Anyone know which Waves "noise" plugin might clean up noisy/hissy/crackly Melotron strings?

[Christian Jones]

So I'm away for Christmas and can't demo anything now, but thought I'd maybe do a shot in the dark on this Waves BOGO offer and make one or both the Waves noise clean-up apps. In Komplete 10 Kontakt has in its factory library a really cool Melotron and I especially love the Melotron strings there.. but some of the notes in the "Melotron Strings" patch have some excessive noise, like hissy/crackly noise and I know some of that is par for the course and that's cool, but as not all of the notes have that issue I'd like to see about cleaning those particular notes that do up a bit. 

I'm looking at these below.. Anyone know which might be best for this? 

http://everyplugin.com/z-noise.html

http://everyplugin.com/x-noise.html

http://everyplugin.com/x-crackle.html

 

[Simeon Amburgey]

Z-Noise would be my pick. Here is something I found from someone at Waves which might be helpful:

Quote

As mentioned above it is a different algorithm but also ZNoise has a lot more tweak-ability over XNoise.  

Here are the main features that ZNoise has over XNoise:

- additional EQ points in allow you to sculpt a noise profile a lot more. I find this very useful bringing back some air etc post cleaning.

- Adaptive mode that will change the noise profile if the noise shifts over time.

- Extract mode will extract a noise profile from a signal if you do not have a section of pure noise to pull from. This is going to be more useful for post production work, foley, etc than music production.

 

[Matthew Sorrels]

X-crackle doesn't seem to see any crackle in the Kontakt Factory Library Melotron Violin, so I'd say it's not going to help you at all.

X-noise is also not very useful, I couldn't get a clean sample of the noise for it to be really effective.  It can't seem to tell the noise from the sample.

Z-noise can remove some of the noise on the samples, but you end up losing a lot of the sound.  It worked the best of the three for me.

Part of the problem is with samples like this you don't have a clean section to sample the noise from really.  You might be be able to get one from the wave's inside Kontakt -- maybe tweak the instrument in full Kontakt to play a small bit of the sample that's just the noise in a loop.  Then feed that into a noise reduction system like Z-Noise.

RX 7 Advanced did a bit better job, but you can't run it real time.  And cleaning up full rendered wave file may not be what you had in mind.

Another way of approaching this might be to re-sample the Kontakt instrument (there are a few VST samplers that can do this) and then feed the wave files that generates into something like RX 7 (or any noise removal system, there are lots) and then use those cleaned samples.  Not quite what you have in mind.

The latency any of the Waves plugins adds makes it pretty impossible to play though.  You hit the key and hear the sound way later.

 

[Christian Jones]

34 minutes ago, Matthew Sorrels said:

X-crackle doesn't seem to see any crackle in the Kontakt Factory Library Melotron Violin, so I'd say it's not going to help you at all.

X-noise is also not very useful, I couldn't get a clean sample of the noise for it to be really effective.  It can't seem to tell the noise from the sample.

Z-noise can remove some of the noise on the samples, but you end up losing a lot of the sound.  It worked the best of the three for me.

Part of the problem is with samples like this you don't have a clean section to sample the noise from really.  You might be be able to get one from the wave's inside Kontakt -- maybe tweak the instrument in full Kontakt to play a small bit of the sample that's just the noise in a loop.  Then feed that into a noise reduction system like Z-Noise.

RX 7 Advanced did a bit better job, but you can't run it real time.  And cleaning up full rendered wave file may not be what you had in mind.

Another way of approaching this might be to re-sample the Kontakt instrument (there are a few VST samplers that can do this) and then feed the wave files that generates into something like RX 7 (or any noise removal system, there are lots) and then use those cleaned samples.  Not quite what you have in mind.

The latency any of the Waves plugins adds makes it pretty impossible to play though.  You hit the key and hear the sound way later.

 

Dang. But thanks for trying that out for me man. Idk, I do write doom rock/metal where I incorporate beauty and grime, so maybe I'll just try to embrace the noise. It's just that some of the notes in the Kontakt "Melotron Violins" (you're right; that's what it's called) are cleaner than others, and a precious few have some serious grime and when you hit those particular notes they tend to stand out. 

I suppose a work around especially when it's time to bounce the MIDI could be to use a second instance of the Melotron Violins just for the notes that are noisy (on my particular case it's just one note) and drop the tuning however many steps so that I can use one of the not-as-noisy notes instead and just drop it's pitch a step or whatever to the pitch of the desired note. 

Edited December 23, 2019 by Christian Jones

[Matthew Sorrels]

To be fair I only spent about 5 mins doing it.  I have the Waves plugins because they came with a bundle, but I've never really used them.  It was a nice excuse to try them.  Noise reduction is always a tricky thing and my lack of skill and knowledge with the Waves noise tools may have meant I missed something.  Z-Noise does work, but I wasn't very happy with the balance between getting rid of the noise and killing the sample.  It does have a bunch of options that might have been usable to improve that.  The X plugins seemed very narrow, I was kind of surprised at how it pretty much couldn't hear the crackle I fed to it, even at the highest settings.  I think they are setup for a very specific kind of real time noise filtering, which is why there are bunch of them.  Z-noise is the more generally useful of the bunch.

I rarely use the Kontakt factory library, but I don't think it's Melotron samples are all that good.  You might have better results finding another library.  The replace a single bad note thing can work though.  Use a slightly higher/lower note then fix it in Melodyne maybe.  You might even be able to fix it in Kontakt itself, remap the key and have Kontakt repitch the note.  Looks like you can change the pitch in the mapping editor.  So pick the bad note, remap it to a sample one semitone above or below and then change the mapping zone to the correct pitch for that one key and save the new instrument.

Edited December 23, 2019 by Matthew Sorrels
Updated with details on how to re-pitch a sample in Kontakt