Suggestions on removing "pick click"?

[bbain]

Did some recording of a friend on mandolin. Good player, but when he gets into it, his picking hand creeps up over the fretboard extension and his pick clicks against the fretboard. It's definitely audible on the takes and I'm somewhat at a loss on how to remove the clicks since manually going in and editing just about every note in the fiddle tune solo is a daunting task.

It seems like a plugin that removes pops and clicks from old recordings might be one possibility - are there any free or low-cost plugins that I could try that would do the trick? Or a demo version that I can try to see if it works before spending $$?

Alternatively, can some one suggest an easier way to edit the clicks than going in and zooming and locating them, selecting them, setting selection boundaries at the zero line and then reducing the gain on the selection, followed by a cross fade?

Thanks in Advance

Bill Bain
Atlanta

[albee1952]

Just went thru this with an acoustic player. Its a bear to deal with, but you might have enough success with 2 techniques. 1 is to zoom way in and use the pencil tool to draw out the spike. The other method is to copy a small bit before or after the spike and paste over it. Zooming way in allows you to see where the zero crossings are so you can move the pasted region or drag regions ends to get smooth transitions. Duplicate the playlist so you can revert(just in case you do a lot of work and still hate the result, you can start over).

[Stig Eliassen]

A technique I sometimes use is to duplicate the track, but leave out the audio. Instantiate a plugin like Trim, and invert the phase on the plugin. Then I manually go through the track in solo, and copy the nasty parts to the dup track. With levels and panning being the same, the audio will cancel out. What I like about doing it this way is that I can adjust the volume on the dup so that some parts only partially cancels out, and at the same time I can leave the original track untouched.

If you're on PT 8 and earlier you need to either instantiate the same plugin on the original track to match the latency of the two tracks, or nudge the audio around.

You can also go further with this. You could instantiate an eq/filter plugin, again invert the phase on the dup, and cancel out audio above or below any chosen frequency.

[tommyj1112]

I ran into this with an acoustic guitar player this past month as well, and had excellent results using Izotope RX (Declicker).

The default settings actually took care of everything on this particular track surprisingly well. Took less than 30 seconds!

So on this particular project, on this particular day, it was a great solution (and I was very excited NOT to have to resort to the techniques albee described... been there, and it is NOT fun).

[bbain]

Izotrope RX2 is $349. :-(

I was sort of hoping for a less expensive option. Audacity has a click removal plugin available. I'm thinking of taking the errant track, bouncing it to disk, running it through Audacity and then importing it back into the ProTools session.

Any thoughts? Thanks in advance.

[mhelm01]

Originally Posted by bbain

Izotrope RX2 is $349. :-(

Sounds like you're at the margin. What is your time worth?

[bbain]

Good question, but $350 to fix a demo tape for a friend's band is a bit more than I want to spend at this point. I don't typically use a whole slew of plugins and effects so I've not had to accumulate many more than what came with ProTools.

I'll try the Audacity route and if that doesn't give me the results we're looking for, then it might be easier for him to re-record the tracks than for me to spend a lot of time trying to edit the tracks I've got.

[mhelm01]

Originally Posted by bbain

it might be easier for him to re-record the tracks than for me to spend a lot of time trying to edit the tracks I've got.

Ahhh....The old "play it better" plug. Good choice.

[albee1952]

Yup! Still waiting for that talent boost plugin

[Stig Eliassen]

Yup! Still waiting for that talent boost plugin

It's already here! It's called Hourly Rates.