"Voxing Clever" article in July magazine

[Kwackman]

I've read this a couple of times, and it's very useful.
However, one thing I found odd was that the order of the processes in the chain.

In the article, the first process is using noise reduction followed by removing silences and then using high pass filters.
My logic would have been to leave the noise reduction until after these, and therefore hopefully not need it at all.
Removing silence (using the manual method described in the article) would have no detrimental effect on the "wanted" audio, and the high pass filter would be less destructive than the noise reduction software. I know noise reduction software like RX etc is amazing these days, but even if you had to use it, having "cleaner" audio for it to work on must be less "destructive"? This may be outdated opinion on my part of the modern noise reduction software.

I'm not criticising the article, I've already read it twice and I'm cutting it out for future reference! I'm just curious about the order of the chain.

[Drew Stephenson]

I guess that if you do your noise reduction first then 1) you have good gaps where it can learn what to remove, and 2) you're giving it the cleanest signal to work with. I would expect trying to apply a noise reduction tool to a heavily processed signal would make things much more challenging for the algorithm.

[CS70]

Haven’t read the article but to me noise reduction has the intent to create a track which is as good as it could have been, had it been recorded better. Hence doing it before anything else is my go-to move as it provides the basis for any further processing

[Jack Ruston]

As mentioned above, it's helpful to have sections of noise for the algorithm to 'learn'. But perhaps more importantly, if you actually have a noise problem, by which I mean noise that can be heard over the rest of the track in context, when you start removing sections of it, the contrast between the noise and the silence can be problematic - distracting, obvious. And so when you start editing it out, you tend to be forced to make decisions between wanted signal in 'breath ins' and tails and the noise. Sometimes you have to cut things which you'd rather have kept. If you can remove some noise in advance, those editing decisions may well change. You might be able to keep bits which you would otherwise have had to lose.

J

[Martin Walker]

if you actually have a noise problem, by which I mean noise that can be heard over the rest of the track in context, when you start removing sections of it, the contrast between the noise and the silence can be problematic - distracting, obvious.

Spot on Jack - and it's easy to get so locked into 'removal' mode, concentrating on how amazingly low you're managing to get the unwanted noise, that you don't notice how obvious its lack has become

Sometimes just a few dBs is sufficient for the best overall result, even if your plug-ins can drag the noise down by 20dB or more

Martin

[Kwackman]

Damn it, so basically the consensus is the author was right and I'm wrong.
And I thought of you all as my friends!! (Looking for the "betrayed" emoticon... )