I have a nice track that has hiss you can hear in quiet moments.
Compressing just makes it worse of course.
Gating cuts out delicate parts.
I wondered if i could copy the hiss and invert the wave to noise cancel it?
Any tips on that?

Maybe R-Mix and clip gain automation might help, other free solutions: ReaFIR http://www.reaper.fm/reaplugs/ and Audacity claims to provide a noise reduction solution. After that it gets a little pricey, iZotope RX2 or noise reduction tools in commercial audio editors.

Rmix should fix it.

+1 for Rmix

M_Glenn_M


I have a nice track that has hiss you can hear in quiet moments.
Compressing just makes it worse of course.
Gating cuts out delicate parts.
I wondered if i could copy the hiss and invert the wave to noise cancel it?
Any tips on that?

I have never heard of this technique to get rid of hiss ? Are you using Cakewalk plugins to try this, or an external audio editor ?
I recently tried Cakewalk's R-Mix plugin to get rid of hiss on a mic'ed acoustic guitar track, and it didn't seem to help the track very much.
Eg. when you lose the hiss, you lose the crucial high end of the acoustic guitar recorded.
 
Best results I've found so far for reducing hiss on a track was with the Adobe audio editors "Clean-up Audio Noise" feature.
Most higher end audio editors have a hiss reducing algorithm, seems the best way to go if you have them.
There are many audio editor demos to download and try, it just doesn't seem to be something that Cakewalk has right now.
 
 

I think the inversion technique idea comes from a technique some folks use to clean up guitar leads on tracks.

A lot of guitar lead tones have a BUNCH of noise, and one theoretical way to get rid of that is to record a track of nothing but the noise, and then invert the signal, and it will cancel out the noise frequencies (many of them anyways) from the actual guitar track with the noisy lead tone on it.

Bob Bone

Sampling some of the noise after and trying to invert it will not work probably because the sample you have taken is in another point of time and the waveform may not invert well at all. In fact you might just increase the noise that way. (I have never had success with this) 

You really need a separate software editor to be able to work on tracks and preferably an editor with a proper noise reduction algorithm. It is the only way and probably much better then RMIX as well. 

What you do is actually sample the noise on the actual track you have recorded. This becomes a noise profile. All you need is usually a small section with just noise and no guitar sound. Then you let the software perform its magic often in several passes as well. You only have to reduce noise in the quieter bits too because once a loud guitar signal kicks in it will masked anyway.

It depends on how consistent and what type of noise it is as to how effective noise reduction is. Hiss can be harder in some respects. Too much noise reduction can effect the guitar signal too. It is sometimes much better to reduce it rather than trying to eliminate it altogether.

Sometimes setting up a noise gate right at the source can be effective as well. But doing what Robert is suggesting is still a good idea. (capturing a noise print that is at the time of recording) Not so much for attempting to phase reverse and null (which won't work actually) but for a noise reduction plug to be able to capture its noise profile for later treatment. The null concept may work for mains hum but not random noise such as hiss.

Surgical envelopes would work assuming there is no other material in the track at that point.  For example the very short spaces in a vocal track could easily be cleaned up in this manner..... however a track with hiss and an acoustic guitar playing softly would not be easy to clean up with this method. 


You can zoom and place the nodes a milli-second before and after the material and achieve the silence you seek. But the soft notes where you can hear the hiss through the note ..... yeah, that's not going to work. 

I think I saw a hiss remover in cakewalk.... although I have never used it. The best option is to not record hiss to start with , but I know that is not always possible, especially if someone else recorded the tracks. 

X1 has a Gate you can set freq on.

Have you tried HPF in the gate up to that freq?
 
In other words if the noise is say from 8-10khz,  Let the gate pass everything but that then adjust the sensitivity to cut/gate them levels

There are noise removal tools - Sony's is pretty good.  It does the sampling/removal thing - along w/ control of the amount of removal.  Works pretty good.  I've been using a little stereo recorder on some piano/singer gigs in a church - classical and pop from the 30s.  The church has ac and the unit itself is a bit noisy.  The noise removal makes it acceptable and if you are careful you don't really lose anything.

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