Preach Right Here

[LSS]

Hey man, thanks for listening.

that's shocking, you need a quality noise reduction processor.

Any recommendations on that score? De-noising is a serious weak link in my audio processing... I've never found a de-noiser that didn't have unacceptably unmusical side effects.

i'm intellectually guessing that you worked on this source in 16bit without converting it to 32bit during import to your DAW?

HOWEVER all processing applied to this converted 32bit file, will be in 32bit, complete with the benefits of added dynamic range! why 32bit? because 24 bit doesn't divide nicely into 16, you get some stuff left over or left out which makes it a quality problem (at least to people like me).

That's a very useful tip. You know, I'm always trying to chew up all the tech stuff I can (or else how can I be a decent technician?) so this is really helpful. Makes sense, too...

I hadn't thought about the bit depth, but that makes sense. I'll bear that in mind for future mixes.

Now onto the noise problem. In a mix session you've got the massive benefit of having everything on separate tracks, which helps a lot. Unfortunately most de-noisers can give very unmusical results, but there are ways around that. I went through all the tracks and checked the noise level: the lead vocals were between -180 and -300, so nothing audible; most were between -110 and -130, so just in the background as long as you've got good speakers; a few were around -100, which is where it starts to become noticeable; the tambourine, shaker, bass1, and the SFX were all between -100 and -85, which is loud for noise. I started off by just muting every track when all it was outputting was noise, which worked quite well, and then I noticed that in almost every case the noise and the instrument in any given track were at different frequencies, so I used PEQs to take care of the remaining noise (although this step was only really necessary on the tracks with the loudest noise). There might be really good noise reduction plugins that can do the job, but I found it quite easy to do like this, and the results are fairly clean.