hey what's going on out there i'm Sean Divine hope you all are doing well i did a video a
few years ago called kill the mic noise and i identified some different things that were causing
issues in terms of the noise floor and noise that was being introduced into my vocal mic recordings
by different equipment or my room or the preamp and a lot of the problem is you don't know how to
identify and then isolate the cause of it so we're going to talk about how to first measure the noise
floor in your room with your mic and your setup which is going to be very unique but we need to
know how much you're dealing with to begin with and then we're going to talk about how to isolate
that and figure out what the source is so that we can then fix it and get cleaner quiet recordings
so i've got logic set up here and we have an audio track with the input for my microphone
and then we're just monitoring that and i have the multimeter which is measuring a peak reading and
an rms rating just so we can get a relative feel for the measurement of our noise floor now i'm
going to throw on my headphones and what you're going to notice right now when i'm not speaking
is silence or nothing because i'm utilizing a noise gate on the way in
through my rme totalmix ufx here so you'll see that activated as i get quiet it suppresses any of
the signal i'm also pretty lucky today i haven't heard a plane your room may have some noise
there's a plane flying overhead right now that you can probably hear so what i'm going to do is bring
that back and effectively turn the noise gate off and now when i go back and i'm not speaking
you're going to hear a few different things one you're going to hear any self
noise from your microphone so some mics are louder than others in addition to
that we're also hearing the preamp gain so i'm using the aphex channel
and as of right now that bit of white noise is actually coming mostly from the preamp
itself there's just some natural analog noise that happens in a preamp it's perfectly normal
don't worry about that we want to hear the mic the preamp and just our audio signal chain as a whole
so to do that if you're using a condenser mic or a microphone that requires phantom power we're going
to turn that 48 volt phantom power off if you're using a dynamic mic we want to turn the gain
all the way down on that mic and then i'm also going to turn the output of my preamp down as
well just so we can hear how much of that noise is coming in fact from anything else in the chain
so if you start doing these measurements like i just did you know what's an acceptable
noise for measurement i would try to keep this below minus 60 dbfs that's going to give you
quite a clean result all right so now that we've identified a measurement in terms of what our
actual noise floor is in our recordings we need to identify where the noise is coming from outside of
the obvious after isolating my audio gear which means just you know unplugging everything one by
one leaving only one unit plugged in at a time with your preamp and your mic you can start to
you know figure out what the mic noise of each component is i was able to identify a hum that
was being produced by the power conditioner itself big surprise right none of this stuff is hooked
up to a traditional studio power conditioner like many of you might and this solved two
problems that i think a lot of you out there are dealing with putting all of your audio equipment
including your interface you know your preamp any analog gear you have your studio monitors put that
all on the same power strip right then everything else that's not related meaning things like
your laptop ac adapter you know i have an ac adapter for my camera that just recently
i had accidentally plugged that camera ac adapter into the power strip that i'm using for my audio
gear guess what i started to have this weird like whizzing whirling kind of noise in my audio signal
and as soon as i unplugged that camera ac adapter and plugged it into you know the other adapter
that i use for everything else it went away so i have two of these identical furman ss6b i'll put a
link in the description if you want to check them out they're nothing special but they're quiet they
don't produce any hum whatsoever which is much more important to me than having the convenience
of turning everything on and off with you know just a single switch there's going to be some
equipment in your studio that just produces a hum based on the power supply or the transformer
internally again i have a keyboard that has always produced a bit of a hum and so i use what's called
a hum x i showed this in my previous video i can plug that keyboard directly into the hum x the hum
goes away immediately this does not work in every situation for instance i had a left studio monitor
that was producing a noticeable hum that would be in my signal chain just because i was recording
you know close right here at the computer and it drove me crazy so maybe some of you out there
dealing with that and hooking that into the hum x did not fix it so what i actually had to do with
that is i found a local audio repair specialist hopefully you're not going to deal with something
like this but actually had to modify the physical speaker itself to move the mid frequency driver
away from the crossover because that was producing some hum and some interference i paid you know 40
50 bucks to have that modification done and it makes a huge difference in terms of the
quiet recording that i can get right here at my computer another thing that creates
a ton of mic noise problems in your vocals that a lot of people overlook is not only the cables
that you're using so make sure to use balanced cables for sure secondly you'd be amazed at how
cable management can actually help reduce noise and give you cleaner recordings if the mic cable
is running over you know maybe another power cable that might not be shielded as well and
it's just physically touching that i can notice that that will produce some buzz some humming and
just pulling that away or having a cleaner cable management behind the desk has actually eliminated
a lot of noise issues that i had so take a look get a little bit more organized with your cabling
and you're going to notice that just again not by having a lot of those physically touching using
cable ties not only for just organization but to help with you know not having those cables
interfere with one another great way to utilize them i hope we've shed some light on some more
unconventional sources that may be causing your noise floor headaches but that you just haven't
considered i know i found myself there and you gotta stay curious and realize that noise floor
and any issues it's going to be something that's constantly evolving for you and you're going to
need to re-evaluate this you know my first video on the topic i was dealing with a lot different
issues at that point i was in a different room i had different gear had a different level of
experience so you know anytime you add a new piece of equipment you change a cable you rearrange
something in your room it can start to pile up and then it becomes very difficult to distinguish
and isolate what are actually causing your noise floor issues if you have anything to add to this a
method or approach that you think might be helpful for those trying to reduce the level of noise in
their recordings please leave that below in the comments if you learn anything in the video please
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