Creating a noise gate in Ableton

Hi All,

Hope all is well.

With my increasing tendency to take samples from vinyl, I wanted to see how I can use the Ableton Gate effect to clean up the recorded WAV files.

I realise you have to set the boundaries so the gate removes unwanted sound like vinyl crackle (which is actually nice in some cases), but I'm unsure how to do this exactly. Anyone done this before?

I realise Audacity does this and analyses the audio info to create parameters to suit the gate but I don't see how exactly this works in Ableton.

I'm beginning to think I may as well have a template set up with an eq8, compressor and gate on each channel.

How do you guys do this?

Peace

I can't speak to sampling vinyl in particular, but I do know that generally you want to get the best recording possible from the get-go. Since you're ripping your own samples, this might be worth focusing on more so than trying to fix the samples after the fact...

With that said, cleaning up samples isn't something I've ever truly nailed down; I think it has to do with the uniqueness of each sample, so that one 'technique' may not apply at all to the next sample. Ultimately, what I try and key in on is EQ boosting and subtracting. Load a Spectrum in to the track channel and watch/listen, see what frequencies are occupied by the sounds you want from the sample, and where the discrepancies are, and try your best to remove those problematic areas. Running a low/high pass filter (or honing in with a notch filter) over the sample while listening/watching can help isolate the trouble areas.

Often with vinyl noise, there's a low/mid rumble and then higher frequency crackling. Boosting the low/mid area with a saturator, EQ, amp, or something can sometimes drown out the low vinyl rumble by enhancing the focused noises (bass drum, bass, toms, etc.). A high pass filter can often lessen the crackles of vinyl. But in both cases, sometimes this can destroy the target sounds (e.g., a high pass filter to take out crackles could wipe away the character from a bell or crash).

I'm sure there's some better methods or perhaps some VST tools available, but that's my contribution to the cause.

What a fantastic response. Thank you!

When it comes to gating - hold and release are key for me. I tend to set a threshold quite high towards of the sample level peak, so it sounds very short. Then I use the hold and release to control the sound and bring some 'realism' back to it so the tails are a bit more natural. If you find that it's still cutting in and out (probably likely when you set a high threshold), you can either lower the threshold, or as I tend to do, set the hysteresis to around -6dB or so. I actually think in Ableton it's called 'Return'. It's the level that the signal must fall below before it can retrigger the gate. It's a very helpful to avoid gate chatter.

To be honest though, I tend to use RX2 when it comes to removing noise from audio samples, but it takes a little while to master. But it really is the cleanest way to remove noise from a signal. Which reminds me, I must upgrade to RX4 sometime soon.

Is RX2/4 a free VST? Sounds good if you can talk me through it's application?

I will refer back to these posts when I process my vinyl records. Planning to sample from this *which is probably illegal unless I get clearance from Max :P

Probably the beginning section with the tribal chanting: I picked it up on vinyl yesterday and it's in very good condition.

Conveniently, this has happened to me before, I've got this on CD too so I'll rip from that too.

Still though, it's clearly a skill I need to develop.

Happy Bank Holiday UK peeps.

  On 4/6/2015 at 10:54 AM, Polytrix said:

Is RX2/4 a free VST? Sounds good if you can talk me through it's application?

It's paid only I'm afraid. There is a free demo but I'm unsure of its limitations. For noise removal I use the spectral repair function which is the fucking tits.

How much be this fine thing?

Also, what do you use for ripping from CD to WAV 44.4/24bit? Winamp only does 44.4/16 which is fine I suppose but the rest of my samples are at 24.

Toodles.

Sorry 44.1...

About £170, so quite a bit. I got it because I use it a lot for work so I found it very helpful.

https://www.izotope.com/en/products/audio-repair/rx

To rip from CD I use dBPoweramp CD Ripper. The free version is enough to rip to wav or FLAC.

  On 4/6/2015 at 3:38 PM, Polytrix said:

Also, what do you use for ripping from CD to WAV 44.4/24bit? Winamp only does 44.4/16 which is fine I suppose but the rest of my samples are at 24.

Haha! Yeah, sorry. Typo I believe!