Getting around a faint hiss problem

T

Thomas Lew

Well-known member
So I was recording my brother playing piano, using the Audio Technica 803b shotgun microphone. In post, it seems that when I turn my speakers all the way up, I hear a faint hiss in the background. But, if I leave my seakers at half volume the hiss entirely goes away and all you can hear is the music.

Is there any way I can get rid of that hiss so people won't hear it when they turn their volume up? Re-shooting is definitely an option.
 
Thomas Lew said:
Um.. just the shotgun going directly into my hm150
Click to expand...

Say again what mic and camera you're using ... The A/T 803b is not a shotgun - I see an omni lavalier mic listed for the AT803b. And what's an HM150? Googling "HM150" turns up all kinds of stuff, none of which are cameras (most hits are for some plushy toy turtle).
 
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My apologies Steve House. I'm making typos all over the place it seems!

I'm using an Audio Tehnica AT8035 with a panasonic hmc150
 
Are you sure the hiss is in the recording and not in the playback speakers? Assuming it's in the recording it might be that you had the levels set too low when you made the original recording. What were the meters hitting during the shoot? Were you monitoring with headphones as you recorded so that you could be sure the levels were adequate? How far away from the piano was the microphone positioned and why did you use a shotgun in the first place? I'd be less concerned with why there's a small amount of hiss audible when the playback level is turned all the way up than I'd be about why the recording level is so low that the speakers have to be turned up all the way to get adequate sound levels for listening.
 
Well there are a number of things, first in many/ all cases if you crank your amp full you will hear hiss out of the speakers. It's the inherent noise in the system. That said if you can crank your amp to full and not blow out your ears with the piano you probably are recording too low OR you have some gain issue with the set up OR you have little tiny speakers.

Also are you trying to find out how to make it better in the future or are you trying to fix the recording you have?

And, there is always going to be room noise to some extent.

And I didn't see it in the specs but a lot of HD camcorders encode the audio in an MP3 like compressed format. That could also add some hiss.

And shotguns, except the most expensive, tend to have less than fantastic self noise, so that could contribute.

As a side note using a shotgun to record piano (I assume indoors) sounds like a bad formula. So you might want to rethink that.


Your first task is to find out if it's something you could have done differently or if it's part of the environment/ system and you just have to deal in post.

In post the answer is Noise Reduction. There are a lot of options out there depending on your system. Tread light, a couple of light passes are better than one big one. And to a certain extent you get what you pay for. Sound Soap is OK for "light" hiss but you have to do very light passes or you get artifacting. A Cedar box will do a fantastic job but the entry level one is I think $5,000. WAVES has some that I have heard are OK but that's around $1,500. Sonic NONOISE is also good but $$$. If your on ProTools BNR is pretty affordable (on ebay) and does better than SoundSoap. My favorite at the moment is RX by iZotope. I think it's running around $350. You can do some mighty heavy cleaning with RX and not have artifacting.

If it's not something you are going to use a lot consider shopping it out. Any good sound guy in your area with the tools would do a few cleanup passes for less that you would pay for RX. I should qualify that, I'm assuming this is a short enough piece that one could do the cleanup in a four or so hours. If this is a two hour long epic the price is going to be higher to shop it out.
 
And further to what Noiz said, a few light passes of NR in Soundtrack Pro (if your on FCS) does wonders, but not at the same level you can achieve easily with RX.
 
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