Removing Background Noise in REAPER (ReaFIR) 

Just getting started with Reaper in 2020, but this 5-year-old tutorial is still just as useful! Your presentation skills are excellent. Thank you.

Hey Kenny. I just had a major breakthrough!!! My electric guitar solo had a bunch of static in the background & you could hear it in the mix. It was annoying. I did exactly what you said, and it was getting rid of the background noise. The problem was there was no "sweet spot" to get rid of the noise & keep the guitar sounding nice & crisp. I played around a little bit & discovered that if you don't use "control" (I'm on a PC), you can draw a straight line across & reshape the filter line. I flat-lined it really low & it got rid of the noise. I kept going lower & lower. In the end, I ended up with a completely flat line WAY at the bottom of the window. It was almost touching the very bottom of the window. The noise was completely gone!!! I kept turning the filter off & on & the guitar sounded exactly the same, and the static noise was completely gone!!! My discovery was you don't have to keep the "mountain peaks" in the filter. My noise wasn't "air conditioner" bad, but by flat-lining it all the way at the bottom, I was able to get rid of the noise without losing any (or much) quality. Your tutorial helped a LOT, but I had to do another workaround to get it to work properly for me. I just thought I'd let you know. Maybe you could do a follow-up tutorial on drawing in your own line in the ReaFir plugin. :)

Dude, this guy is basically changing my life with these tutorials.

Hey, Kenny! Great video! I discovered a way to get rid of all the ambient noise completely by combining this trick with another one. First, duplicate the track and flip the polarity. Place an 1176-style compressor on the polarity flipped track with fast attack and dial the release in to taste. This takes out most of the noise during and especially after the words. Next, build your noise profile with ReaFir and dial it in on one of the tracks with the other track muted. Finally, copy that ReaFir instantiation to the muted track just above the 1176 compressor and then unmute it. No background noise! Hope this helps everyone 😊

im throwin away all my mixing daws for reaper, man, i learned it in school but i always thought it was cheap and the expensive stuff was better, smh after all these years finally seeing the answer was in my face

Mr. Gioia, great tutorial as usual. I can't praise your tutorials work enough. I only discovered you this month, Dec. 2016, but the effect of learning from you is phenomenal. As an old school keyboard player from "way back" I've been appreciating the fact you're a musician as well as an engineer. I've known about REAPER for over 10 years from friends who used it. I recently bought it as a way to more directly collaborate with a partner of mine. I was amazed to see how far REAPER has evolved and I decided to get into it 100%. Now that I've discovered "Kenny Mania" it has completely revolutionized my studio situation. I've had a multitrack studio here at my house since 1977. Many machines have come and gone since then. I'm on my 15th and 16th studio computers now, but this change to REAPER represents a step forward, especially with Kenny Gioia helping me over the learning curves I have to deal with! Thank you, sir!

Great video - I use this technique a lot to clean up old tapes when digitising. A handy addition to this is to create another track and add a send from the original track to it, full signal, pre-fx. Then invert the phase on track 2 (or invert the phase via the send) and what you hear is what's being removed from the signal by reafir. Very similar to the 'difference' button in Waves X-Noise. It can be handy to audition how much musical content is being removed in addition to the noise. Just need to make sure that reafir is the only active plugin and that the two tracks are at the same volume/panning or you'll hear those differences as well when the inverted track is active. Thanks Kenny for posting this.

I'm new to reaper. bought it bout 3weeks ago after using Sony acid pro for bout 8 yrs and I just wanted to thank u sooner much bro. been watching ur videos for bout 2weeks now. thought the learning curve was goin to be horrible and tedious but I really have to say....for the knowledge u know bout reaper u have helped me out 10x fold. thanks again.

Thank you so much for this info! I didn't realize you could adjust the red line using the ctrl key. I've been struggling the past two days to balance my noise removal with reafir without having that robotic tone. Much appreciated!!

If I may, there is a way to diminish the gargling sound. To do this you make a duplicate of the track without any plugin. You then insert an expander that is setup pretty aggressive, so that the back ground noise is ducked quickly between the words. Then you blend in this track ever so slightly. This material will fill in the blanks in the gargling sound and attenuate the gargling effect.

I think ReaFIR-type noise reduction is based on gating at each (eg of 1024) frequency-range/bin/bucket. So when a voice utterance happens to open a gate, that lets in not only the voice but also any noise in that range. If the noise is distinctive, the ear hears it gating in and out, it sounds weird. That’s another reason for leaving some of the noise (in addition to avoiding the robot voice) - so the contrast (gates opened/closed) is not so obvious (even if the noise itself is). This is why I ended up using 200 or so notches instead for cleaning up mains-buzzy audio (for a client’s own recording).

Hi Kenny, you uploaded this video in 2015 and I'm still using it today. Thank you so much. You are the best! Hal

This is great. I knew about this technique for years now but didn't have much luck with it. Now I know what to expect from it and might use it instead of RX4 on occasion.

Sometimes the noise is so quiet that we have to adjust the "analysis floor" before tweak the reduction levels.

This also loads as a VST into Cakewalk nicely. You provided a very clear use and demo of the free software. Thank you to Reaper and Kenny equally.

This shy little plugin surely can replace some shiny plugin bundles sometimes.

Love this tutorial - repeating the example a few times with different scenarios helps massively to embed the knowledge.

You just made the biggest difference in my recordings, holy shit, thank you.

oh my GOD you're a lifesaver. Couldn't figure out why I still had a hiss. Changed the settings to what you said and BOOM. Fixed.

Noise reduction built into Reaper.....It just gets better. Thanks for this useful video Kenny.

Brilliant stuff, Kenny. Many thanks.

Thank you Kenny. I have experienced a lot of robotic sounds due misuse of ReaFIR. The 1024 FFT resolution sounds like a good start, as I was working in the opposite direction (i.e., higher values).

Thanks so much for this. I appreciate the step-by-step instructions, and the repetition in four different scenarios was also really helpful.

Oh my god man you are my hero, it's so amazing, at last now I can hear the silence

omfg...i always used this plug in just to see what my peaks were doing...this is nuts.....thanks as usual for posting this...i use reaper for so many different things!!!....i got some film noir samples i wanna try and use this one to clean up a little bit...

Thank you for these. I have subscribed for a while now and casual lurker, but I sincerely do appreciate these. I have learned tips and tricks I never would have thought of otherwise. Thank You.

Just what I needed! Thank you! Great tutorial! Very helpful!

What an excellent video. Completely saved some piano and guitar tracks I thought would have to be re-recorded. Mucho thanks.

SWEEEET , I just used what you showed my to pull out most of my recording artifacts on a very spliced up bassline. Yes it effected the overall recording but its just rock and roll

Thank you, Just got Reaper few months ago, and my room i record has PC fan, AC blowing, and some times a slight hum / buzz from my Guitar tube amp. I do use a gate, but to keep it quite, i tend to clamp it down a bit to hard, this should do the trick.

Only 1.3k likes? This is a life saving video. Thanks!

Kenny is a gift to Humanity! Saved my ass more times than I can count!

Hi Kenny. It's me Jimmy SantAngelo from the Reaper Facebook Group. First I Love Your Videos. You're an EXCELLENT Teacher, next Thabks for Alk Your Help ! Next I knew of the ReaFir, but only the Basic subtract option noise removal, Holy Mackerel You just gave me an Advanced Course in that. ThankYou Again. GOD Bless You

The Reaper standard plugins are not very sexy, but they are of high quality and can very often do the job adequately. For the 50 Hz hum, maybe you can also try to remove it with the equalizer, given we know its exact frequency, it should be possible to remove that frequency without damaging the rest of the spectrum too much.

WOW! It also can be used as an alternative for noise gate for hi-gain guitars.

Kenny - geez! The best, the most thorough, expert Reaper resource out there - oft imitated, never duplicated :-)

Thank you for this precious tutorial REafir is a beast

This channel needs more subs. Thanks for this!

Thank you Kenny for this video. It worked perfectly for me! Keep doing the good work that you do!

Exactly what I needed to kill a 60hz hum on a guitar solo between notes. Thanks!

I wish that I could find someone to cover every product I use as well as you cover reaper. I watch your videos even if its not something I need to know just because you make such good videos. I did a tutorial on this that used automation to back off the noise reduction based on the amplitude of a track, works best in those situations like this one where the noise reduction really cuts into the dialog if up too high, but if you dial it down you still hear it too much in quiet parts. So the automation lets you have max noise reduction in the quiet parts, then back off when you talk to not mess up audio, kind of like how a compressor works. II made that so long ago, I have to assume I probably learned that technique from you at some point.

Awesome. I'm a total newbie in recording. This worked a treat. Thanks so much!

Better then so many plugins I tried! Used on acoustic guitar and it's amazing!

Thank you so much for this! I knew it was this plug-in I needed to use, but completely forgot how to use it. Thanks again.

Hi there, thanks for this video. I recorded some classical guitar over microphone and noticed the hiss too late. The method you explain identified and eliminated the noise. Excellent, very useful.

How are you moving that up and down though?

Amazing. Helped a lot. Thanks

Grazie 1000 Kenny!

That is the one thing I liked about adobe Audition. You could just select a part with the just the hum and you could auto remove all the hum and that was built into audition. I am surprised that reaper hasn't got this out of the box

bro this technique is really usefull. now my audio is cleaner than before. thanks !

thank you Kenny

Just come back to this vid after one of my studio amps got a bit noisy (probably needs a valve change) and ReaFir and Kenny have come to the rescue again. Most people wouldn't notice the noise due to the tracks being downtuned HM-2 metal guitars, but there's a definite phasey computer noise in there. Well, there was...

Thanks Mr Walken

Good explanation, but I am missing a way how to move the noise profile by a specific amount and most important to reset it to the start position or to limit the movement not to get more reduction than needed.

Thank you man! Your videos are awesome!!

man you have saved me so much hassle , thank you so much

Thank you very much for sharing this tutorial! Simple and helpful, solved my problem in a matter of few minutes! Much appreciated!

It works really good, thank sir!

So easy to understand and completely useful! Thanks a lot for your video!

Thanks for this. And Reaper for making a such a cool plugin. I got a mixer lately and it's adding some noise. Not anymore.

Gracias, Arigatou, Danke, Thanks.

Life savior

Awesome video

Is there a way to get rid of the processing sound you hear after doing this? Could you use another instance of the same plugin and get rid of that since it would be a smaller amount of frequency reduction?

Thank You Kenny VERY MUCH for this priceless technique. This is great. Regards.

So good - Thanks for all your tutorials !!

you the best Kenny!

great video, helped a lot.

Amazing video! Thank you so much :)

I want to use this on some old Benny Goodman recordings because there is a lot of noise in them. I will use it on my guitar recordings in the future also.

THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!

Thank you !! This really help me.

Thanks - it was a really good video. My only problem is that I supose that expereriment wasn't conducted properly, cause first you mixed clean record with noice (before video) and then subtracted. I may be wrong.

Great video man. Definitely helped me with my voice recordings and actually helped clear up my instrument recordings as well. I subbed my friend =)

7:13 it's almost more distracting with the noise reduction. Using a combination of plugins may help in those "tricky" cases.

Nice! Thanks again!

this video is a diamond! thank you for the knowledge

Thank you 🙏

The most valuable thing I learned was: "It's not perfect, but it's much better"

I'm getting a hum when I use any amp in Reaper. When I place my hands on the strings it almost goes away. How do I make that go away?

Amazing ! Thake you so much!

Brilliant, will try it now. Thank you!

Hey Kenny, Awesome tutorial as always. I'm wondering if you can do a follow-up on Reafir using the Convolve L+R mode. I don't really understand what that mode's supposed to do. A quick example would be quite helpful. Thanks!

I got my sound profile but I don't know how to drag the entire line up and down. I try to drag and it only takes a small part of the line and bends it up and down

Thanks for the video. I was struggling with my audio getting distorted with reafir and couldn't figure it out. I turned down my FFT size and that seemed to help a lot. If I turn off my fans while recording it's get unbearably hot in my room.

NICE - this helped out a shitload!

U tha man kenny thx!

Thanks!

What happens if the voice is always affected by wind sound and voice is like whistling because the person recorded it using the Mobil phone microphone so close and that repeats all the audio track. How to remove the buzzing? Thanks in advance

This is a lot easier of a process on Cool Edit Pro. Just select noise area...load profile...exit...select whole track...apply

Yo Kenny, awesome vid. May I ask though, is it better to loop a longer section of noise or a shorter one? Is there any difference?

Thanks for the video! I tried to use this with my acoustic guitar recording but after taken it into use, the guitar recording sounded very bad. Does anyone have any tips for reducing noise without the sound quality getting worse in an acoustic guitar recording?

thanks so much man

thank you. very helpful

Thx Kenny. Your tutorials are super. I got this Reafir to work once, but now when I slide the spectrum up and down nothing is happening to the noise or the vocal. I think I followed your clear steps to a tee, but the subtraction does not seem to be subtracting. I built the noise profile on a section of noise, then unchecked "Aoutomatically build...", clicked Play, then slid the spectrum up & down while holding down the Ctrl button. Nothing. Very confused. Can you suggest something?

Thanks for the tutorial. Works great!

thank you so much for this gold tutorial!!!

thans very useful video

Thanks a lot bro

Why doesn’t my reafir graph read my laptops loud fan?