How To Clean Up Noisy Vocal Tracks

How To Clean Up Dirty Tracks

Sometimes as audio engineers we are sent tracks to mix that the artist recorded themselves at home. Unfortunately when things like vocals or guitars are recorded in a home environment there can be lots of noise in the background like refrigerators, air conditioners and noises from outside the house. One of the best tools I have found for effectively cleaning up these noises quickly is Izotope Voice De-noise. Today we are going to talk about How to clean up dirty tracks. We are going to take a vocal track with way too much noise in the background and clean it up to make it usable.

1. Add the Voice De-noise Plugin to the Track

In order to clean this up, we are going to use the Izotope Voice De-noise plugin. It’s immediately going to clean up your track.

2. Make Sure it is in Adaptive Mode

Make sure your plugin is in adaptive mode. Alternatively, you could take a little loop of that background noise and instead of adaptive mode you could click the learn button. If we go back and play that again there’s a lot less background noise, and of course if we increase that background and that reduction it’s going to take a lot of that away.

3. Dialogue Mode for Vocals

I prefer dialogue mode for any kind of vocal recording. If it is an instrument, make sure it is in music mode.

4. Adjust Threshold and Reduction

Adjust the Threshold and Reduction controls until it is effectively reducing the background noise.

Viola!  You have a much cleaner take to work with and now you’re ready to mix that vocal.

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