The audio files on this page accompany the 'Clean Up Your Act' article on noise reduction that appeared in SOS January 2012.
As described in the main article, I used various processes together to 'clean up' a bass part that had ben recorded as part of a demo, and which suffered from several different problems, including 50Hz mains hum, some buzzing and higher frequency noise.
sos-noise-reduction-jan12.zip | 12.5 MBThe examples are as follows:
1-Original
This is an excerpt from the original recording of the bass part.
2-TBHum
This is the result of applying a bhum filter and some high-pass filtering with Tone Boosters' TB_Hum plug-in.
3-TCDenoise
After the hum removal plug-in, I inserted an instance of TC Electronic's Denoise and started with the strong noise removal preset before refining the process via the plug-in's draw mode.
4-LPF
Just to tidy up a few remaining high-frequency noises, I applied a low-pass filter using DDMF's LP10.
5-OriginalPlusCompressor
This is the original part run through a compressor (TC's 24/7 plug-in). the settings have not been massively refined, but this shows how the noise becomes even worse when treating the part to typical mix processing.
6-CleanedPlusCompressor
This is the part with all the various noise-removal processes applied, and then run into the same compressor as for file 5. Again, the settings haven't been refined very much, but you can hear a massive difference. Although there are a few audible artifacts remaining, the part is now usable, and in the context of the mix this eventually appeared in the remaining problems were masked by other elements.