Noises on Recordings

Noises on a recording can be very annoying and are easily overheard on a session (as you focus more on the music obviously). Usually the sound engineer is supposed to spot noises but they can slip by quite easily and what you could barely hear on the monitor mix in the booth suddenly will jump right in your face at the mix. You have a few options dealing with them. There are some spectral clearing tools which allow to “cut out” noises from the frequency spectrum and as long as they aren’t masked by an instrument this method works very well. However, if you can’t solve the problem with that, you might want to find the spot mic that is closest to the noise (and it hopefully isn’t a noise so loud that it spilled on every microphone). When you have isolated that mic, you might want to try muting it for a moment there. However take care that it doesn’t feel like you’re punching a “hole” into the music. Interestingly this works also to a certain extent at short wrong notes. A horn section split might be very obvious on the spot mics but hardly noticeable on the tree mics so helping such moments with a little “cutting” might be very benefitial.