How to reduce unwanted How to reduce unwanted electrical and acoustical noise electrical and acoustical noise

when recordingwhen recording

by Marcin Badura

Hello everybody!

• My name is Marcin, I’m 24 years old and I’m from Poland

• As you might know english is not my first language so go easy on me if I make some mistakes

• In this assignment I’ll try my best to teach you how to ow to reduce unwanted electrical reduce unwanted electrical and acoustical noise when and acoustical noise when recording so without further recording so without further ado let’s begin!ado let’s begin!

Acoustic noise

• Acoustic noise refers to noise of the space. In this case we talk about unintended type of sound which can be caused by a fantoms in a room or by outdoor environment such as motor vehicles, aircraft, trains and industrial sources.

Reducing acoustic noise

1. Listen carefully to the „silence” or „room tone” to indentify noise.

2. Move away from noisy sources such as windows or fans.

3. Create an isolated space for recording

4. Turn off noisy sourced like A/C, fans, heating, TV, and appliances

Electrical noise

• Every piece of gear does make some kind of electrical noise and in recording you want to avoid this as much as possible

• Every piece of gear has something called „self-noise” which you can find in product’s manual

Reducing electrical noise

1. Use as few gear piece as possible (the fewer number of things the signal is going through the noise floor is reduced)

2. Use short cables (longer cable means more noise picked up)

3. Use balanced cables (XLR or TRS cables to prevent noise from being picked up)

4. Turn off appliances and light dimmers (hum from them can get to our recordings)

5. Use high quality products

Avoid unnecessary gain

1. Boost level electrically as little as possible

2. Move microphone closer to the source of the sound instead of increasing gain (it will help pick up more sound of the source instead of sound of the room)

3. Choose directional microphone to isolate the source from the noisy environment

My reflection on the subject

• This assignment helped me to review the most important things on how to reduce both acoustic and electrical noise. I would definitely take that into consider when building my own home studio and recording vocals

• I hope that this assignment was pretty useful to you and my language mistakes didn’t bother you much

• I wait for your feedback!