Recorded distorted D.I. output and what to do about it.

[UpTilDawn]

I've ended up with a distorted bass D.I. track or two from this Summer's festival recording. It appears that the amp, the bass, or just the whole rig decided to begin spitting on the low tones and hard attacks for a couple of sets.

Aside from EQ that might destroy the sound of the bass (mostly upright bass), would anybody have any suggestions as to how I might get rid of it, or at least diminish it to the point of being a non-issue? Any neat toys around lately that can handle this sort of job in a software plug-in, maybe?

Fortunately, that's the only real issue we ran into this year!

[Bob L]

Short of trying some of the clipping plugins... you can manually clean up clipping nicely by creating a copy of the distorted wav file at a -3db level... then opening it into the soundfile view and zooming all the way in to the sample edit mode... now while holding the shift-key and left mouse button use a smooth sweeping motion over the clipped areas to draw a smooth properly arced curve where the flat topped waveforms are.

It is a tedious procedure, but cleans up the sound very nicely.

Bob L

[cgrafx]

You could also try something like this: http://www.sonuus.com/products_b2m.html and post process the bass to a midi track and overlay a midi bass.

[UpTilDawn]

Short of trying some of the clipping plugins... you can manually clean up clipping nicely by creating a copy of the distorted wav file at a -3db level... then opening it into the soundfile view and zooming all the way in to the sample edit mode... now while holding the shift-key and left mouse button use a smooth sweeping motion over the clipped areas to draw a smooth properly arced curve where the flat topped waveforms are.

It is a tedious procedure, but cleans up the sound very nicely.

Bob L

I've successfully used this method to clean up clipped audio many times and while it is very tedious at times, I really like the results. it's saved many tracks for me.

I've wondered about whether or not it could be helpful in situations where a track is distorted, but not actually clipped. The bass output was distorting at the source, but not at the recording preamp input. I will experiment on a copy of the track to see if I might smooth out the sound a bit anyway, I think. It's not constant, so maybe it can help at the worst points. I suspect that it would affect the tone somewhat as well, but maybe won't be so noticeable on single notes.

[UpTilDawn]

You could also try something like this: http://www.sonuus.com/products_b2m.html and post process the bass to a midi track and overlay a midi bass.

I can see a lot of uses for this! I hadn't heard of it before. Thanks for the link.
I just discovered the Fishman Triple Play too, as a result of the link - The guitar player in me wants new gadgets!!

It's given me a couple of other ideas to try to fix this bass track as well, where I might not need to use a physical device to 'reamp' the track.

[UpTilDawn]

I've used the iZotope D-Clip and/or Waves X-Crackle to tame some distortion in tracks.
The results aren't perfect, but it can make the original sound a lot better. A combo of that and Bob's suggestion of sample draw will clean it up.

I'm thinking of beginning my edit/mix sessions of the festival today with the two, or three maybe, sets where the problem exists. I hope you and Bob are right about using these d-clipping methods to smooth out these tracks, even though the recordings themselves are not clipped.

Waves X-Crackle - another alternative that shows promise... Maybe I have a suitable substitute around here.

[UpTilDawn]

So far, RX D-click is looking promising - taking out most of the distortion and not changing the overall tone in tests I've tried.

Just getting started though, so we'll see.