Here’s a look at a recording I was sent. It was recorded inside the Male Processed voice track.
Take a listen to the audio here:
The original Adobe Audition Presets work very hard on voices as they’re designed to make them loud and powerful for radio imaging, promo creation etc.
A couple of things you can do to stand the best chance of no background noise:
- Make sure you’re using a high quality microphone.
- Ensure the input levels are louder. The levels on the above example hit around -18 dB. Try and get levels between -12 dB to -6 dB when recording.
- Make sure your recording room is as quiet as possible. Sound treatment is preferred but if not do all you can by switching off fans, closing curtains and moving away from loud computers if possible.
When you are having background noise or hiss pulled up in the mix after recording there are a couple of ways to begin to solve this issue.
- Increase the volume of your recording. Using Waveform view go to Favorites > Normalize to -0.1 dB.
- This is an advanced tip! Go to the bus view by hitting [SHIFT] & 4. Now look for the Voice FX (Male) bus, select it and go to the Effects Rack. Now disable the Speech Volume Leveler. This will reduce some of the processing power of the track but should eliminate hiss and background noise were you are unable to avoid recording it in your initial recording. See image below for a guide on where to find these settings.
Goto your control panel and then click Sound, a popup will appear with 4 tabs: Playback, Recording, Sounds, Communication. You want the Recording tab, find your mic and make sure it’s “Set as Default” (it probably is already) then select Properties. The Microphone Properties popup will appear showing 5 tabs: General, Listen, Levels, Enhancement, Advanced, you want the Levels tab. In this area you can adjust your microphone levels (volume) as well as your microphone boost (gain). Just note that the boost goes up by +10.0 dB and you can’t input a number. Hope that helps.