Hi,

My guitarist recorded a track the other night and by his own admission played a passage badly. Whilst playing an E note throughout the passage he kept badly striking the strings causing a harmonic (similar I guess to a pinched) . 

It will be easy to get him to rerecorded but I would like to know the best way to remove, no, lessen the effect of the harmonic, if there is one. 

The easiest first thing to try is to sweep the range with a parametric EQ, find the harmonic center, and set up a deep, yet narrow cut.

Melodyne DNA might be effective.

Tools like the recently released R-Mix might be effective.

An FFT noise reduction filter might work if you can get a good enough sample of the unwanted noise.


Good luck.


best regards,
mike

Thanks Mike that's very helpful.

Also, unless my theory is off, if I look for the 1st harmonic after the fundamental (2x the fundamental) of the E that will put me in the ball park is that correct? 

It's tough to tell without hearing the actual harmonic/artifact myself, but the first thing I'd try would be to isolate the section, zoom in tight, split the clip and then run a tweaked eq right on that split clip to see if I can minimize the problem. If you can, just duplicate the method and you'll be ok.

The other thing I'd try if that fails, is iZotope Rx Advanced. It is a very powerful piece of software that would allow you to zoom in on an artifact and remove it without totally messing up the rest of your audio. We use it on a lot of the forensic audio stuff we do here along with a few Waves plugs. But a program like that would definitely help you out if the isolation method fails you. Good luck.

-Danny

I'm thinking .... clone the track first and work on the cloned version. 

the tools Danny & Mike mentioned may work but if you don't have them already, they will cost you some serious money. There are some pretty cool and effective tools on the market. 

I have the melodyne editor version... you will need the poly version (editor) since the mono versions will not show you the two distinct sounds. You can work on what you can't see. 

A better option and cheaper might be to simply have the guitar player record the track again. 

Some very respected views here, thank you for you input.

The obvious answer for me is to get my guitar player in to play again, which I am going to do. I don't have the funds to splash on the recommended software. 

However as I am effectively a begginer at this game I was looking for ideas on how to correct this problem.  

Before I get the track redone I am going to experiment with Danni and Mike's ideas and see what I can achieve. 

I also wondered if compression would help to lessen the effect by reducing the peak of the harmonic, or am i barking up the wrong tree here?