Rooms have a habit of “sounding bad”, especially small apartment rooms with a computer stuffed into them. The common way to deal with this is with acoustic treatment which is a lot more expensive than most of us can imagine. Today we’ll talk a little about DIY treatments.
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A de-esser (or DeEsser) is a dynamics tools for dealing with high frequency sibilants, such as s-sounds, thus the name. When recording the human voice some sounds can be especially troublesome, this includes s, p and t. The de-esser is basically a compressor that’s sensitive to higher frequency sounds like “esses”.
Audacity 1.3.4 (beta) have been released. It’s in beta because it doesn’t include complete documentation and translations into other languages. Audacity is a multi-platform audio editor (Windows, OS X and Linux) and is absolutely free. Certainly something to check out if you haven’t got a proper audio editor for your podcasting purposes just yet.
Here is an e-book focusing on just that – podcasts with Audacity. I have no idea if it’s any good, but it could very well be worth checking out. Don’t believe all the hype on that page though (Audacity is not “universally recognized” as the number one software for podcasts).
I bought a new guitar today, a Swedish axe from Hagström, so I of course had to lay down some riffs with it.
Sometimes all you need are a few seconds of music in your podcast. Like a riff or something that ends one segment and starts another. Well, here are two!
As with all clips on Audival, you can use this for free in your podcast
Even my girlfriend liked this one, so it can’t be all bad…
As with all clips on Audival, you can use this for free in your podcast
A limiter is basically a compressor that works at high ratios. There is no set rule as to what the ratio needs to be for it to stop being a compressor and start being a limiter. Some suggest 10:1, other 20:1, and others something else altogether. The high compression ratio is often combined with a fast attack to stop any sound getting past the set threshold. This is often useful for stopping clipping to occur. When the limiter is set to behave this way (i.e. stop the entire signal from reaching a set threshold) it is usually referred to as a “brick wall limiter”.
I’m trying out iZotopes new audio restoration software RX (previous post). You can expect a full-blown review of it somewhere down the road. For a first test I found a really noisy old blues recording (and a field recording on top of that) from the 1940′s called “Shetland Pony Blues” played by Son House. I really didn’t do much processing with it but the results were still very noticeable. If I would restore this song “properly” I wouldn’t have settled with this… and I might not even have removed so much at one time as I think the guitar might have lost a little of it’s high end frequencies.
Anyway, have a listen to them. The first file is the original and the second is the processed file. The difference is most apparent in the beginning.
