Audio Difficulties

[Brett Underberg-davis]

I’d start with audio compression. I tend to use the Track Compressor plug-in, but you can also do compression via the Graphic Dynamics plug-in. Either one allows you to toggle Auto gain compensation too — review the effect to decide if it helps or hinders.

If you have other audio elements in the mix you may want to have your recording of his voice on a separate track, so the plug-ins are limited to just the problem audio.

If your experience messing with audio is limited, the best option is to start off by applying the system presets for each plug-in and listening to their effect in preview. The more you play with it, the more you’ll learn what tends to affect what, and looking for potential solutions will become easier. Also, be sure once you’ve found an approach you like to save both any custom presets you make for individual plug-ins and also save your finished plug-in chain so you can call it up for re-use should you run into a similar challenge again.

Chances are you’ll need to add some band pass filters to reduce ambient noise, if the speaking voice is competing with any kind of ambient noise, which sounds likely to be the case. Depending on the nature of that noise the Track Noise Gate plug-in can also come in handy in some cases.

Explore the other standard plug-ins as well, you may find that some of them have presets that will help compensate for much of the noise the subject’s voice might be buried in. It’s hard to suggest specific plug-ins without some idea of what the particular challenges are in the audio (there might be very different kinds of background noise, for instance, fighting for attention on any given track where the spoken voice seems muddy).

But ExpressFX Audio Restoration and Multi-Band Dynamics (MBD) are two that I would also take a look at. The presets in MBD include several that can be useful for moderating defects in speech, especially if you find that you have to exaggerate one part of the frequency spectrum and kill many others to get an effect where the speech is what comes to the fore.

Good luck exploring the possibilities!