad form to respond to myself, but I just received my Jan 2010 EQ magazine and Craig Anderton has an article on page 36 called \"Nylon String Guitar Perfection\" which was on how to remove artifacts in recorded audio. The software he was using was Adobe Audition 3 with the Spectral Frequency view. Got me to thinking about my little buzz and hum removal project. I have a friend (we'll just call him Capt. Salty) who has Adobe Audition 3. So I brought over my guitar track with the problem buzz and hum and we looked at data in the Spectral Frequency view. I was able to analyze a portion of the problem buzz and hum on the track between songs when nothing was being played on the guitar. I had Adobe analyze that small portion for noise. Then I told the program to remove that noise profile from the entire guitar track. It was amazing how the program was able to surgically cut out that problem sound from the data. When I switched back to the Spectral Frequency view, you could see the small narrow bands of data that it had elminiated. And since the frequency bands it eliminated were so very narrow, the guitar still sounds like it should - not like I had EQ'd the track to death.
Now I thought that the noise gate was a great feature, and it certainly killed lots of this buzz and hum between songs. But using Adobe Audition to analyze the problem noise specifically and then eliminate it from all data when the guitar was playing, raised the quality much higher than just using a noise gate (where the buzz was still heard while the guitar was playing). After a few tries, the difference between the before/after noise elimination is almost like night and day. Before I was discarding complete songs because of this buzz problem, but now I can rethink, and remix, lots of those tracks.
I can still hear a very faint buzz on the guitar track, but maybe it's just because I know it's there. It totally eliminated the buzz between songs without using the noise gate. I suppose if I had more time playing around with the program I could get even better results. However, when played back in context with the other recorded tracks, I bet the remaining faint buzz on the guitar track won't be noticed at all in the mix. Well, I know some of you guys are pros at this stuff, but I'm talking about putting together a little demo of the band's music for bar owners. They won't be listening to the demo as closely as I do on my mixing station with good studio monitors, etc...
Like I said before, we had a guest singer on some songs and I really wanted to find a way to save those tracks. I think I may have found a solution.
Way cool taus thanks for the info..
Maybe you can share a short 30 second clip of before an after... Just so's I can get a better understanding of what your talking about..
Yeah, I'd willing to do that if you would be so kind as to tell me how I can post some .wav snipets. I have never posted any files on this forum, so maybe you could give me a quick tip so I can post the before/after clips.
After spending about half an hour doing A/B testing of the files at my mixing station, I am really quite happy with the difference of noise reduction I was able to achieve using Adobe Audition 3. When I added the modified track into the main project, and did the A/B testing using the mute buttons, I really hear a big differnce in noise reduction in the modified track, without the loss of total guitar sound I experienced when I was just using the EQ curve. I think if I had more time to work with Audition and learning how to profile and eliminate noise, I could probably do even a better job.
I'd say cut the before and after snippets, put them together one after the other. save it. convert to mp3. Then go here http://www.digitech.com/soundcomm/guitar_list_music.asp?productid=199 the sound community an uplaod it.. been awhile since I posted anything.. so I can't remember if your login name will work or if you have to register it again in that room. Hope that helps..