Avid S6 Session: Unwanted Noise and Performance Correction

Callum any Myself had a past session mixing the first song off our upcoming 'Mufaro' project. We found ourselves inside the Avid S6 studio, analysing our recent recording and touching up a few errors in the mix. The session led us to using iZotope RX to correct some noise issues on the Piano Solo, as well as using elastic audio to correct the keyboardists performance.

iZotope RX: Unwanted Noise

Listening back to the overdubbed Piano Solo on the track 'Closer', Callum noticed a weird noise coming from the left speaker. It seems that during the session, I unplugged the Piano from the DI before we started Overdubbing, thus when I re-plugged the DI in, the Left cable must have been incorrectly slotted in (or so to say). This noise was apparent when paying attention to the Solo, thus, we took the file to RX.

At this point we had not removed the previous tracking takes of Closer from the session, so to keep the Left Solo file perfectly in time with the Right file, we exported the track from the beginning of the session. Though this gave us a 35 minute long file, it kept the track perfectly in time when importing it back into Pro-Tools.

The noise we were hearing was not a 'random' frequency, but a noise that came over the whole file, affecting every frequency range for a split second of time. This became a challenge to remove completely from the file and resulted in us having to leave certain noise in the track due to it clashing with important notes / frequencies. The screenshots are of our session in RX, showing the highlighted areas in which we removed the signal.

Here is a few audio snippets showing a before and after of the RX session;

Elastic Audio: Performance Correction

In the last hour of our S6 Session, Callum and myself were listening back to the recording and we noticed that the Main Piano went out of time in the second chorus. We realized that it was such a subtle mistake timing wise that we were able to implement Performance Correction Techniques such as Elastic Audio & Warping. Due to the Piano's being tracked in Stereo, we had to find a work around to get a good correction.

The screen shot above is the group we created for the Warping, Keys Wrp. Grouping both Keys tracks together, we were able to adjust the timing of both tracks at the exactly the same intervals. The timing of the Pianist was a minimal issue, he seemed to play a chord a bit too early, thus pushing him a bit in front of the rest of the band, nothing we couldn't address. We were very conscious of not warping to the point of audio fragmenting thus, we allowed the track to still have some natural syncopation. Below you can see the warping markers and timing we corrected the track to.

Unfortunately we do not have a copy of the file before we warped, so there is no before and after comparison.

Thank You For Reading!