Repairing Audio

Repairing audio is a vital part of getting anything to sound good. At the end of the day, stuff goes wrong and knowing tools that are available to fix these problems can be vital to fixing problems that arise. Some of the tools that I know I can utilise include iZotope’s RX bundle for fixing unwanted clicks, de-noising, de-reverbing, etc. , iZotope’s Nectar for pitch correction and Melodyne, also for pitch correction.

So here’s some examples of how you can use some of these tools to repair your audio, mixes, whatever, to make it sounds great!

Over these past few months I have been using iZotope’s RX5 almost constantly. It’s ability to de-noise and de-crackle is incredible and super helpful especially when recording in spaces with lots of background noise. To use the de-noiser, first isolate and listen to a silent section of the song, where the only audible thing is the crappy background noise that you want to remove. From here, click the learn button so it’s highlighted and play the section that you’ve highlighted. This will cause the de-noiser to learn the specific frequencies and sound of the noise you want to remove, taking it out, for the most part, from the track! Here’s a little snapshot of that process!

So the grey curved line you see there is the current track playing and all of the frequencies in that track. The orange line is any residual nose that is present in the track, whilst the yellow is the curve. Overall, this process takes out any identified and learned unwanted noise and is great at reducing wind sounds, buzzy lights, air-con sounds, etc.

Another great tool at fixing and repairing audio is iZotope Nectar’s Pitch control tool. This tool allows you to manipulate instruments to make them in key and ‘correct’ sounding. Below are two images of the same word, “Naivety. In the first image, you can see that a couple of the notes are off, which overall made the word sound a bit forced and overall, it didn’t really sit well in the mix. After fixing this up, as seen in the second image, the word now sounds proper and sung correctly!