Experiencing Static when recording voice over

[dtlee412]

Hi all,

  I record vocals for company instructional videos. For the vocals, I use Audition with an AT2020 USB microphone. During COVID I took my equipment home and had no issues. Now that I am back in the office I am finding that my background noise is virtually nonexistent, but as soon as I start talking I get static. I am just using quick basic edits in the waveform, I start with a single band compressor, then normalize, then I do a light noise reduction process. In multi-track, I apply the podcast sound essential.  Anyone have any suggestions? Aside from going XLR which would be my preference 😉

[emmrecs]

"In multi-track, I apply the podcast sound essential"

If you mean the Podcast Sesson Template, then get rid of it as soon as possible!  It may well not be the source of your problem, but it cetainly won't help!

[SteveG_AudioMasters_ · Accepted solution]

Doing NR after compression is counter-productive; it makes the Spectral Decay rate rather more obvious, because the compression has raised the effective noise floor relative to the maximum signal level. Generally the way to reduce these issues is to do as much NR as you can first, before doing anything else. And by 'as much' I mean doing more than one pass at it, using different FFT sizes, and taking off rather less at each pass. Yes you have to do a new noise print for each pass, for two reasons: firstly the remaining noise will have a different footprint, and secondly, changing the FFT size means that the existing print won't fit the processing anyway. If you do three passes, taking no more than 6dB off at a time, you'll end up with a significantly better result than you'll get from using a single pass. And do any other processing after doing this - that will almost certainly improve the results.

Oh yes, and don't use the podcast session template for anything - not even holding the door open!

[dtlee412]

You know, I went through a lot of youtube and other various tutorial type things and that was the workflow order a lot of them recommended. The youtube has failed me. Simply changing the order of operation has improved my sound quality a thousandfold thank you so much!

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

I have to say that when it comes to YouTube videos about Audition (or often audio in general), it's generally safer to ask about them rather than to blindly trust what they say. Unfortunately there's nothing to stop anybody posting videos on there, however strange and 'incorrect' they are, sometimes...

The other thing about Audition specifically is that most of us here have been doing it since before Adobe started on it (think CEP) and we have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn't, one way or another. After a long period of time now, even the rest of the industry has come to realise that multipass NR is invariably better; it's something we've been recommending for decades, and probably came from here first... 😉