Hi Dana, here are a couple of thoughts.
First, that's a very clean recording as they go, and although I can
make out the sounds you're talking about, the hiss is very minor, and
I like the insects!
The easiest thing to do for single events like the insect fly bys
that you don't want, is to simply edit them out. Maybe some of the
purists would disagree, I mean, it's possible that by doing so you'll
be changing a long bird phrase, but if not using this for research,
just cut out the insects, and slide the pieces together to get rid of
the hole. When mastering sounds, this is done all the time. I'll
often roll for an hour, and slowly work through the file, removing
planes, myself coughing or moving, things like that. Unwanted sounds
like a fly can be treated the same way.
As far as hiss, there are probably two options. A low pass filter,
with a gentle slope, will reduce some of the highest of the noise,
and you can slowly bring it down until you hear it start affecting
the bird calls, and then back it off. This will reduce a bit of it.
Noise Reduction plugins aren't going to work really well here. First,
in order for them to work well, you need to be able to feed them 2
seconds of 'just' the noise, so they can learn and build a noise
profile. In a recording like that, pretty hard to do. Second, I fear
you'd start to hear them affect the birds very quickly. I love my set
of noise reduction tools, but they get used very minimally and
carefully. But Sound Soap is surprisingly good for about $79,
although in this case it probably won't do much.
For the low end, I'm not sure I'm hearing exactly what you want to
get rid of. But when mastering FX, I often employ about a 6db per
octave high pass, and slowly bring it up until I hear it start to
affect the sound, then back it off. But it works well for taking away
some of that 'low end' air and rumble that mics are good at
recording. Especially when what you want to preserve is something
like the bird song, you'll be able to take away quite a bit of the
low end before it starts to sound unnatural.
I agree with Derek that a lot can be done with EQ, and would suggest
starting with gentle settings. It's too easy with a sharp EQ to
create a really unnatural sound. As he noted, you can EQ out the
sound of the insects, perhaps, but at a huge cost probably to
everything else. Make sure you have a good set of speakers or
headphones, and start playing around with EQ's and you'll see what
you can and can't get away with. I use in general a 7 band EQ, with
highly adjustable settings. It can do pretty much whatever I need.
I'd avoid 24 and 30 band, and even 12 band types, they usually don't
allow any adjustment of frequency or Q (width) and as such, pretty
hard to keep something sounding natural in my opinion.
I do have to disagree (politely) though with him about excising out
unwanted sounds. Unless the recording is being done for research, I
see no problem in trying to preserve the sounds you want, and get rid
of the ones you don't. But he's absolutely right, much more can be
done in the field as far as isolating sounds than be done in post
production.
I would almost never use a compressor for mastering nature sounds,
but maybe some do. Aside from EQ and an occasional use of X-Noise or
Sound Soap to remove broadband noise, I wouldn't process the sounds
too much.
Good luck,
Tim
|