- Hey, I'm Mike Russell from musicradiocreative.com.
So it is the Queen's Platinum Jubilee this year,
celebrating 70 years of serving the people.
And as a proud British citizen,
I thought I'd pull one of old,
well, then Princess Elizabeth's speeches from 1947
and have a go at restoring it.
Make sure you watch to the end,
to find out what happened.
♪ Check the mic and make sure it sound right, boy. ♪
♪ It sound right, boy. ♪
- Let's get to it.
I'm Mike Russell from musicradiocreative.com.
Hit like and subscribe if you want more tutorials like this.
Queen Elizabeth II
celebrating her Platinum Jubilee this month,
70 years of service to the people as a Monarch
here in the UK.
I'm very proud to be British.
And I'm very, very excited to grab a speech
of Princess Elizabeth on her 21st birthday back in 1947.
It was broadcast on a radio station in Cape Town
in South Africa.
- [Princess Elizabeth] 21st (static crackling)
birthday, I welcome (static crackling)
the opportunity. (static crackling)
- So we've got all kinds of issues going on there.
We got crackle, we got hiss, we got degradation,
we've got old recording equipment.
Let's see what we can do with it.
And the first tool I'm gonna show you here is a tool that
will clean up all those little crackles
that are going on in the background.
The first thing I like to do
when I'm working in Adobe Audition,
as I am right now to clean up this speech,
is to switch on the spectral frequency display.
Shift + D or that key up there, that little shortcut icon.
And that'll give you a lot of problematic stuff.
If this were normal speech,
we would simply have waveforms where we could see the audio
and black everywhere else.
It's not kind of looking like that now.
Let's zoom in and really get a look at the crackle.
So you see these yellow little lines here,
these are all the crackles on Queen Elizabeth
or Princess Elizabeth's speech as she was then.
Let's listen. (static crackling)
There's a very prominent crackle right there.
And you can see that the crackles
are generally appearing here.
So anywhere upto 4 to 4.5K.
(static crackling)
So we can really zero in on those crackles.
And I'll just show you how this tool would work
on a little example.
If I go ahead now and go to the window
and look for diagnostics right here,
I can go into DeClicker.
And depending on what I'm working with,
in this case I'll go for heavy reduction,
I can now scan just this small sample and frequency range,
like so, and it'll find me 44 individual clicks going on
just there, repair them all, and watch how they disappear.
Most of them disappear.
Gonna undo that.
See they all come back here.
And then repair all.
Boom!
It's getting rid of most of them.
This one it didn't quite.
(static crackling)
So most of the clicks you can hear have now gone.
(static crackling)
But some of the bigger ones remain.
No worries.
I've got another tool for this one right here.
I can actually turn on the Spot Healing Brush Tool up here,
and grab that, and then make it bigger or smaller
using the curly brackets, just big enough to get that click.
And then what I can do is I can go from top to bottom,
holding Shift and paint over the click.
And look, it's disappeared.
That's amazing.
Now that big click
(static crackling)
has completely gone.
Of course, if I want to run it on the whole sample,
all I need to do is zoom right out.
And again, I'm going to marquee select
using this Marquee Selection Tool,
just the lower end frequencies
because there are no clicks up in the high end.
So there's no point in running this tool over audio
that doesn't need to be repaired.
Scan everything and repair all.
And there did you see the clicks disappeared?
Watch, undo.
There are the clicks in the bottom and then repair all.
Again, boom! Gone.
Okay. And again, as I say,
catching any of those really big clicks
with the Spot Healing Brush Tool
Shift and paint down and it's gone.
And of course sometimes we get some in the lower end there
we can just paint over multiple times,
(static crackling)
and that click has completely gone.
The next step once clearing up clicks
in very old recordings using the DeClicker
inside the diagnostics window,
we can go ahead and do some kind of noise reduction.
You may have seen it before on my channel,
but I go into favorites or sorry, effects, noise reduction.
I'd capture a noise print
and use the noise reduction process.
Today I'm gonna try DeNoise.
And I'm gonna show you the impact it has
by switching on the preview editor here.
So you'll see before up the top and after down the bottom.
Effects, noise reduction restoration, DeNoise.
And look at that, up at 84% we are seeing much more
what we should be seeing in spectral,
which is just audio or highlights where the speech is
and no background noise as we could see before.
So let's dial this in a little bit
until we get the sound that we like.
And as we dial it up more,
we see it's reducing more of that background noise.
Let's play back a bit now.
- [Princess Elizabeth] But then are multitudes of friends
all around the world who are thinking of me
and who wish me well.
- And then switch it off.
- [Princess Elizabeth] But (static crackling)
there are multitudes (static crackling)
of friends. (static crackling)
- And then on.
- [Princess Elizabeth] But there are multitudes of friends.
- So as you can hear so far,
what it has done over there is
it has cleaned up all the background noise.
We've got rid of the clicks, we've denoised it,
but we haven't improved the quality.
How do we do that?
Using AI of course.
So I'm gonna show you a few tools right now.
And the first one of which
I'm going to drag onto my screen now.
I've already preloaded Queen Elizabeth II,
or Princess Elizabeth as she was right then, into Descript.
Descript has a brilliant AI effect called Studio Sound.
Here it is, Studio Sound.
So if I play back a bit of the speech here,
- [Princess Elizabeth] 21st (static crackling)
birthday, I welcome (static crackling)
the opportunity. (static crackling)
- That is the original file with all the crackle and hiss.
Switch on Studio Sound.
It does its thing.
I processed this earlier,
so we didn't have to wait for it to happen.
- [Princess Elizabeth] 21st birthday,
I welcome the opportunity to speak to all the people
of the British Commonwealth Empire.
- Now you can hear that sounding better,
but it's not quite great.
And that's because I left all the hiss
and all the clicking in.
So it's like blipping in and out with the clicks.
So what I did is I ran that enhancement
and I saved the file as Princess Elizabeth (better).
So now we can check this out
and we've got a cleaned up version.
- [Princess Elizabeth] 21st birthday,
I welcome the opportunity.
- Much less clicking going on there,
much less trouble.
Switch on Studio Sound.
- [Princess Elizabeth] I welcome the opportunity
to speak to all the people
of the British Commonwealth Empire.
- So it's great.
And we can also dial up and down the intensity if we like.
So we can make it 43%.
- [Princess Elizabeth] I welcome the opportunity
to speak to all the people
of the British Commonwealth Empire.
- And we can dial the intensity to such a level where
it's just about sounding a bit better
without making it sound too robotic,
because the AI has gone completely crazy with all the tools
and just enhanced stuff to the extent where
it doesn't sound normal to the human ear.
There's also another project
that I wanna give a big shout out to
and it's from Adobe.
It's currently in alpha only
so you have to apply to get access at this present time,
but it's called Project Shasta.
And I actually ran the cleaned up version
of Princess Elizabeth's speech into this.
And then I ran a filter,
which is similar to Descript, it's called Enhance Speech.
And again, I think it's done a tremendous job.
Let's have a listen.
- [Princess Elizabeth] 21st birthday,
I welcome the opportunity to speak to all the people
of the British Commonwealth Empire,
wherever they live, whatever race they come from,
and whatever language they speak.
- So out of all those AI tools,
we had Descript, we had Adobe's Project Shasta,
and we had Mike Russell working the decks
of the noise reduction tools in Adobe Audition.
Let me know in the comments down below,
which did the best job.
And maybe I get to keep my day job for now.
Let me know.
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