Vocal Plosives

[vtone]

I'm currently trying to mix a track that was recorded with one mic on acoustic guitar and vocals. The problem is that the engineer failed to put up a pop filter on the vocal mic and there are three very noticeable plosives in the track. There are other takes, without plosives, but the musician is changing his singing and fingerpicking style with each track. He prefers the take with the plosives and has asked me to take them out, saying he can't recreate that performance.

Does anyone have any ideas how to deal with this? Volume automation takes out too much guitar and sounds like a dropout or bad cable or something. But the plosives themselves drown out the guitar anyway, for a second. This song is literally one track. It overall sound is excellent, but the pops are very annoying.

Thanks

[audiaudio]

(1) Select and cut the problem plosives. (Zoom in on them. The transients should be easy to see. Cut the transient only.)
(2) Copy a non-plosive "p" from another take
(3) Replace the problem plosives with the copy

Another way: use a high-pass filter (set somewhere between 60-200 Hz, whatever sounds best), and automate the bypass so that the filter is "in" only on the plosives.

Hope this helps.

[Mark Haliday]

Only system I have found (and it can work quite well in some cases) is select the offending pops, and filter them using an Audiosuite filter plugin in HPF mode (low cutoff).
To avoid phase problems you should group, select, and process all phase related tracks simultaneously.
Digidesign's EQ can do it, but if you have Filter
Bank or SonyOxford filters, it will be *much* better
Time consuming, but it will yield a much better result than filtering the whole tracks.
I just hope they are low freq pops because the low mid thuds you get with stage mics like the sm58 are much more difficult to take out.

Good luck [img]images/icons/rolleyes.gif[/img]

[MDC]

I have just spent several weeks trying to reduce plosives from voice-overs. I used the Digisuite EQ high pass filter with the roll-off somewhere between 80 and 150 hz depending on the quality of the voice, then also reduced the gain on some by as much as -10db (this usually works only if the plosive is at the end of a word, like "tap," doing it at the beginning like "pat" sometimes begins to sound unnatural.)

My experience was the same as Mark Haliday says: the plosives recording with a Rode NT1 were relatively easy, the ones recorded with a SM58 I couldn't really eliminate, they would only start to disappear if I raised the roll-off above 220hz, and in most cases, that affects the timbre of the voice.

I was working on just spoken voice-overs, editing a singing voice over a music bed you might get away with more. Hope this helps.

(now I'll go look for Filterbank or the Sony Oxford)

[rickyshand]

Here's how I like to deal with finicky plosives:

1) Create a new track next to the offending track, reverse phase and make sure it's bussed the same as the offender.

2) Copy the plossive, along with a little lead in/out audio to the new track

3) Use an audiosuite process to filter everything *but* the plosive, I have good luck with Waves and with Digisuite.

4) depending on the filter used, slide the resulting plosive around slightly to match phase.

5) use head and tail fades to bring in cancelation and track level to adjust amount of cancelation.

This takes a while to set up, but lets you really fine tune things in a visual fashion that I find very helpful.

[jaysun]

the C1 sidechain compressor works pretty well....it even has a "de-popper" preset that comps those nasty low end plosives and the freq. is adjustable...to get what ya need..
automate the thresh and your golden...

that phase cancellation idea is sweet too!!

[vtone]

Thanks so much for your responses everyone! All the ideas are very cool, and it would've have taken me a lot of hours/days/years(?) to come up with it on my own!

I think Mark Halidays method is the best for my situation. The phase cancellation is very cool, as well as the C1 preset (I don't have C1 though).

Anyway, thanks again everyone. I think this is will pretty much take care of me!