Spectral noise removers such as the one in iZotope RX are a far better option than a noise gate for removing hiss and buzz on guitar recordings.
When I record guitar in my little ‘studio’ at home, it always sounds kinda noisy. I have a little old Fender Champion 600 tube amp, and I put a Shure SM57 on it. But there’s a bit of buzz (hum?) and it sounds kinda hissy too. I tried using the gate in Cubase, and it sort of works, but it only really gets rid of the noise when the guitar isn’t playing, and sometimes it cuts notes short too. What’s the best way to tackle this?
Darren Davies via email
SOS Reviews Editor Matt Houghton replies: I had a Champion 600. While not exactly versatile, it’s a real valve amp and I thought it sounded very decent for the price. Still, I remember it not being the quietest and there were issues with the small speaker’s sound and the cabinet vibrating — I had mine modded, and fitted the amp in a bigger cabinet with a nicer, larger speaker. Still, assuming all is well with your guitar and pedals, you should be able to get a reasonably good sound out of this amp through an SM57.
It’s always best where possible to minimise noise at source, so first I’d examine your whole signal chain: your guitar/pedals could well be contributing to the noise. For more on that sort of thing, check out our SOS February 2025 feature: https://sosm.ag/tackling-noisy-guitar-recordings. To then tackle any unwanted noise you record, I don’t recommend gates, mostly for the reasons you state. But hiss, buzz and hum can usually be pulled down effectively using a ‘fingerprint’ style spectral noise remover.
You should be able to make very worthwhile improvements to your recorded sound.
I tend to use iZotope RX, but if your budget’s tight there are lots of options. Essentially, you record some amp sound without any playing then feed that sound into the plug‑in so that it can learn the ‘fingerprint’ of the noise you want it to remove. To make this easy, I always try to capture, say, 10‑30 seconds of ‘silence’ before or after the guitar take I’m recording and use that. The software can then remove the noise either offline (as with RX) or in real time during playback (like ReaFIR, from the free ReaPlugs bundle). Either way, you can’t play through them (the real‑time ones add latency that will affect your ability to play well and in time), but you can always monitor your playing using the amp itself. There can be undesirable side effects if you push the processing too far, but you should be able to make very worthwhile improvements to your recorded sound this way, such that later using compression or other tools that can bring up the noise floor won’t sound unbearable!