remove pad from sound

[Ban jhankri]

there is a sound i want to sample but behind it there is an annoying pad....later there is the pad alone without any sounds...is there a way to remove the pad? like (sound + pad) - (only pad) = sound...is it possible?

[Veracohr]

Your best bet is probably with EQ. Unfortunately, pads tend to have very wide frequency ranges, so that presents a problem. But if you want to try, you can take the part with the pad only, invert the phase, and attempt to line it up with the first part. This will only work if the pad-only part is EXACTLY the same as the pad part in the first one. In this case, it will cancel out. But it's unlikely that will work out. Good luck.

 

If it's a pad with a lot of low frequencies, you can high-pass it, as long as you don't want a full-range voice (assuming it's a voice you want from the sample). In fact, this often sounds better regardless. Especially if the sample is over music. If the sample is during a time when there's very little else going on, a wider range will sound better, but if there's at least a moderate amount of music going on, you can high pass pretty far up and still sound good, thus cleaning out a lot of unnecessary sound.

[Colin OOOD]

there is a sound i want to sample but behind it there is an annoying pad....later there is the pad alone without any sounds...is there a way to remove the pad? like (sound + pad) - (only pad) = sound...is it possible?

Yes, it's possible... you might never remove the whole thing but you can get a long long way with care.

 

To do this I would use a combination of brutal EQ and Sound Forge with the Sonic Foundry Noise Removal plugin as an offline process, although you can also use other noise-removal plugins in whatever host you like. I use Sound Forge because it makes it easy to do repeated passes, as described below.

 

Firstly EQ out the top and bottom frequency ranges of the sound. I would suggest Waves Q6 with all bands set to hi- or low-pass at exactly the same frequency. When all the bands are set the same you can just drag the control point on the frequency graph and it will move all the bands together. You can either use a spectrum analyser to identify the unneeded frequency ranges or move the EQ up (or down) until you hear it affecting the sound you want to keep, at which point you should back it off a bit.

 

Next comes the removal of the pad itself. Use the plugin to take a noiseprint of the solo pad, then apply that noiseprint to both the sound you want to clean up, and the solo pad (I'm assuming you know what I mean here; if you don't you should read the help file that comes with the plugin). Use Mode 3 and switch 'keep residual output' on to hear the noise you're removing, and juggle the 'Noise Bias' and 'Reduce Noise by' sliders to make sure you're removing as much of the pad as possible without also removing the wanted sound - make sure you switch 'keep residual output' off before you apply the plugin though! Set attack and release to their highest settings to make sure the plugin reacts quickly to the audio. Don't worry if you only seem to be removing a little of the noise - once you've done this once, keep repeating the process on the newly cleaned audio, taking a new noise-print from the solo pad (which must also be processed with the noise removal plugin, otherwise the noise-prints won't match!) each time. Keep going until you can't remove any more noise without damaging the sound more than you want to. Some damage is inevitable but it can sound really interesting

 

After you've removed as much noise as you can, you can then gate the wanted sound. Especially with vocal samples this can help clean up the gaps between words even more, and if you use Waves RVox for this you can also boost the level of the wanted sound at the same time. RVox works with all kinds of sounds, not just vocals, so experiment, but remember it's an expander not a true gate, and so works fairly gently in this regard. Its compressor is killer though. Other gates can also be used very effectively so if RVox doesn't do it for you, try another. Be careful not to remove too much of the start and end of the sound.

 

As an example of this technique, if you have heard the title track on OOOD's album 'Free Range', listen for the vocal samples after the first main section. These originally had quite loud music behind them in a totally different key to the track we were writing, and you can still hear this a little bit when the voice is speaking, where - along with the inevitable noise reduction artifacts - it adds a wierd atmosphere to the samples that we quite liked.

 

Hope this helps... good luck!