A denoiser is a piece of software that is designed to reduce stationary noise in audio signals. These sounds range from tape hiss to microphone hum, to the rattle of an air-con and any other noise that could change the level or spectral shape in a recording (“Using Denoiser”, 2018). Basically, it just takes the unwanted sounds out of anything that has been recorded.
It does this by ‘learning’ the shape and frequency of the sound that you want removed. When the unwanted sound is selected, there is usually a button that will ‘learn’ this sound and then automatically remove it for the rest of the track. A clear section of unwanted noise is usually found at the start or very end of a recording, however, the piece of software will usually successfully remove the noise from the whole track.
I was lucky enough to be able to grab the izotope RX5 plugin pack at a really cheap price and now have access to their denoising software and plugins, specifically their denoiser itself:
It has been extremely helpful in my recordings to remove any extra, unwanted sounds and general background hum.
An example of this is in the latest tracks I have been working on. I have been trying to create a small EP of lo-fi tracks with the theme of ‘space’, as I had come across some samples released by NASA including several sounds of space, rockets and communications between Houston and the astronauts.
Before distorting the vocals I was using, I wanted to make them as clean as possible, so took advantage of this software to do so. This recording is the sample as is, at its original level and having had no editing done at all.
This is the denoised sample. I learnt and selected the section at the start of the track that was just noise and then applied what the application had learnt to the whole track. Here’s a short video of the process. You can see that I highlight the selected area without noise and then learn it with the plugin. I then select the whole track where it is now applied to.
Thanks for coming and having a look at how to denoise your recordings using the RX5 plugin! I hope you learned a little bit!
References:
Using Denoiser. (2018). Help.izotope.com. Retrieved 25 April 2018, from http://help.izotope.com/docs/rx1/pages/denoiser_getting_started.htm
Quick Tips: Izotope RX5 How to Denoise audio. (2018). YouTube. Retrieved 26 April 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Irq2Vl1fQ0c
Connor 