Dry mouth rasp, can anything be done?

David G. Smith

David G. Smith

Steak Knife Member
You know, that sound the person you are recording makes because they are nervous and their spit drys up. Any post fixes?
 
Good question. I only know how to fix it in pre-production, by planning to always have bottled water for my interviewees. But some still slips thru. I hope someone answers your question. :)
 
Its a pain in the neck. Here is what I do. Keep in mind I am a sound guy learning to be a shooter, so my editing rig is geared towards audio. I do everything in Pro Tools.

Make sure you have room tone, if you did not specifically record any, try and find a decent length of silence between spots of dialog. Find your offending audio and zoom in quite abit. Most of the noise that the mouth is making is going to be in between words. You know how most people move there lips in a sort of pre-sound movement just before any air is used? You can most likely replace those sounds with bits of room tone. It takes some finesse and make sure you know how to cross fade files or it will sound funny. Its really tedious work, but it should make the dialog much more enjoy able.

Also I have had moderate success with using Waves X-crackle to remove some exsessive mouth noise. Some of the sounds are much similiar to crackle so the plug-in works pretty well.

You may try EQing the best you can too. Notch filters in the higher registry, 3K up to 8K I imagine.

Good luck.
 
I do the same -- edit out the bad-sounding bits. I usually put a track of room-tone in the background on a separate track, then gate, compress, and eq the dialogue (in that order.) If there's excessive sibilance I'll put a de-esser in the chain.

Every speaker requires tweaking -- there's no magic setting. Some people need a lot of compression, some barely any. For a project I try to get everyone to sound the same.

Compressing a voice makes it sound a lot warmer and less brittle. You need to watch that the gate doesn't chop-off the beginning and endings of words. EQ to take away resonances that interfere with intelligibility. You should be able to stand across the room and here exactly what they're saying with the monitors at a low volume.

With the right tweaking, even the raspy thin weak voices can sound like professional radio announcers. Well, not quite, but they'll good.

I use Vegas, so do all of this while editing. Waves plugins are great, though the standard Vegas plugins are useable.
 
pmark23 said:
I do the same -- edit out the bad-sounding bits. I usually put a track of room-tone in the background on a separate track, then gate, compress, and eq the dialogue (in that order.) If there's excessive sibilance I'll put a de-esser in the chain.

Every speaker requires tweaking -- there's no magic setting. Some people need a lot of compression, some barely any. For a project I try to get everyone to sound the same.

Compressing a voice makes it sound a lot warmer and less brittle. You need to watch that the gate doesn't chop-off the beginning and endings of words. EQ to take away resonances that interfere with intelligibility. You should be able to stand across the room and here exactly what they're saying with the monitors at a low volume.

With the right tweaking, even the raspy thin weak voices can sound like professional radio announcers. Well, not quite, but they'll good.

I use Vegas, so do all of this while editing. Waves plugins are great, though the standard Vegas plugins are useable.
Click to expand...

Do you put a compressor on the noise track and then run the dialog through the side chain? A lot of extra noise if you don't, right?
 
Droog said:
Its a pain in the neck. Here is what I do. Keep in mind I am a sound guy learning to be a shooter, so my editing rig is geared towards audio. I do everything in Pro Tools.

Make sure you have room tone, if you did not specifically record any, try and find a decent length of silence between spots of dialog. Find your offending audio and zoom in quite abit. Most of the noise that the mouth is making is going to be in between words. You know how most people move there lips in a sort of pre-sound movement just before any air is used? You can most likely replace those sounds with bits of room tone. It takes some finesse and make sure you know how to cross fade files or it will sound funny. Its really tedious work, but it should make the dialog much more enjoy able.

Also I have had moderate success with using Waves X-crackle to remove some exsessive mouth noise. Some of the sounds are much similiar to crackle so the plug-in works pretty well.

You may try EQing the best you can too. Notch filters in the higher registry, 3K up to 8K I imagine.

Good luck.
Click to expand...

That sounds good, I knew it would be a pain in the ass.... I am going to go through all the persons takes and see I've I can save my self some work, but there are whole sections that I am gonna have to use that need the work...

Thanks.

Definitely put bottled water on the "must have list".
 
My daughter does voice over work for Disney and she and a lot of other VO actors swear that eating a few green apple slices are the best thing you can use to get your voice in top shape just prior to working. Won't help at all in this situation, but might be something to file away for future projects.
 
Droog said:
Do you put a compressor on the noise track and then run the dialog through the side chain? A lot of extra noise if you don't, right?
Click to expand...

The dialogue I deal with is usually recorded well, we just need to make everyone sound as good as they can, and everything in general is even.

The noise track in the background is barely noticeable, and no processing is done to it except for maybe a little EQ. We could use a side-chain to shut it off when the person is speaking, but it's almost impossible to hear unless you crank the volume. Plus there's a soundtrack on top of this, which further masks the noise.

I can see the use for a side-chain in a high-noise environment (like an interview in a factory), but I use FFT noise-removal for that.

We used to use side-chains a lot when I was engineering in a studio, but that was when digital equipment was expensive.
 
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