mastering piano

[TaurusT]

I'm speaking about mastering solo piano (read: only a piano playing).

Between soft slow passages, there's always a slight hiss. It's barely noticable but it is there (for a keen ear). You can hear it especially when a final note fades out (the hiss then becomes apparent). It's almost as if it's crossfading with the hiss.. I'm exaggerating ofcourse. (it is not my compressor causing this..I'm speaking about the dry signal).

 

You have to have your headphones on at the maximum volume and it needs to be deadquiet in the room. But it is there. A song's last pianonote will never be completely dry/deadsilent fading.

 

Just to clarify, it IS inside the .wav. It is nothing external. I'm talking about the actual recording that has this very slight hiss.

 

I haven't dealt much with mastering pure piano so much in detail in the past, and I believe those times I did I just let it pass after the usual of normalisation, gating, reverberation, eq and compression. Nobody ever complained. But is anyone specialized in this?

[kanker.]

It's called noise floor - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_floor

[TaurusT]

I know what I'm hearing, I'm asking a solution for solo piano in this context. Thanks for the reply though. I might just need some better cooling in my system.

[SilverDragonSoun]

Do you have other things running in the room like computers, TV ect. Everything else may create little noises which could show up. This happened to me and when I eliminated everything else(elctronic), this solved the problem for me.

[kanker.]

Originally posted by TaurusT:

I know what I'm hearing, I'm asking a solution for solo piano in this context. Thanks for the reply though. I might just need some better cooling in my system.

There is no solution - there is no such thing as zero noise. There are only little things like Silver Dragon Sound mentioned to lower it. Some other ways to lower it are to get better converters, get a better analog signal path, use more gear with external transformers, try balanced power. Also, do not limit, compress, or normalize the material in any way. This will only serve to raise the noise floor even further. Beyond that, you could *try* editing the file some, maybe putting a fadeout on the last note.

[ksounds]

You could always try using noise reduction software. Some programs are better than others, but if the noise is pretty subtle to begin with, you might not need to spend top dollar to get good results. Just be sure to compare the original signal with the processed version. You don't want part of the music to get removed along with the noise.

[Byrdman]

You can always stick it through a gate - most compressors have a gate as well. Its going to mess with the sound a little but sometimes that's ok.

 

I have heard samples that are noisy. If you start with a poorly recorded source for your samples there's not a lot that can be done with it later. Some instruments are noisy and the noise gets into the samples but wheras on the original instrument the noise is there all the time, on the samples its only there when you are playing a note.

[soundscape]

Originally posted by ksounds:

You could always try using noise reduction software. Some programs are better than others, but if the noise is pretty subtle to begin with, you might not need to spend top dollar to get good results. Just be sure to compare the original signal with the processed version. You don't want part of the music to get removed along with the noise.

IME Waves X-noise works great for this.