Topic: Editing Out A Chatty Channel In Post?

[stevetoney]

I've been thinking about techniques I may be able to use to enhance a recent recording I made.  Looking for some opinions.

I made a recording recently at a bar that has low ceilings so I couldn't put the mics up very high.  The layout of the room is such that most of the patrons were to the right of my mics.  So there's quite a bit of chattiness in the right channel, but the left is quite clean.  Taboot, because of my location to the speakers, I decided to run the mics with a fairly small included angle (maybe sixty degrees), so I'm not hearing a whole hecka lot of channel separation in the recording.  The fact that I was using MK41 hypers helped the cause a bit because the left channel is even cleaner because of better off axis rejection (since the talkers were standing close to and to the right of my mic stand).

I was giving some thought to how I might be able to remix the recording to improve it to minimize the right channel chattiness.  My thought was to put the clean left channel through both sides, apply some delay and a tiny bit of reverb to simulate channel separation, then lay the original right channel on top of the new right channel, but with say 30% mix so that it's heard but so the fatty chatty's are way lower in the mix.

Think it could improve the recording?  If so, I'm not really sure how to go about doing this in Audition...can anybody give me some ideas on what I'd need to do?

Another thought was that since I have one clean channel and one that has chattiness on it, isn't there a way h that you can do some phase reversing to eliminate unwanted sound artifacts (I think I might be off-base with this question as regards my understanding of situations where one can use phase reversing to eliminate noise, but never hurts to ask)?

Thank you for thoughts.

[F.O.Bean]

Just copy/paste the left channel and make it mono. See if that makes it any better

[F.O.Bean]

Just copy/paste the left channel and make it mono. See if that makes it any better

Just copy/paste like I said. Then, at least in WL 6, there is a stereo expander plugin that fakes a stereo image

[Brennan]

If you have the tool(s) you might try to re-balance the mix by putting a percentage of the left channel into the right and a bit of the right into the left.  The thought being in my mind that hearing some chat in both sides will keep me from focusing on the stark separation that you seem to be describing.  Depending on your ratios of mix you will by definition be moving towards mono but it's worth a try.  Audition has this tool and it's worked for me a time or two.

HTH

Just used this a minute ago to swap channels. It's under Effects>Stereo Imagery>Channel Mixer.

[Will_S]

It's worth playing with, but in my experience even chatter that images hard left (say) due to combined amplitude and timing differences often isn't all that much quieter in the other channel.  So you run the risk of bringing it more front and center, which may not be an improvement even if it is a few db quieter.  But maybe one channel really is clean if the chatters ended up in the null, so worth a shot.

Don't think there are any phasing tricks to hep here (unless the chatters were in the rear lobe of one mic, then mixing channles would cancel them out a bit), except insofar as one more thing you could try is converting to a sum (~mid) and difference (~side) and playing with the image width.  Don't know how you particular program handles going back and forth between ms and stereo but the brute force way is create a mid channel, create a side channel, then set up a new 4 track file with two copies of the mid as L1 and R1 and then the side and the inverse of the side as L2 and R2 and then playing with the relative levels of pair 1 and pair 2.  But in effect this is just adding a bit of L to the R and vice versa, so perhaps you can do this more directly.  Or just another 4 track file, but now tracks are L, R, R copy, and L copy, with "copies" lower i level and reversed sides.