Adobe Audition -- Removing individual noises from audio clips

howdy folks Jeff Sengstack here I want to talk about how to remove noises in Adobe Audition on another tutorial I talked about removing noises that run throughout an entire clip like hiss wind noise fans motors light fixtures things like that this particular case I will bring that up again briefly but then talk about dealing with specific types of noises and how we work with those kinds of noises so here's a clip that I made just me talking and and then having some noises thrown in so for example here's a big hum we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal there's some just some basic kissing sort of staticky noise that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these this is static with little clicks in it are life liberty here's a vinyl record sound the pursuit of happiness that to secure these rights I got some coughing arriving very lovely and a cellphone the consent to go so how do I get rid of those sounds well you can get rid of some you can get rid of some of some of them and all those you just gotta sort of punt and just give up so but the basic way you do it is by not working inside the waveform view you work inside the spectral frequency display view and that is this little button up here that will switch to that view open it with a corner or just simply grab this little handle down here when you see those two sets so that set of parallel lines that you guys drag that that's a little handle you draggin will drag it all the way up and deal just with a spectral frequency display first of all there's this hum and you can see it this bright yellow area means that that's loud and that's the frequency that's loud and the frequencies right down here the bottom if you look at the right-hand side under this frequency display which goes from 0 to about 22,000 Hertz that gives you a sense of the full range of human hearing for people of really good hearing down here on the bottom which is basically almost off people's hearing range there is a deep hum that's very loud but doesn't sound that loud because it gets right at the edge of human hearing to really see exactly what frequency that is because that's kind of important for the process we're going to use you can zoom in on this display to zoom in on this particular ruler here this frequency readout you can just do a marquee select so I'm going to right click here to do that I right click on and drag and make that marquee notice the little magnifying glass icon saying that we're going to zoom and we'll zoom in here from 0 to about 500 cycles per second and now you can see the frequency range of this hum and it kind of stops right about there and if you go across it's like it stops right around 190 190 cycles per second which is important to know because we're going to work on that that specific range later well there's a couple of ways to get rid of that hum I'll start by using what's called a marquee selection tool and other tools inside Adobe Audition that worked very much like tools inside Photoshop we have a marquee selection tool here which will select a rectangular area & alesso which will select any kind of area you want to draw so we'll start with the marquee here we'll use the marquee because it is rectangular as is this sound here so I'll click on the marquee selection tool to change that I'll drag a marquee around this yellow area where it's really loud I do that you probably want to be able to see there's a marquee there because it's sort of soft white over that dark that bright yellow I'll drag it up here so you get a chance there's the marquee drag it down just to that spot there now what we can do is we can then just reduce the volume and you create that marquee here's your little volume control knob it'll affect only whatever is selected so I'll reduce the volume a little bit at first let's say we'll bring it down let's say 20 dB and there you can see it's not so bright yellow anymore we'll bring it down even more now it's getting to be almost gone so we basically just reduce the volume in that selected area let me just play that back and you'll see that the hum is gone but that also affects the voice of it we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal so you can see how the base of my voice comes back and the area after the ha mended so that's one way to deal with Hum you can just simply reduce the volume to a certain degree I could keep on reducing it more and more and more until it's just gone or just do it partially like that I'm going to undo that a couple of times we go go back to the beginning another way to deal with that is by using an effect so let's go to the effects first of all let me change the view back here to regular the way you change it back to regular view is right click again it's a zoom reset which you can see has a keyboard shortcut but that's kind of an elaborate keyboard shortcut so let's go and reset now we're back to normal applying effect you know the two ways to apply an effect to the clip you can do it inside the effects rack or go up here to the menu for effects effects and find some effect here and apply it that way if you apply it via the menu it will apply directly to the cliff and then when you're done it'll change the data in that clip it won't change it on your hard drive until you click save go file save but it will change it within the clip if you use the effect rack effects rack that sort of applies the effect electronically without actually putting it into the files and you play back later you'll hear the effect of the effect but without it changing the data of this clip as it is now sort of residing temporarily inside your program the advantage of that is that you can apply a bunch of X in the effects rack and test them out and change them or delete them or turn them on or off and to see how they all work which is great the problem with that though is that you can't apply an effect on effects rack to just part of the clip unless you specify the area of the clip and then click the word apply down here just for that particular effect so there are there are pluses and minuses but let me just show you how that works the effect we want to work with is called the fast Fourier transform but let's just take one step before there's the other effects that work with specific frequency ranges so I'll go over here open up this effects area and look under filter and EQ there's something called graphic equalizers and parametric equalizers I'll take the graphic equalizer I'll let you control volume in specific frequency ranges from minus thirty one thirty one to sixty three sixty three to 125 you can see that works at doubles for each one sort of the way frequencies double along here so I could take let's say these frequencies right down to zero and that'll actually get rid of a lot of the huh we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created so it does get rid of some of the homeless goes between 125 and 250 there's still some space there that was included in the home so I'll knock that 250 down all the way as well try that yeah we hold these truths to be supple it makes the voice really teeny because it took out at the bottom let's say 300 or so 300 plus cycles per second and makes it sound pretty neat that's kind of a zone or my voice does start kicking in so it's not a very exacting way to deal with reducing volume in a particular frequency range so let's close that it'll still be here and if extract but we're going to swap it up or something else by clicking this disclosure triangle and go to filter DQ and go to FFT filter the fast Fourier transform this lets you specifically select certain frequencies to remove if you just check some of these presets for example we'll get rid of a 60 or it's loop they're very specific very narrow ranges of frequencies if you want to select them and drop them down to zero for example go back to default this case we want to take about 190 which is right about there and bring everything before that everything less than that to zero so I've got that starting point I pick up right next to it grab it out and pull that all the way down if I slide it to the left I've got this kind of gradual change but here it's like abrupt photo so from about 190 on down will be absolutely quiet right there and I take this side down all the way and now everything in the 1 and the 0 to 1 ID range will be silent we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal so that will be silent it will be that way all the way across the entire clip now if I select a range of the clip let's say right where the hum is about from here that you're using the i-beam tool I just went up there and selected the time selection tool also called the i-beam tool and drag the select just that area then right now I could apply this effect to just that area here it sits inside the effects rack affecting the entire clip but until I click on the word apply it won't actually change the clip later if I've got let's say 6 effects sitting here and click apply it affect the entire clip so right now I want to take care of business by clicking on the word apply to effect just that selected area and now you can see that that home is gone now the yellow is turned to dark purple meaning it's silent we hold these truths to be so and I'll click away here so you can see that sounds like when I go from the affected areas of the not affected area of evident that all men are created equal so you can see it the voice does get a little base here when it gets there I could do the same thing to music if I were to switch over to the music side of things there's that hum again I could do the same fast Fourier transform on that one but we'll just stick with the voice right now and we'll work on the voice side of things for the rest of this discussion notice there's a little asterisk now next to the name of the file saying by the way you've changed this file so at some point you might want to save it and usually you want to save it with a slightly different name so that you don't mess up the original file or more importantly you're the probably the better workflow is to not work with original file ever just make a copy and work only with copies here inside edition let's look at this next thing here it's just this hiss that they and we've dealt with the cysts before where you get a noise print like that you go to effects noise reduction ministration capture noise prints and then go back again and go like so and do noise reduction process using the noise print we just got and then you go across and you select the entire range of that particular clip test it out that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that they are and decide how much you want to remove and then click apply for that area and we've talked about a clicking apply for the entire clip by selecting the entire file in this case we just do it to that particular area so that's the standard way to go about dealing with the noise issues here I'll go ahead and click apply so you can see how that looks if you look by the tutorial you'll know that it'll clean up a lot of that sort of purple fuzz there you go got rid of most of that stuff and cleaned up that they are endowed by their creator with certain on but what I want to do these next ones here is I want to deal with these little bits of static listen to this yeah that among these are life liberty just a couple little pieces of little pieces of static well when you're dealing with static like that it's best to get rid of the background noise first and then work on the static I'll assume in a little bit here so you get a better look at the frequency display and you can see I'll drag this guy a little bit to the right there you can see those little bits of static you can see problems here inside the spectral frequency display that's one of its great attributes so let's first of all go through the process of getting rid of the background noise and I'll show you a faster way to do it than the way I have been showing you and that is simply to apply the effect the noise reduction effect now it's going to take the old noise print which we don't want to use in this case so just make a selection now with the i-beam with the time selection tool get a new noise print bingo drag this guy out for the length of the thing that you want to fix test it out make sure the little loop button to select this little loop a loop and loop as you play it that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness you decide among these our life look how much you want to reduce you know how much of the noise you want to get out and then how many decibels of noise do you want to get out Rudy and the pursuit of happiness that among these are life liberty and again when you do this it's sometimes by reducing the noise you end up kind of affecting it the whole overall sound quality but this is a quick and easy way of getting rid of that hiss so I'll click applied it for the whole range here apply and now we're done and now we've got these little pieces of static the deal with us listen to that that among these are life liberty they're pretty subtle but you can see them so I want to get rid of the static and there's a tool that we can use that sometimes works and sometimes does it we'll try it out and see how it works in this particular case there are two approaches that you can take you go to effects noise reduction and then this thing called automatic click remover so here you see this so you got threshold and complexity what the heck does that mean well the lower settings are more sensitive and the higher complexity uses more processing power to try to deal with it and if you forget what those darn things mean you know which one they use I mean typically the default value is thirty year for threshold and about that make sixteen or so for complexity if you do forget what the skies are you can always click on this little button here and say you know tell me more and here's that particular thing automatic click remover and it says that threshold determines sensitivity to noise and columbic City indicates the complexity of noise higher settings more processing lower settings more clicks okay so let's just try it out that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness to concur those guys pretty well I'll just I'll just take the default settings here and that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness that among these okay so I'll I'll accept that that did a pretty good job and let's see if they go away they get this kind of fuzzy those little sharp lines now we're a little fuzzier they're not it's not completely gone but that among these are life liberty and the pursuit usually have to listen carefully to hear any remnants of those little bits of little bits of statics so the click remover does a pretty good job dealing with those little bits of static let me undo of that work and try different process things called diagnose a thing called Diagnostics if I go to effects Diagnostics is thing called D clicker process the same thing is true if I go to this Diagnostics tab and there'll be a D clicker as well as all the guys you just saw a moments ago and they effects menu item so I'll go to D clicker and then what it says is scan it so scan this guy I'll scan it and it finds things that it considers to be clicks that it wants to deal with and they say repair all let's see it did and get rid of them completely let's just you that sounds though that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of fruity good I still hear some little clips back there so you could scan it again and try to repair all again but that's that's the basic the other way that you could do to deal with little clicking sounds like that let's move on down to this next one which is the vinyl record noise this is different that to secure these rights governments are instituted among and I'll say the process will be the same for this one how are you remove the basic basic background noise first and then go try to get rid of those little pops from the from the crack so the scratches on the record what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and take care of the the noise off-screen here and I'll come back in a second alright I've taken care of the some of the noise this is a difficult one because the noise kind of waiver is a bit so it's hard to get rid of all of it that to secure these rights governments are instituted but I haven't tried to deal with this click so now I'll try the same thing we did before we'll go back to effects as you duction automatic click remover and we'll try it out that to secure these rights government and boy it's not working at all right oh yeah sorry instituted remote that to see here these so you'll see that the automatic click remover it doesn't work when the clicks are big let's go back and scan it repair all try it again what that to see here nada so you can see that the D clicker or a automatic click remover neither one really deals with these sort of thicker clicks so how do you deal with it then you got to do it manually let me show you how that works I'll expand the view a bit here and you can sort of see the clicks let me just take a look at that tooth right there as I click right there let you see here these right another clicker so we'll deal with this click here write that to secret right there's it look like and when you're dealing with clicks you just have to identify them or select them with the marquee tool here's a marquee tool I'm going to select this little guy right there I'll expand the view little bit more so I can better look at it I'll just take the marquee tool and select that whole click if I just play it I've got the loop on it's playing that little click and then there's this wonderful tool this amazing tool inside audition called auto heal I don't he'll it will take an audio like this and will erase it essentially and then do a cross fade with the stuff on each side of it to try to replace it with something other than what was there so you go to favorites not effects but favorites and those Auto heal look like that and that thing is now gone if I click this guy it has that click in the middle that took care they click it is now replaced it with stuff is on both sides now let's play that that to see that click is gone which is amazing so it's a great way to deal with these little specific narrow instances that you can identify you can see one like right there is one you can take this guy to the same thing go Auto he'll go to favorites auto heal and I don't look like when I'm hearing these rights so this little guy right here is probably another one but nevertheless that's the way to deal with it but the problem with auto heal and I'm not sure why it'll be does this so when you apply auto heal the volume level drops about 3 dB so I'm going to use it on a coffin show you a way to remedy that let's zoom out a little bit government so we'll go to this next thing here slide over to the COFF it's a big coffin a small cloth arriving being very just as a small cloth there so we'll deal with a small cloth so let me zoom in a bit on that Lily right here you can see this big cough here right to open platform and then this little guy here I better jump I'll get rid of the smaller cloth and notice this little line right through there that's an electronic hum that I inserted there at about 16 thousand Hertz which only people is really good hearing will here you can deal with that by using the marquee selection tool for example and picking that out or using the FFT filter and again selecting about 16 thousand this narrowly removing with us we could remove it that way as well let me just stick here with the second cloth okay I'm going to select it with the marquee tool you can see the COFF basically right about there yeah and what I want to do is I'll remove that using auto heal now when I do auto heal under favorites auto heal it removes it and then reduces the volume I think just I really took care of my voice too so let me knock time it'd be quite so much when I reduce that let me take up a little bit maybe just move a little bit less of it this time favorites or heal arriving very just so the cough is more arriving very just gone there's a little bit of coffee left here so I'll do another auto heal arriving very just so it does get rid of it just give you kind of a thump still that's not as obvious but the thing is that the volume drops whenever you apply oh I'm going to control Z a couple of times we'll bring it back since the volume drops you need to first do auto heel and then really to make it work right need to raise it three DB or so and then it'll be a single it just it won't be so obvious that it was there so I'll do it one more time favorites auto heel raise it three DB and this is kind of the process every time I use auto heel you should then raise it up 3 dB I think very just as long as the thing is selected so there's a way to avoid having to do this thing where you you know apply on a heel then raise the line by 3 DB and that is to a record favorite so this little option down the bottom of the favourites the start recording favorite so I'll click on start recording favorite and now it's gives you a message saying you're recording a favorite now which is fine so I'll say ok so now the first thing we do while it's recording is go Auto heel on now raise 3 DB let's click here and type in 3 and now I'm done I will click under favorite so I'll say stop recording favorite and that created a new favorite we'll call it good Auto feel okay good Auto heel I've already got my own right there that I've done before so there's good auto healing so in the future if I want to do all undo the this one here and I'll apply the good auto heel favorite good auto heel and that will then do the auto heel and raise the 3 DB all at one time and - since I do auto heel a lot when I'm working with say concert recordings and taking you know little noises out like coughs like this I've come up with a keyboard shortcut that I use to do this faster I said if I may need to go to the menu command this good auto heel instead of v-net arriving very Justin I use a keyboard shortcut in the keyboard shortcut you apply by going over to edits keyboard shortcuts and there's the favourites so what I want to do is apply some kind of keyboard shortcut this I've already got my keyboard shortcut for my OD Hills control for it slash but we'll go up here and let's say we pick out let's say we got the short cut they are ready to go i press the shortcut your control let's say control backslash maybe that'll work if i click a sign it'll tell me whether one's already been assigned or not yep this one's it's already in use one overwrite it no we don't want to write it so let's try different one so I'll select it again go down here get this guy ready by clicking there so let's say goes to I control left the right bracket control right bracket how's that will that be alright assign that one bingo so now control right bracket is my new shortcut for the good auto heal and so I try now to try that out on this big cough which again you know big cough is going to be tough to get rid of Bell do control left right brackets gives me control Rebecca and that is new the new shortcut and not only does the auto heal but also raises the DB arriving and get rid of some of the cost but boy can't get rid of all it but that's the basic process to deal with coughing by using that auto heal finally here is this horrible cell phone and the consent to go how to get rid of that if we do a lot of heal for the whole darn thing notice that the you can see the frequency is going all the way down here and all the way up to here with actually some overtones up here what a mess this test file to heal now and also go control left right bracket do I get my left to right confused it's gone and see what it sounds like towards from the consent or government so it takes a lot of my voice out of there as well so let's narrow the view down a little bit for Marquis like just does the brightest areas just allow just offending things I don't heal that control right brackets its from the consent of the government still have that horrible and that's the problem with a cellphone ring like this oil boy it will be tough to get rid of it all you could try to select like that and do one thing at a time but when you do the auto heal it's taking what's on the left and what's on the right and cross fitting it what's on the right is more beeping sounds so as you can see some things are not so easy to get rid of I could try to select these guys down here but you know it's going to take care of my voice too so one thing you can do is reduce the volume out a little bit but again it'll reduce the words from a consent big upper so it's tricky to get rid of something some things are impossible to get rid of and something rid of them they leave obvious places in the middle of it but hope you can see there are various approaches to dealing with specific types of noises and Adobe Audition

Channel: Jeff Sengstack

Views: 249,539

Keywords: Adobe Audition, Santa Rosa Junior College, SRJC, music, recording, studio, audio, bus, bus track, file, editing, effect, noise, remove, removal, tutorial, sengstack

Id: hfp5ze0XTUo

Length: 24min 21sec (1461 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 08 2011