Nothing ever really gets completely silent. We always descend, eventually as we get quieter and quieter, down to some type of noise. Even in completely sound isolated anechoic chamber, it gets, when you get really quiet, you start hearing your own biological noises. The sound of your nervous system and the blood flowing through your veins. So there's always some kind of noise, and as we get quieter and quieter we're getting down into it. We usually try to avoid it in a musical context as much as possible. And as we're recording, we try to eliminate two types of noise. The first one is going to be our acoustic noise, this noise of the space and everything that comes into it. And the second type is going to be electrical noise noises that get picked up, I mean in all the gear, and that the gear itself creates. And I'd like to talk about just some strategies for avoiding both of these during the production process while you're recording. Every time you set up to record, you always want to remember that you're recording the instrument in a space. And you want to get a very clean recording. The cleaner the recording, the more options you're going to have down the road. So reducing noise is really first about listening. Just get really quiet and listen to the space. As we saw earlier, you start noticing all those little things that kind of comes up. And you'll start noticing, oh, wow, my computer, the fan it it makes a lot of noise. Maybe you should move that farther away from what you're recording. You might notice that the window actually, a lot of sound is coming in through the outside. Be putting a blanket or a pillow against that, will stop the noise from coming in. You can really make high-quality recordings in, in most places if you're very careful about isolating the noise of the space. HVAC, air conditioning, and heat also can make a lot of noise. Fans and equipment makes noise. Right? It's all over the place. Televisions in other rooms. You'll find that the quieter you get, the more you notice these things. So before your recording, take a chance just to stop and listen and try to reduce all those different types of noise. The second type of noise you're going to come into is going to be electrical noise. And every piece of gear does make some kind of electrical noise. And we want to try to avoid that as much as possible. So, first, every piece of gear and every microphone has self noise. You'll even see a specification for it in the literature. If you get the manual, you'll find a self noise specification. And what you want to do to reduce that kind of noise is just use as few pieces of gear as possible. In general, if you can limit the number of things that the sound is going through, you're reducing the noise floor. You're reducing that, that, that amount of noise. So, get a clean path and really use short cables. The longer the cable, the more noise the cable will pick up. And as we saw earlier, we'd like to use balanced cables like XLR cables or TRS cables as much as possible, because that will try to reject the noise that comes into the cable along the way. Electrical noise can also come in through the power system of your studio as well. We find that dimmers, and light dimmers, they can really cause a lot of noise and if you go to all the light dimmers in your house and turn them off, often that reduces the noise force. Our power systems use alternating current. And that alternates 60 cycles or 50 cycles, which is hertz. Right? That's 50 or 60 hertz, which is actually a frequency we can hear, and that hum can get into our recordings. It's something to watch out for. you'll find certain devices will have ground lift buttons, which can help get rid of that. But really, you just want to be careful, listen, and use fewer pieces of gear. The other thing can really help is actually high quality gear. The more expensive a piece of gear is, the more they've taken care to avoid this kind of noise, and protect the device from that noise. You find that things that have a lot of metal, tend to be a bit quieter, and those plasticky devices tend to have a lot of noise. The other place that we get a lot of noise is during gain stages and we saw this a little bit earlier. But every time we go to like a mic pre and you turn that gain way up, you're really bringing up the noise. So, if you were to get the mic closer to the source, you're going to find that you don't need to turn that mic pre up as much and you're not going to have as much noise on your, on your recording. Now, we talked about reducing acoustical noise via kind of adjusting the environment. But you can also reduce the amount of noise just by that mic placement, just like we were able to reduce the noise by, by not turning the mic pre up enough. If you get the mic closer to the source you're going to get less of the room and more of the source. So the noise floor goes down a bit. Also your mic polar pattern choice can have a major impact on that. A directional microphone will focus the sound on that source and reject the, sound of the room, which is also rejecting a lot of that kind of ambient noise that you have there. So all those things have a major impact on the amount of noise, and are what you're going to want to focus on in the recording process. Now, we do have some tools that can reduce that noise in the post-production process. But don't rely on those. Don't try to fix it in the mix. Instead, correct the acoustics, correct the electrical noise in the beginning and you'll have to do much less in the end. Now we also find though, that noise can be a musically useful thing. Many contemporary electronic artists have these gigantic noise sweeps that just, that, that just signal the next section is coming. It's kind of a new kind of drum fill and it can be useful because it fills up the spectrum. It just makes everything seem loud and powerful. So don't discount the use of it, but always use it musically and when you want. Don't have it in there kind of by accident.
