Too much white noise
I recently completed a job that was initially rejected due to too much white noise. This after recording almost a hundred individual tracks overnight in a very short space of time. Frustrated is a mild way of describing my feelings. In the end things came good-ish. Since doing this job I have availed myself of the best equipment I can afford, namely a Shure SM7b mic, a focusrite scarlett 2i2 and high quality xlr leads. I have also emptied my recording booth of all electrical appliances save the mini mac I'm using with Adobe Audition. What I really would like is to be able to send some samples to QC in order that they can critique my audio ahead of any more jobs, rather that waste time recording everything to find I need to re-record everything due to some background or white noise I was unaware of.
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Hello Adrian,
Thanks for using this space to voice your concerns!
Also, I apologize for the experience, it does sound like an extremely frustrating situation, but I will help you make sure that the quality of your awesome new equipment is finely tuned for any future projects!
Please share with me a couple of samples so I can give them a listen, maybe include some of the old samples that had the white noise/hiss issue too so we can check them out as well.
Kind regards,
Daniel
How shall I get the files to you? At what email or link?
Adrian
Hi Adrian,
You can upload them to your preferred cloud service and share public links to the files here with us.
Kind regards,
Daniel
Here are two rejected samples and then 3 differently processed samples with new equipment
https://www.dropbox.com/s/5oi0etwhjql6f92/sample%20or%20rejected%20clip%202.wav?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/p1molyb9mc887hv/Sample%20from%20rejected%20clip.wav?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jm5nhf4bq0fbqrp/New%20equipment%20without%20normalising.wav?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/sbqprmwmr6738e1/New%20equipment%20normalise%20to%20-3db.wav?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/tn6rue5injass8a/New%20equipment%20normalised%20and%20with%20noise%20reduction.wav?dl=0
Thanks for sharing those files, Adrian!
There is a definitive improvement over the previous quality, the old files have a much more present white noise (probably the noise floor of the equipment) while the new ones sound much cleaner! My only worry is that when you did the -3dB normalization on the new setup, that brought the new noise floor quite high, but your noise reduction processing on the final one fixed it pretty much completely!
You can also try to increase the mic gain a tiny bit when recording, also recording a little bit closer as well, so you have a better signal to noise ratio, which will also help when you do the normalization since your software won't need to bring the whole signal too high.
And as a side note (I'm sure you noticed it but I will mention it in any case), please be super careful with noises like the one at 0:08, I don't know if it was a handling noise or a click from a different source but just be careful with those since they can definitely cause revisions and/or rejections.
In conclusion, I believe your current setup definitely is better than the old one in terms of quality, and if you send us files like the last one, I'm sure the QC team won't have any complaints about it.
Let me know if I can do anything else for you!
Kind regards,
Daniel
That's all very helpful Daniel, thank you for your feedback
I did no other editing Ie clicks etc as I was concentrating on the white noise etc. but I appreciate the point about 0.08, of course.
that's all really helpful thank you and gives me a lot more confidence going forward
all the best
Adrian
You are welcome, Adrian!
I hope that you have a great rest of the week!
Kind regards,
Daniel