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How To: Remove Reverb

H

hungryhawk

This is really a cry for help. I produce news stories for a regional prod. house. Everyone of these stupid personal mp3/wav recorders we own has a "reverb" button on it. Without fail someone on my staff takes it out in the field and hits the button before recording their actualitites. They bring it back to the studio and suddenly it sounds like everyone we interview lives inside a storage container or gymnasium (depending on the recorder). Can you help me remove this crap.

Thanks
-H
 
I routinely clean a lot of undesired signal out of speech recordings and my first reaction is: There is NO WAY to clean up the reverb. Then I think: this is not natural, random reverb, this is machine created reverb. Maybe someone could actually write an algorithm that could deal with it.

Have you had a gifted technician look at one of these devices. I know today's electronic devices are apparently built to never be repaired or modified, but if one could gain access to the back side of the switch or identify a wire actually going to the REVERB switch, then maybe that feature could be..... neutered?
 
This won't be of much help now, but it can help you down the road: remove the button, pry it off or have an engineering type figure out how to disable it.
 
A bit of Super Glue, epoxy glue or airplane glue ought to "gum up the works" real well.

Tee hee. Take it to a manicure shop. They could probably make it look real cool while doing the dirty deed.
 
Depending how noisy the backround ambiance is..you might be able to put a "noise gate" or expander on the actual track and clip the reverb trail off of each line..THEN add a little natural room noise to the whole track to mask the gating effect. TV and location filming does this all the time..they usually have thier sound guy record 30 seconds or so of backround noise so they can actually mix the sweetened dialog with the backround to achieve a balance. It works
 
I'm going to back-track just a little bit from what I posted earlier. I'm with Jeff Laurence on this one. I edit a sermon each week to go an a church website for on-demand streaming or via the podcast mechanism. This weeks recording was a BEAR! Maybe an extra mic open. Maybe the monitors for the choir turned up too loud. It had that "in the barrel" sound.

I have learned that aggressive gating with this particualr voice sounds so very abrupt so I didn't want to do that. I did notice that the reverberating tail of each phrase seemed to have a common "tonality" or tuning about it. I sampled a short segment of one of those lingering tails and used the Restoration, noise-reduction feature in Audition. I was able to do that twice without causing much damage to the main signal. Then I played with the parametric filter to enhance another frequency range to overshadow what was left of the reverb tail.

When it was all said and done, it was not up to the standards I set for myself in editing, but considering the original, I was happy to settle for what I got.

Remember to save with a new file same every few steps so if you over do it, you can always revert to a previous version without going all the way back to the original. (Been there, done that!. Cost me 3 to 4 hours last week.)



Thanks for the tip, Jeff. I've got create a loop of background/ambient noise for an overlay on those times you have to cover up extreme gating. If I personally did the recording every week this wouldn't be an issue. But a rotating group of volunteers does the recording and I take what I can get. ;D
 
What GRC suggests will only work for removing a room mode. Nothing for artificial verb. I have been working on an algorithm for months that would do this. Problem is, at present, I've only had success with very controlled signals. It CAN be done with current technology, but not to any degree of satisfaction. I can do slightly better than a good gate or expander...But it takes about 3 hours to do 30 seconds of audio. So in addition to needing refinement, it also needs major simplification. As far as I know, this is brand new technology (or existing technology used in a combination that has never been done before). So the short answer is, no, you cant remove reverb. I may hit a brick wall, but so far, all signs point to this being possible in the next few years. Until Adobe released the Center Channel Extractor, everyone thought that was impossible.

Emmett
 
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