The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Ever since Aurora installed the new hard drive on our computer, any time that I have tried to make a recording, there has been a considerable hum. Even a recording of silence will have some hum on it. And I can't eliminate in using noise reduction as doing so flanges the recording. What can I do to eliminate the hum?

use a noisegate, or try to get rid of the hum's frequency using eq. is it around 60Hz?

Um... plug the computer into a different power outlet maybe? This is assuming that your entire rig (computer/instruments/amps/mixer/effects/what-have-you) is all plugged into the same powerstrip and/or wall jack, which may or may not be a grounded one depending on the age of your residence. The joys of home studios, heh.

If all else fails record a small amount and don't make any noise. Then get a noise profile of this and save it to load and use for noise reduction on whatever other recording needs it.

I'm just curious what you mean by "make a recording?" Is the noise from your computer being picked up by your microphones? Is there noise on direct recorded tracks as well? Is there noise on midi tracks and/or your final mix?

If it is just the new hardrive is noisy, put the computer in another room, get rid of it, or buy some silent PC gear. If there is now a grounding issue with your whole computer, look into new power cables and hospital grade outlets.

Ken

ken wrote: Is the noise from your computer being picked up by your microphones?

No

ken wrote: Is there noise on direct recorded tracks as well?

Yes

ken wrote:Is there noise on midi tracks and/or your final mix?

No midi here.

Try rewiring everything. There's a good chance that one of your signal wires is too close to one of the power cables. Gotta keep em separated, as they say.

bzl wrote:Try rewiring everything. There's a good chance that one of your signal wires is too close to one of the power cables. Gotta keep em separated, as they say.

I bet you're right. It's not like we're geniuses at messing around with inside of computers. We would make a simple error as that.

Also, are you using an external interface, or the onboard soundcard? Even with the 'good' Audigy stuff I always got noise.

The Sober Irishman wrote:Also, are you using an external interface, or the onboard soundcard? Even with the 'good' Audigy stuff I always got noise.

onboard.

That makes things tougher, for sure. Cables cables cables is all I can say. I hate rooting around in pc cases, so I'm afraid I can't be much help at this point.