Processing interview vocals, recommended steps, sequences and best practices

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Probably best to pick up a book like https://www.amazon.com/Mixing-Audio-Second-Concepts-Practices/dp/0240522222/ref=pd_sim_b_2 because there is so much mixed information online.

https://audio.tutsplus.com/ isn’t a bad resource either.

Generally, when looking at a dialog track, I do the following:
— Look at the general structure. Is there a lot of noise or a little noise, are there steep peaks in volume or does the speaker use even diction and volume, and so on.

— If the audio is really chewed up (audio is close to the noise floor) I’ll normalize the peaks to zero so I have some working room for noise removal, compression and re-normalization.

–Depending on how heavy you process, do noise reduction, eq, multiband compression, and then reverb. There are no hard and fast rules but it’s a signal chain I like. I prefer to do everything that affects volume heavily before compression… you’ll also find people who like to compress the signal during recording (mostly in a controlled studio setting).

[Jim Bachalo]

Thanks!
Yes I’ve found that compressors in Audition are your best friend. Also I prefere NOT to normalize but to amplify instead because normalizing 2 different tracks with different peaks will give you 2 tracks with different average volumes.
Also need to keep reminding myself to boost the gain as much as possible without clipping when I record to help minimize the noise floor.

I’ve gotten some quite amazing results using only an inexpensive lav, removing noise, adding some compression eq and reverb to bring back some room presence.

Local is the new global