Metronome headphone bleed

[Stephen Simmons]

Yeah I know I'm probably SOL.

Just recorded four acoustic guitar parts every one of them has audible metronome bleed through the cans. Probably nothing I can do right? No magic EQ isolation on whatever that frequency is? 

😫

 

WSS

[Lynn Wilson]

You can use a noise gate to silence the clicks in the silent parts, but it may be time to look for closed ear headphones.  Perhaps make it part of your drum or percussion track?

[Stephen Simmons]

1 hour ago, Lynn said:

You can use a noise gate to silence the clicks in the silent parts, but it may be time to look for closed ear headphones.  Perhaps make it part of your drum or percussion track?

nah 

fingerpicking guitar.

Oh well I guess the extra rehearsal isn't going to kill me.

thanks

WSS

[Lord Tim]

You might be able to rescue it by doing a bit of spectral editing using something like Adobe Audition or Audacity (free). Have a look here at the manual: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/spectral_selection.html

Sometimes you can get some pretty decent results if you can home in on the noise you don't want, other times it destroys too much of the original sound you want to keep, but it's certainly worth a look considering it's a free tool.

[Bill Phillips]

iZotope's RX7 Music Rebalance does a good job of removing acoustic guitar from a vocal track. Not sure how well it would do with a click in an acoustic guitar track. RX 7 is expensive but very handy. I have it as part of the Music Production Suite and got it through multiple upgrades over a couple of years which made it seem a lot less expensive. RX7 also has a de-bleed tool, but I've had less luck with that.

[mark skinner]

"ReaFir"  included in a free Reaper plugin bundle from Reaper.fm   Plenty of videos for how to us it in "subtract" mode for noise removal.  Works well ..    mark

[RobertWS]

On 1/27/2020 at 6:15 PM, Stephen Simmons said:

Yeah I know I'm probably SOL.

Just recorded four acoustic guitar parts every one of them has audible metronome bleed through the cans. Probably nothing I can do right? No magic EQ isolation on whatever that frequency is? 

😫

 

WSS

A crazy idea....

On one verse record a tambourine over the clicks.

On the next verse, record a high-hat over the clicks.

etc.

It might add some musical texture to the piece.

[chuckebaby]

You typically set up a second microphone "out of phase" while recording live to remove bleed. Its almost impossible to do after the fact because the track needs to be in synch with the original. With a metronome though, it may be possible. Because clicks are in exact same places.

[lmu2002]

I use a dull sounding click (a soft kick drum or similar) to avoid such bleed when recording quieter sources without backing tracks.

[Stephen Simmons]

9 hours ago, RobertWS said:

A crazy idea....

On one verse record a tambourine over the clicks.

On the next verse, record a high-hat over the clicks.

etc.

It might add some musical texture to the piece.

I guess it could. There's actually no percussion in this song so... I just bit the bullet used my earbuds from my Audio Technica Wireless monitors and played the guitar parts a few more times. Actually the whistle didn't do me any harm.

WSS

[Starship Krupa]

On 1/27/2020 at 4:48 PM, Lynn said:

it may be time to look for closed ear headphones

No, it is past time to look for closed ear headphones. 😄

In the spirit of good humor, it does puzzle me when people say on forums that they are trying to salvage already-recorded tracks and then get suggestions that they use a different mic, or put a mic on the kick drum, or have the vocalist use a stand instead of hand-holding the mic....and this is when the OP has not self-identified as Time Lord nor are they in possession of any time travel device or method.

I see that it's also past the time when processing suggestions would be useful for the OP, but I love the challenge of salvaging tracks. Maybe some future reader (see what I did there) can benefit.

I might throw a dynamic EQ or gate at this one.

First take a parametric like the Quadcurve or my favorite, MEqualizer. Dial in one of the bands to boost about 10dB. Then sweep the frequency across until the sound of the metronome click is at its most obnoxious and you've found the frequency you need to cut. You can start with trying to just cut it with the para and see if it sounds too intrusive. To get fancier, set up a dynamic eq to slap the frequency down a bit when it comes up.

Another cool trick is to use something like Boz' Gatey-Watey to gate out only the frequencies you want to gate out. What, buy a $20 plug just for this? Nope, turns out that the Sonitus fx gate has this feature built right in, once you figure out what freq you want to nuke, just move the sliders, tell it how much, and set the detector.

The thing is, usually while I'm playing, my guitar sound is covering up the click anyway (or it should be, ha).