Cleaning up an iPhone recording

[DrJasonK]

I am a hobby musician, singer-songwriter who records in my basement studio on ProTools 12 on a Mac Mini through a Safire interface. I was given some audio of a family holiday event recorded on an iPhone and asked if I could clean it up. The quality is not bad, it basically needs the voice brought out more. It is a singer, guitar and cajon percussion. The cajon is the problem, it is overpowering, too loud. It seems to cross about every frequency I could try to EQ out. I tried to put some kind of gate on it, but it cut out the voice and guitar. I know there are limits to what I can do with this audio source, but wondered if someone out there had some tricks that might help me improve what I have?


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[cwsand]

Hard to say for sure without hearing the recording. EQ would be one possibility to try to diminish unwanted noise - possibly a high-pass filter to remove lower frequencies and then narrower bands to remove noise at certain frequencies. You might also experiment with noise reduction plugin processing such as iZotope.

[Sardi]

Originally Posted by DrJasonK

I am a hobby musician, singer-songwriter who records in my basement studio on ProTools 12 on a Mac Mini through a Safire interface. I was given some audio of a family holiday event recorded on an iPhone and asked if I could clean it up. The quality is not bad, it basically needs the voice brought out more. It is a singer, guitar and cajon percussion. The cajon is the problem, it is overpowering, too loud. It seems to cross about every frequency I could try to EQ out. I tried to put some kind of gate on it, but it cut out the voice and guitar. I know there are limits to what I can do with this audio source, but wondered if someone out there had some tricks that might help me improve what I have?


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I do audio repair/enhancement stuff everyday. There are limits to what can be done, but with the right tools and know how, it’s quite mind blowing what can be achieved these days. Without hearing the audio, it’s hard to comment.

Have you thought about just hiring someone to do the work for you? I know everyone wants to do everything themselves these days, but sometimes it’s best to just farm out the work to someone that specialises in this type of work. It’s probably a lot cheaper than buying a bunch of plugins or wasting time that could be better spent doing something else.


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[DrJasonK]

Thanks for the suggestions! I am generally a DIY type and sometimes the process of trying to do stuff is as important to me as the end result. That said, the recording came from a family event. It would be nice to get it done properly, but I wouldn’t spend a lot of money to do it. I could spend a little on a Plug-in, if I might use it on other projects, although for my own projects, the stock plug ins, usually work fine. What would I expect to pay and where do I look for someone to work on it, if I did hire it out? Is there a specific iZotope plug in I should look at if I went that route? Thanks!

[The Weed]

As a start, either iZotope's RX Elements or Elements Suite. Check on line, some stores like B&H have a sale on.