Did you know that the powerful Adobe Audition feature Adaptive Noise Reduction has been moved into Premiere Pro? You can use it to quickly and smartly find the “bad” noise in your audio track and neutralize it in an intelligent manner. We will also talk a little bit about the Mastering effect, but the bulk of this tutorial will be spent covering the ultra powerful and very useful Multiband Compressor which we can use to really add that element of “radio voice” to our vocal recordings, or just selectively boost or enhance very specific ranges of frequency in voice or music tracks. The more you learn about Multiband Compressor, the more I’m sure you will love it! Check out the video and drop a like on it if you feel so inclined!
Using the Multiband Compressor
In the video, I talk about using noise reduction to get rid of background noise and also using Mastering to tweak higher end sharpness of the sound, but let’s make no mistake about it, the star of this tutorial is Multiband Compression. This effect is powerful. You can find it in the Effects panel under Audio Effects. Drag it out onto your audio track and we’ll focus first on the Limiter. I like to set my margin to -3dB. This will ensure that my track will not exceed -3dB and therefore not peak to the point where we’re losing and clipping our audio.
Continuing Using the Multiband Compressor
After setting a limiter, we’ll begin using the four segmented slider areas in this dialog box. I like to typically reduce my Threshold to around -25dB, but this really all depends on how loud your audio is. If the audio monitor is spiking to -12, I’d be setting the Threshold somewhere between -12dB and -15dB in all likelihood. I would then either boost or decrease the gain depending on whether I want the lower sounds in that frequency range to be increased or decreased. I also like to keep my ratio at about 2:1, but do some google searching on how ratios work in the Multiband compressor–it can be difficult to understand–but once you understand it, it’s not that bad. The attack and release are not nearly as important if you’re just getting started with Multiband but think of them as a sort of fade in/fade out for when the Multiband compressor. Check out the video for more explanation and make sure you spend lots of time reading up on it online trying it out in your own projects!
Creating a Preset and Applying to Multiple Clips
Once we have our Noise reduction, Mastering, and Multiband Compressor settings just perfect, we can select all three effects in the Effect Controls panel by Cmd/Ctrl + click each one and then simply right-click and choose to save it as a preset. Give it a name and then any time you would like to use the preset, select one or multiple audio clips and drag the preset from the effects panel to quickly apply it across multiple audio clips. Please be sure to watch the full video at the top of this article for all the depth and details of what I do!
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