Pro Tools comes with a very handy function that allows you to clean your tracks in no time.
All you have to do is set a threshold that tells Pro Tools that you would like to get rid of any signal under it. You can of course set time handles before and after each detected chunks for more refinement. This is a very powerful function that will speed your workflow if you know how to use it well.
In this tutorial, Ben Lindell shows you how to get rid of undesired noise in percussion track.
00:00:10 Today I'm gonna be showing you how I use
the Strip Silence plug-in in Pro Tools.
00:00:13 Strip Silence is basically
a powerful noise gate
that allows you to separate
information inside the regions
by how loud or quiet it is.
00:00:21 I'm gonna be using it today to separate
the musical information I want to keep
from all the noise and ambience
that's in between.
00:00:28 It's gonna do this all automatically,
so it's gonna save me a bunch of time.
00:00:31 So let's get started!
Here's my session
we're gonna be cleaning up today.
00:00:36 First things first,
let me play you my tambourine track.
00:00:39 Pay attention to
in-between the tambourine hits,
all the noise, the jingling,
the ambience and whatnot that's going on.
00:00:56 Depending on the genre of music,
I may want to leave that jingling in,
that's kind of
and could be the vibe of the track.
00:01:02 Since this is a pop/hip-hop track,
it needs to be as clean as possible
and I need to edit out
all of this extraneous noise.
00:01:09 I could do this by hand,
by just clicking through and deleting...
00:01:14 one by one...
over and over again.
00:01:19 As you can see,
I have about 50 more of these to do.
00:01:23 It's not really a good use of my time.
00:01:25 I can use Strip Silence to actually
do this all automatically for me.
00:01:29 Let me go ahead and undo that.
00:01:32 I can go to the Edit menu
and select Strip Silence.
00:01:36 Or I could use the keyboard shortcut
which on Mac is Cmd+U,
or on PC, it would be Ctrl+U.
00:01:42 To use Strip Silence,
I'm first gonna select my region...
00:01:46 and there you see a bunch of white
boxes being drawn around my regions.
00:01:50 What's inside the white boxes is
the audio that's gonna be kept
once I've stripped the silence.
00:01:55 As you can see, there's a few areas here
that aren't exactly what I want to keep,
and there's some that are too long
in the front, and too big in the back,
so we need to go through
and adjust the settings
to get this so it's just keeping
the tambourine hits I want to hear.
00:02:10 The first parameter we're gonna
adjust is the Strip Threshold.
00:02:14 Anything below this level
is gonna be stripped away.
00:02:17 Anything above it is gonna be kept
inside these white boxes.
00:02:20 As I'm gonna adjust this, you're gonna
see the white boxes focus in more
on the tambourine hits
that I want to keep.
00:02:32 There we go!
The first thing I'm gonna adjust is
the Region Start Pad,
just to make sure I'm not cutting off
any beginnings to my tambourine hit.
00:02:40 Now I'm gonna adjust the Region End Pad
to make sure I get all the tail
from each tambourine hit.
00:02:46 Here we go. It looks pretty good!
Now I have three options
to finish this off.
00:02:51 The first is to Extract.
00:02:53 What this will actually do is remove
all the audio inside the white boxes,
basically, the opposite of
what I'm trying to do here today.
00:02:59 The second option is to Separate.
00:03:01 This is gonna create regions
in and around the white boxes,
so I can go through
and manually delete each region.
00:03:08 That's not quite as automatic
as I'd like it to be...
00:03:11 The third option is Strip.
This is the one I use all the time.
00:03:15 This is gonna keep the audio
inside the white boxes
and strip away everything else.
00:03:21 So there we go. Now I have four regions
that contain my four tambourine hits.
00:03:25 I just need to add fades before
and after each region
to make sure there's no clicks or pops,
and I'm all good to go!
The cool thing about Strip Silence is
now that I have my settings dialed in
for my tambourine track,
I can go on the other regions
and apply the same settings
to get the same results.
00:03:42 Except in this case...
00:03:43 Because as you can see,
we have one big white box.
00:03:46 The reason for this is because we didn't
adjust the Minimum Strip Duration.
00:03:50 Right now, it's set at 497 ms,
and what that's saying is
that for something to be stripped away,
it needs to be at least 497 ms
away from the other box.
00:04:00 So what I'm gonna do is
just drag that down
and suddenly I have white boxes
around each one of my tambourine hits,
just how I wanted.
So I'm gonna press Strip.
00:04:10 There we go! Now I have all those sounds
stripped out of my tambourine track.
00:04:14 But as I mentioned before,
you want to create fades
before and after each region
to make sure there's no clicks or pops.
00:04:19 A quick way to do that is
to select all of your regions,
and hit Cmd+F, or Ctrl+F on a PC,
to bring up the Fade window.
00:04:29 Then I'm just gonna set it for 10 ms.
00:04:32 It's gonna put a fade-in and a fade-out
on each region automatically for me.
00:04:37 So there we go!
Now let's listen to my track
and hear the difference.
00:04:52 As you can hear,
it's much, much cleaner.
00:04:54 But with any editing, it's always advised
that you listen through all of your edits
to make sure you didn't accidentally do
something you weren't supposed to,
such as cut out too much,
or leave in something
you didn't want to be there.
00:05:06 That's how you use Strip Silence.
00:05:08 Today, I was just editing
on a tambourine track,
but I use Strip Silence everyday
to clean up background vocals,
toms, any sounds
that I want to clean up.
00:05:16 Now a word of warning, sometimes
the jingling and breathing,
and everything in between the hits is
where the vibe of the track is.
00:05:24 So as always,
be listening while you're editing
to make sure you're not
taking away from the music.
00:05:29 Strip Silence is a pretty powerful tool
and it can easily be abused.
00:05:32 So, until next time!
Once logged in, you will be able to read all the transcripts jump around in the video.
Ben is a NYC based producer/engineer who has worked with artists from MGMT to Soulja Boy, Bebel Giberto to Lloyd Banks, Ryan Leslie, Olivia, Tony Yayo, Red Cafe, Edie Brickell, Carole Pope and hundreds of other artists from around the world. He grew up in Iowa and then attended the University of Miami.
In addition to being a fantastic musician he is also a tremendous geek when it comes to anything technical, be it software, plug-ins, microphones or outboard gear. It's this marriage of musical creativity and technical know-how that makes him an in demand producer/engineer.
Ben is also the Director of Marketing at pureMix.net, feel free to reach out to him directly, ben@puremix.net
really fabulous! Thank you very much Ben. We can learn a lot from you!!!
beatweezl
2016 Jul 19
Still seems like a lot of work. Is this a better, more powerful or more versatile option than a noise gate?
composermikeglaser
2016 May 03
Awesome, I'm working with a very "breathy" singer right now. This is going to save me a ton of time.
JLHolmes
2015 Dec 29
I fairly comfortable with Protools functions but never found out just what Strip Silence was, and since there are 45 way to do every thing in Protools, I accomplished this in another way. But after seeing this video I will always go about it this way for time constraints. While recognizing that this has to be used with care when using this technique this is an absolute killer. Will change my approach forever. So Kool!
not the mama
2014 Aug 14
This was an amazing tutorial. However, the point you made at the very end is probably the most important takeaway. I tried this method on some tom tracks trying to clear all of the other bleed. However taking out the bleed of the other drums actually killed a bit of the energy in the kit for that particular song. The tom mics picked up some nice air that give the whole kit mix a better live/room vibe. Trimming out that noise made the kit feel too dry. So after all that cutting, I decided to leave the toms as they were originally.
Teri Michelle
2014 Jul 07
That was an awesome 5 minutes or so spent on a subject that help me everyday in the studio. Thanks Ben!
juancopro-flow
2013 Oct 28
GREAT VID, STRAIGHT TO THE POINT...SHORT N SWEET...
Baffman
2013 Oct 27
Ben, You have a great clear and consice way of communicating. Thanks, Jojo
