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Hissing, noices and clipping...


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So, I had this huuuge project for graduating from my high school which I had been working on for the past few months. After a lot of arranging I recorded some live flute in my room. Good recording devices, good program, good headphones and a very crappy laptop. But I managed and everything sounded really good on my laptop. Today I finally finished all of the editing and stuff, which was good because today was the deadline, and this project is like 50% of my music grade for graduating school. But when I transferred the recording from my laptop to my computer, and took one final listen, there were some huge audioproblems. Noices, hissing, clipping; all of the very hated recording problems that I had carefully edited away were suddenly present again. Now I had to send some amateurish audio file to my teacher, besides having worked on it for several monthes.

There's a link here: https://soundcloud.com/jorik-bergman/danse-macabre-pwsmp3

Does anyone know how this could have happened, how it could have been prevented, how it could be solved or anything else that might be helpfull. Because I'm pretty stressed...

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hey there,

This is due to clipping the signal while recording. When you were recording, where was your microphone placement? Natural instruments like the flute depend heavily on microphone placement. It sounds awesome during the low dynamic parts, but as soon as you go into higher dynamics with layered flutes, the signal starts to crumble.

The best way to deal with clipping is to make sure you have got headroom when you're recording. (Like -6dB for example.) That way you have 6dB of volume headspace to work with when you're recording. Also, since this is a natural classical instrument, there won't be much you'll want to do with in the way of EQ or compression, so it'll be mostly volume fader mixing. You can do a master to bump up volume in the end.

Main thing: make sure your signal isn't clipping when you record originally.

Second thing: when mixing, make sure the sum of all the parts does not clip the Master fader. Aim for -6dB while mixing. Worry about volume after you have a good mix.

I hope this helps!

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