Hiss Problem

[Donna]

Hey y'all, please deliver me from this if you can

It's not a connection problem, pretty sure, and not a bad connection Hiss, if that makes sense. But, could it be a not-good-enough-keyboard problem?

Using a splitter jack with two 1/4 inch cables into the tascam annalogue 4 track. I think once all the parts are there on the tune it might be OK if nothing can be done. Still, the dynamic swells of keyboard lines, those are fine w/ good strong sognal, but the quieter parts, if I boost the trim, hiss is boosted as well.

Thanks for any insight.

[Nightwolf]

As far as it being ok after parts are added, that's a bad road to go down.

There is a delicate balance between instrument volume verses recording volume. Too much volume from instrument will give you hiss, also if you record light and pump it with the board, you will get hiss. Instrument quality could be a factor as well. I'm sure Prom can give you a good setting to eliminate the hiss with an EQ. Gates can also help for hiss.

[Donna]

Yeah. Thanks, John.

The gates you speak of, these are not gated effects (like on my midiverb II)? Or are they?

[john]

Are you applying any effects pre-mixer? If your midiverb is in the signal chain, try bypassing any effects while monitoring. The same is true of your keyboard effects.

If it is the effects, you may be able to change the EQ settings on the effect. If so try reducing the gain on high frequencies, say above 8KHz.

You could also be getting crosstalk from a noise source. Basically noise can come from virtually anything electrical, including your mains power (though this tends to be called hum and is generally much lower in frequency at about 50Hz). Filtering your electricity can reduce problems from mains hum, but careful routing of cables and using well shielded cables often helps a hell of a lot.

I've got most of this in an article. Here's a link to page 2....

http://recording.songstuff.com/articles.ph...d=43&sub_page=1

Other than that a noise gate would help on passages where the instrument isn't played, or not played much. Your midi verb won't have this (I doubt it anyway). You can get some good budget units to do the job. I use a Behringer Composer Pro. It cost me about £50, or $80. Probably less now.

Cheers

John

[john]

Oh yeah, a gated effect is basically using a gate to switch on and off the effect. If the ouput sound is 100% effect in balance, it will switch the track on and off. So if it was a reverb effect applied to drums, when you hit the drum you would get the sound of the drum and reverb and then suddenly nothing. A good example are the big drums used in 80s music. If I remember rightly Phil Collins "I Can feel it coming in the air tonight" used it as an effect.

A noise gate is basically a gate specialised for managing noise, rather than an effect.

http://recording.songstuff.com/articles.php?selected=44

[Donna]

Mon capitan, thank you for your help! Good to see ya

Cheers (but only with beers)!

Donna

[john]

Yeha, sorry I've not been around much. I've been busy sorting out lots of site improvements, writing a new songwriting article looking at song form and another on the basics of mastering. Other than that just all the other smash life throughs at you. Or at me as the case may be.

[Prometheus]

Mon capitan, thank you for your help! Good to see ya

Cheers (but only with beers)!

Donna

the trouble with trying to use EQ to cut out hiss is that the hiss tends to be spread across a lot of frequencies... So I'm with John, gating unused parts of the tracks is the way to go on this... Hiss on one track is not very disturbing in a mix unless it is very bad, but if there is hiss on unused parts of every track in a twenty track mix, it very soon builds up into an insidious noise...

The way I work this at home is that I use Cubase with CoolEditPro set up as an external wave editor... When I have recorded a track, I send it out into CoolEdit and silence all the bits of the track that aren't being used... If you tell me what equipment you're using, and software, I'll have a better idea...

I'm gonna have a think about this one, I've got a lot of tools that can be used for this kind of thing, but it's very late here now, so let me get back to you tomorrow...

Edited June 3, 2006 by Prometheus

[Donna]

John, I've read everything you posted as links. It really does look like the Behringer will have to be acquired.

Your article writing is so packed (dense), you probably don't realize that. How the heck do you know so much? I've found that every answer is there, but I must slow down and look it over carefully to get it. That's in part cause the language is still new to me.

It's not main hums or low frequency rumbles, this I knew. 'Tis hiss. Well, I'm gonna get the noise gate, probably should have it anyhow and the price (or debt acquisition ) is manageable.

But you're right, it's the minimal or silent keys passages which are intolerable w/ hiss. I'll try cutting gain on the effects after bypassing them to check the monitor. But I hope to get the noise gate pronto, in a day or two.

Thanks for getting us up to speed about what has kept you away...

[Donna]

the trouble with trying to use EQ to cut out hiss is that the hiss tends to be spread across a lot of frequencies... So I'm with John, gating unused parts of the tracks is the way to go on this... Hiss on one track is not very disturbing in a mix unless it is very bad, but if there is hiss on unused parts of every track in a twenty track mix, it very soon builds up into an insidious noise...

I agree, I think I can hear the hiss across more than just the high freq.

The way I work this at home is that I use Cubase with CoolEditPro set up as an external wave editor... When I have recorded a track, I send it out into CoolEdit and silence all the bits of the track that aren't being used... If you tell me what equipment you're using, and software, I'll have a better idea...

I'm gonna have a think about this one, I've got a lot of tools that can be used for this kind of thing, but it's very late here now, so let me get back to you tomorrow...

Bless your heart...Prometheus, I'm using the annologue 4 track exclusively til further notice. The pc mission has been aborted for the time being...

[Nightwolf]

If the hiss is happening while nothing is being played, you can record silence on to that section, be careful not to run over the parts you want.

[Donna]

That would be an option, John Nightwolf, except I'm recording the keys via a sequencer, and while I'm playing drums...ha ha, as it is, I'm using the drumstick (ya know, leaning past the drum kit which I'm behind) to push "record" on the 4-track, and also using drumstuck to push the "start" on the sequecer.

*sings* "things'll get better"

Edited June 4, 2006 by Donna

[Prometheus]

That would be an option, John Nightwolf, except I'm recording the keys via a sequencer, and while I'm playing drums...ha ha, as it is, I'm using the drumstick (ya know, leaning past the drum kit which I'm behind) to push "record" on the 4-track, and also using drumstuck to push the "start" on the sequecer.

*sings* "things'll get better"

Does the Tascam have Dolby A on it? Even to this day, Dolby A can be used very effectively on drum tracks...

[Donna]

Hey~

It's got dbx. Don't think there's dolby, will look again~

I need to play with it, which I will but having too many outings and stuff.

will report back....

[Prometheus]

Hey~

It's got dbx. Don't think there's dolby, will look again~

I need to play with it, which I will but having too many outings and stuff.

will report back....

dbx eh? My portostudio has that too, but I've never heard any of the problems mentioned in this article... In fact, I find my Tascam 244 as good as my computer for recording drums, and a hell of a lot easier to move around...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBX_(noise_reduction)

[Donna]

Re: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBX_(noise_reduction)

A sometimes noticeable artifact of dbx was "breathing", as its compander rapidly increased and decreased the volume level of the background noise along with the music, which was most noticeable in quiet musical passages; this was a greater issue with dbx than with Dolby because its compander was more aggressive and worked across the frequency spectrum.[1]

Interesting...I only need press a button to switch it off (not recommended in the 246 manual).

dbx Type I and Type II are types of "companding noise reduction". Companding noise reduction works by first compressing the source material's dynamic range (in this case by a factor of 2) in anticipation of being recorded on a relatively noisy medium (magnetic tape, for example). Upon playback, the encoded material, now contaminated with noise, is passed through an expander which restores the original dynamic range of the source material. The contaminating signal (tape hiss) is "masked" by the dynamic expansion process, resulting in a significant reduction in perceived noise.

Love that: "perceived" noise. Hey Prometheus, it's good to know a bit what dbx is! This paragraph got me wondering about compression as an effect. I assume compression on hot vocal levels would not expand upon playback? Right, the idea is to level out peaks which are overhigh. In dbx it is the dynamic range which is compressed...that's the same with compression per se?

[Donna]

It's not the splitter jack, effects or dbx...altho pushing the input mix of the midiverb adds a crisp hiss

[Prometheus]

Re: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBX_(noise_reduction)

A sometimes noticeable artifact of dbx was "breathing", as its compander rapidly increased and decreased the volume level of the background noise along with the music, which was most noticeable in quiet musical passages; this was a greater issue with dbx than with Dolby because its compander was more aggressive and worked across the frequency spectrum.[1]

Interesting...I only need press a button to switch it off (not recommended in the 246 manual).

dbx Type I and Type II are types of "companding noise reduction". Companding noise reduction works by first compressing the source material's dynamic range (in this case by a factor of 2) in anticipation of being recorded on a relatively noisy medium (magnetic tape, for example). Upon playback, the encoded material, now contaminated with noise, is passed through an expander which restores the original dynamic range of the source material. The contaminating signal (tape hiss) is "masked" by the dynamic expansion process, resulting in a significant reduction in perceived noise.

Love that: "perceived" noise. Hey Prometheus, it's good to know a bit what dbx is! This paragraph got me wondering about compression as an effect. I assume compression on hot vocal levels would not expand upon playback? Right, the idea is to level out peaks which are overhigh. In dbx it is the dynamic range which is compressed...that's the same with compression per se?

Yeah, it's the dynamic range that's compressed... Compression is one of the mainstays of the modern mixing process... Every modern commercial mix you'll ever here has compression on just about every element of it, and then the whole mix is compressed at the mastering stage...

Used properly, by decreasing the dynamic range of certain signals or certain part of signals, compression creates the illusion of increased dynamic rage, this is the principle behind NICAM television, or Near Instantaneous Companded Audio Multiplex...

Clever use of Compression Expansion in NICAM gives a ten bit digital signal a perceived 14 bit dynamic range by kicking in at appropriate sound pressure levels... As I have found out using a NICAM camera to record video footage, it's actually a pretty savage process, but it does the job for TV...

Used unwisely, compression can lead to extreme listening fatigue...

People in the modern age are of course trained to listen to compressed sounds basically from birth... Everything that comes through TV and radio and commercial CD's is compressed... DVD's, working on a 24 bit databus give the appearance of an unaturally massive dynamic range to people who are used to NICAM and VHS sounds...

http://www.geocities.com/thetrueprometheus...Compression.doc

[Donna]

I've solved some of this hiss - maybe most.

Turned up the gain way on the keyboard, turned off the trim, had to ride the master and individual gains a bit before recording and on mixdown. Still experimenting and at 15 minute intervals (which stinks), but there it is, til I get a bigger block of time.

All in all, progress

PS Prometheus, I found your last reply quite interesting, thank you.

[Prometheus]

I've solved some of this hiss - maybe most.

Turned up the gain way on the keyboard, turned off the trim, had to ride the master and individual gains a bit before recording and on mixdown. Still experimenting and at 15 minute intervals (which stinks), but there it is, til I get a bigger block of time.

All in all, progress

PS Prometheus, I found your last reply quite interesting, thank you.

Yeah, it stands to reason that if you get your signal into the desk as close to zero dB as possible with as little gain on the trim as possible, you're gonna get less noise... The received wisdom is that you want to record a signal that peaks between 0dB and -3dB... Obvioulsy there are situations where it's a good idea to give yourself a little more headroom, because drop outs caused by clipping are a lot more distracting than hiss...

The TASCAM unit I have has very good preamps in it, but I don't know what the later units were like... Even with the trim control at 4 o'clock, my spirit studio has basically noiseless preamps, you're talking about a noise floor of about - 95dB, which is pretty easy to deal with, and that makes a hell of a difference... Obviously, once your signal is into the digital domain, noise after that is not something you have to worry so much about, the chain of hiss effectively ends there, unless you patch in outboards...

I don't know if you've got MS Word on your machine, but if so, you might find that link interesting... It contains examples of the common uses of compression in modern mixes... Bascially, compression is probably the most important part of "the black art" of creating mixes that sound like commercial ones, and that are suitable for broadcast...

Edited June 17, 2006 by Prometheus