Logic Pro 9 Cleaning up guitar noise???

[Briody]

My Mac Pro arrives tomorrow and I've been learning Logic via the Groove3 training series. I need to hit the ground running!

I'll be recording an album right away which involves lots of guitar tracks. Much of the music involves stops in the guitar parts, so I want all the empty spaces to be very clean.

Here's how I would do it in Sonar - Suppose there is a 2 beat section that should be silent. I'd split the clip in two right in the middle of the part that needs to be silent. Then I'd resize each side of the clip so that I'm basically eliminating the silence. Then I'd put a very quick crossfade in to eliminate pops.

I know that Logic can work this way, but I'm looking for a faster method. The above way isn't bad, but doing it for 10 guitar tracks in 12 songs gets tedious.

I noticed in the Logic training videos that you can just use the mouse to highlight a section, then hit the delete key. That saves me one step. But what about the crossfades?

I'm just trying to get this tedious editing as proficient as possible.

 

[sonnykeyes]

I would start in the Arrange page "Audio" menu with Strip Silence, adjust the parameters until the guitar parts you want to keep are all clean single chunks, (with maybe a little extra ring-out at the end of each chunk for your fade) then select the track (in order to select all the newly created regions) and type in a fade length in the Fade: Out field in the Inspector in the upper left corner. (Double click after the word "Out" then type in a number of samples - I usually start with 200 or 300 and adjust from there to taste) This will apply the same fade-out to all the selected regions. You can also do a little fade-in the same way if you'd like. HTH

 

[Ming]

Even when the audio is sliced up in the strip silence window, it's always possible to adjust the length of individual slices ones back in the arrange-window by prolonging the region, dragging in the down right-hand corner of region. Any fades already applied as described by sonnykeyes will follow along. You can choose between snappier parts or more ambient ones.

 

[Peter Ostry]

If the guitars have always a high S/N ratio and do not fade out, you can use the Logic Noise Gate which is pretty good. You would use it as the first plugin in each guitar track. If you don't record many different guitars/amps, adjusting the gate once for each guitar and copying the plugin to other tracks should work well. However, adjusting the threshold on several tracks is still faster than doing multiple cuts per track. You can automate the gate at critical points if necessary.

 

[Pete Thomas]

If the guitars have always a high S/N ratio and do not fade out, you can use the Logic Noise Gate which is pretty good.

+1. The gate would be my first reach for. You can set a reasonable release just in case an abrupt cutout of sound is audible.

Anything not caught be the gate can than be dealt with as you hear it by slicing out the region or silencing.

EDIT: The good thing about the gate is you have a frequency conscious filter which will work more creatively than strip silence which just looks at loudness

 

[Eli]

I would use the marquee region of the main pointer tool to select the area desired, and then hit delete. (It might have been me you saw doing this in the Groove 3 videos?). While both strip silence and the noise gate offer excellent solutions as well, my experience is that you invariabley need to constantly go in and tweak things to get them how you want. So, while the marquee tool/delete method may seem like more work at first, it actually usually isn't in the long run.

And if your multiple guitar tracks have their gaps that need to be deleted in the same places, you can easily make marquee selections across multiple tracks. So, on quick selection and hit of the delete key can potentially take care of all the tracks at once. And don't forget to use the control or control and shift key as you are making your selections to fine tune the movement from the default grid settings.

And as far as the fades, like was posted earlier here - just select all the regions and add the fades in numerically once in the region inspector, and they will be applied to all selected regions.

Welcome to the world of Logic!

 

[robgb]

I like Logic's gate, too, but you have to be very careful with it. I think it's often more effective to simply go through and delete the noise by hand.