Dranorter
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Hello! This is my first post so apologies if it's in the wrong place.

I'm trying to make a good recording of my only really complete song (been messing around for 6 months, but I do microtonal stuff so it's pretty experimental / hit and miss), so naturally I fire up Audacity and try to do some basic noise removal to remove a bit of the unnecessary whine of the gameboy. Maybe I should simply be less aggressive with the noise removal, but at any rate right now my results aren't sounding too great and I'm curious what other people do to get the best quality end product they can.

SuperBustySamuraiMonkey
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Madriz, Supain

Dont remove noise. Its like baking saltless bread

ForaBrokenEarth
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Nottingham, UK

Noise removal adds weird artefacts that are generally worse than the noise.

Victory Road
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Gosford, Australia

nah i like removing noise. for me it's more like trimming the fat off of a chicken, to extend the cooking analogy.

how basic is your noise removal process, exactly? a gate is a gate is a gate, but you can also do wacky stuff like sidechained phase cancellation, or even wackier stuff like this process that evilwezil devised.

first thing i would check is that whatever you're recording with isn't adding extra noise (all hardware will to some extent but it should be negligible).
the high pitched gameboy whine is around 9.25KHz, so run a parametric EQ/notch filter over that frequency with a high Q and it should go away without affecting the rest of your sound too drastically.

edit: oh, but if you're using one of those specific "noise removal" effects then yeah maybe don't do that and instead just use a gate and EQ

Last edited by Victory Road (Mar 14, 2014 11:54 am)

freezedream
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Adelaide, Australia

Hmm... Is there really much of a whine sound from a pro-sound DMG? I don't remember it being a big problem and usually when your track is playing it can't be heard at all. A Gameboy Color on the other hand... :S I also agree with Victory Road, noise removal tools can remove bits of the actual waveform that give your music it's specific sound, so I'd avoid those.

Victory Road
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Gosford, Australia

yeah it seems to me that pro-sound doesn't get rid of the whine. even though it's quieter on it's own, you'd still really notice it if you're using a lot of compression, stacking channels or linking.

Fudgers
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Indiana
Victory Road wrote:

a gate is a gate is a gate

Use decent preamps or get an interface with decent preamps, prosound the gameboy, use short cabling, turn off fluorescent lights and appliances, move audio line away from power cables and transformers, and you are left with a high frequency whine that is pretty well masked by square wave harmonics.

throw a gentle gate on the track and put a high pass filter in the sidechain, and your noise will be gone. if you're worried about your note tails you could always manually cut out your silent bits as well.

Last edited by Fudgers (Mar 14, 2014 8:02 pm)

SketchMan3
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NC in the US of America
ForaBrokenEarth wrote:

Noise removal adds weird artefacts that are generally worse than the noise.

There is a method for noise removal with audacity that I have found yields good results.

Don't adjust the default settings. Leave them as they are. Don't increase the noise removal level at the very least. The default setting doesn't seem to add a bunch of bad artifacts for me.

Step 1). Record noise profile track (hit record and just let it run for 3 or so seconds)
Step 2). Select the noise track as your noise profile. Hit that "Select Noise Profile" button.
Step 3). Select EVERYTHING including the noise profile track
Step 4). Effects>Remove Noise
If there is still noise:
Step 5). Select the affected noise track (which should have shrunk quite a bit) again as your noise profile
Step 6). Repeat steps 4-6 until the noise track has fallen to the desired level.

It's a very non-aggressive way of getting it down in multiple steps and cuts down on artifacts that come from more aggressive one-shot noise removal.

Edit: This is the method that I use when recording my guitar and stuff with my horrible microphone and on-board audio chip on my computer.

Last edited by SketchMan3 (Mar 14, 2014 8:08 pm)

nitro2k01
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Sweeeeeeden

The first thing to check is which type of GB you're using and whether you've prosounded it. Those are the two main things influencing the noise floor.

http://www.herbertweixelbaum.com/comparison.htm

And of course, a crappy audio interface might add noise as well. Try recording silence from the audio interface with nothing plugged in and see how it sounds. Maybe you actually ought to get a new interface. (Especially relevant for built-in interfaces in laptops.) Yet another thing you may want to try is draw a spectrogram of the audio and look for the frequency of the whine, then use a very narrow eq to take that particular frequency out. This also assumes that the whine is at a fairly constant frequency. Not sure what capabilities Audacity would have doing something like that. I could upload pictures and an audio example of how to do this in Adobe Audition.

sleepytimejesse
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Youngstown, OH

Don't do sound subtraction. What it does is it tries to do too much and ends up becoming an at least as annoying problem. Go through your recordings with a parametric EQ (if you've got a visual EQ that can be helpful too, I actually just use the one that FL comes with) and narrow the bandwidth on a band, sweep through the spectrum to find frequencies that jump out and/or "hurt" your ears, and try dipping those down a bit. That usually makes the background noise at least not offensive, even if still present.

Last edited by sleepytimejesse (Mar 15, 2014 7:09 am)

Dranorter
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Great advice. I have an unaltered gameboy (dmg) for recording with since my other one has a backlight and I've heard they add noise (tho my backlight doesn't seem to). Pro sound would probably eliminate my problem since it's really just a matter of volume; if I understand correctly the mod makes the music louder but not the circuit whine.

As is its not bad really, for example my midi piano whines worse, but anyway the EQ/highpass solution sounds good. I've been using the default settings in Audacity and it's too much.

There are also clicks I might want to remove, but everyone has those.

sleepytimejesse
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Youngstown, OH

Yeah trust me, I've only just recently learned about this whole scooping down select frequencies thing and man, it makes things so much easier to work with. And on the other hand, this is chip music. If it's still got some roughness to it, call it character. haha

SketchMan3
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NC in the US of America

I guess the noise removal stuff works differently with Gameboys than with ukuleles and guitars and junk. Also I guess it depends on what kind of noise you are trying to get rid of and what is causing the sound. Cheers.

BeatScribe
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Chicago, IL

If you can afford it, fab-filter EQ really helps you single in on the exact frequency that is causing some whine and just trim out that little sliver. It won't effect your overall sound much at all.

Dranorter
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SketchMan3 wrote:

I guess the noise removal stuff works differently with Gameboys than with ukuleles and guitars and junk. Also I guess it depends on what kind of noise you are trying to get rid of and what is causing the sound. Cheers.

Oh, I'm totally trying your way too, I'll just be turning the noise removal way down. Removing a specific frequency is the smart thing to do but at the same time that background whine is sort of buzzy and clicky so I can tell it won't work completely. I think using both methods with a very light touch should do best.

Fudgers
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Indiana
Dranorter wrote:

Removing a specific frequency is the smart thing to do but at the same time that background whine is sort of buzzy and clicky so I can tell it won't work completely. I think using both methods with a very light touch should do best.

if you have broadband noise like buzzes I would strongly recommend just eliminating the source of that if possible! Any noise removal/parametric EQ you apply to get rid of a buzz is going to cause much greater impact than the needle EQ we were talking about for removing the whine.

barring that, try just a touch of the noise removal until the sound is better gateable