How to REMOVE HUM from a recording

Eric Beels  0:01  
Last episode, I talked about identifying harm. Now, let's get into removing if you're listening to Practical Podcast Tips, my name is Eric Beels. And today, I'm going to cover tip number 28, how to remove hum or tone from your recording.

So in the last episode, I talked about identifying some of the different sources of humming, or tones, or whatever it might be. In this episode, I'm gonna talk about how to remove that tone. And it's easier than you might think. Now, so firstly, I'm not going to cover every software on doing this, I am going to talk about some of the different tools and whatnot. And I'm going to talk about how we do it how we remove tones and hum. From recordings. But with that said, most editing software's do have this ability to some extent, some are handled much better than others. So your results will kind of vary when when doing this. But in this episode, I'm going to talk about specifically how we do it. Final Cut has ways to do it, and things like that premiere should probably should have a way to do it, you know, Audacity has ways. But one thing I wanted to talk about, here's contrary to what you might think we actually hardly ever use the D hum tool. And I know it sounds kind of weird, because it's D hum, it should do exactly what it is. And the funny thing about it is it does it will remove home pretty pretty well. The problem that I've had with the D hum tool, which is pretty universally the same name and most most software's if you do a search in your FX tool toolbox in your editing software, like typing the word hum, you'll probably see something called the D hum tool or D humming tool. And the problem that I've had with it though, is it tends to ruin or distort your voice, every time I've tried to use it, it always kind of makes your voice very tinny. And it just doesn't work all that well in my experience. And the software that we use to remove hums and tones and just you know, fan noises, whatever it might be, we use a software called RX nine, which is by a company called isotope and it's one of the best software's around for removing noises, you got lots of lots of different tools and flexibility for whatever the noise might might be. But universally, what we found works super well is to use some of the standard de de noising tools. And in RX nine, there are three main different ones. So there's the voice D noiser, there is something called the spectral D noiser. And there is also the dialogue isolate tools will often use a combination of these these tools for all audio files. But in particular, the one to remove tone that works immaculately is the spectral de noising tool within RX nine. And the reason it works so well is because you can isolate one one particular frequency. And it's really good at removing just that particular frequency that it's great for removing, like even microphone noise floors, as well. And it just overall works extremely, extremely well. Now, if you don't have isotope, or RX nine, what one of our editors of choice is Final Cut Pro 10. And that has a noise reduction tool built into it. And what you can do in that is you if you click on your file, you can turn on the noise reduction tool, and then there's like a little slider to do it. This doesn't work as well, but it will generally get the job done. It might distort your voice a bit. Now, one thing I wanted to talk about as well is a lot of people think that you can't remove, remove harm or noises or anything like that. This is just not true. You can absolutely remove so many noises. And in fact, in this entire episode, I've had a tone generator coming from my phone the entire time. And I'm going to show you what the raw audio sounds like right here. So this is the raw audio so you can hear the tone in the background. And this this audio obviously sounds terrible. I would be almost more inclined to just rerecord it. And it's frankly giving me a headache listening to this this whole time. So I'm trying to do this episode without getting too distracted with this annoying tone going in the background. But you can remove tones pretty well. And it is possible to to do this if you know, know what you're doing on it. So, look inside your software, your editing software, see what see what kind of noise reduction tools are there. You know, if you have a D Hummer within it, try it, give it a shot, if it works great in my experience, so it just does not work well at all. I don't know why they can't seem to get the D Hummer tools to work, right. But they always ruin the voice. For me, the voice quality just sounds terrible, it sounds tinny, it gets all almost sound, it sounds metallic is what it sounds like. But try it and see if that works. If not type in on your editing software, like under the search area or something or look for it, just type in the word noise. And you should see like noise reduction noise reducer, each software will have its own kind of name for it and give that a shot. Now many of them have a function where you need to sample the noise. And how you're going to do that is you need to find a empty spot on on your audio file. Okay, so you don't need much, you just do like a half second. So sometimes it might just be a pause in in someone's dialog, find a gap, that sort of thing. And just you want to sample you'll have to sample that bit. Now not all of them require sampling just some of them do. So make sure so if it's not working at all, you can't just run it across the whole thing, you need to sample a piece first. So for example, that's how the spectral noise reduction works inside RX nine others that are if they're kind of AI powered, so they're powered by artificial intelligence, they won't need that necessarily the kind of act on kind of a smart function where it'll just kind of runs and it just analyzes it on its own, those can be a lot easier to use. However, they tend to not work quite as well. For example, in in RX nine, the dialogue isolate tool actually works extremely well with random noises. So if you're like by on the sidewalk across the street, with cars going by, it actually does a really good job at removing those things. And it'll remove some kind of consistent tone or noise in the background. But it just doesn't work as well. So you can use that that tool, the dialogue isolate tool. And, for example, in Final Cut 10, they just have one tool, just the the noise reduction built in. And that's kind of AI powered, it just samples on its own and it doesn't really you don't have to sample spit this specific audio point you just have a slider. Now one key thing to remember is don't overdo it. Okay, this is the most common problem that people have is they tend to want to just remove the whole thing, you know, crank it to the max, crank it to 11 and reduce it completely. The problem with doing this is it will tend to make your voice sound watery. Okay, and generally doesn't sound as bad as the D Hummer. But it will sound watery like you're in a tunnel or underwater. It's just sounds strange. Okay, so you want to be really careful with with how much you're reducing the noise. Okay? Make sure that you don't, don't destroy your voice when trying to remove this this background noise. So that's the most common problem I see is people cranking it too high, and then it ruining the voice. Okay, so be gentle with that noise reduction. And I hope this helps you figure out a way to remove that noise. All right. I will see you in the next episode.

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