Often enough, as a recordist, you encounter a sound that just begs to be recorded. But it comes with “extras”, background noise, cars, or most likely some dark background rumble we don’t even hear ourselves.
Imagine this bird (not the same as in the recording, granted.
The basic sound recorded was this:
You can hear a basic rumble that must have been wind in the trees or something. It’s a sound I don’t need in my recording.
Ideally, I would get rid of those low frequencies as they hold no interesting information. With a bit of basic EQ in Reaper (nothing fancy) you can get this result. It sounds a lot better:
I've asked around for that and got plenty of interesting answers. The one that will be the very best, but the most difficult to obtain in a fairly densely populated area like Nova Scotia (Canada), is to get to a quiet area and record there. The trouble is that the birds are often in the noisy areas here; the quiet areas are really quiet. No birds, nothing much to record. Spectral editing was another suggestion, but it left me with very unnatural results. Probably, I wasn't doing it right.
Then there is the spectrogram. What does one bird tweet look like?
It seems that Audacity holds the best spectrogram out there:
But you’d need to see and hear it to follow the sound with your eyes.
So here it is; the spectrogram is basically the same but generated by a different algorithm.
This is how I approach the recordings that I present here. Minimal processing, as each operation will remove something but will also distort something else that I want to keep. So basic processing it will be.
Until next time…}