In this tutorial, Shaun Whynacht demonstrates a straightforward method for eliminating a subtle room hum from an audio recording using Adobe Audition. He begins by explaining how ambient noise, such as the sound of an air exchange unit in a boardroom, can be inaudible to the human ear but become prominent when captured by a microphone. He advises recording a few seconds of silence (ambient room noise) to create a "noise print". The workflow proceeds with highlighting the ambient section, navigating to Effects → Noise Reduction → Capture Noise Print, then applying the Noise Reduction Process to the entire file. Shaun shows how to use the "Output Noise Only" preview to match the reduction level (green line) with the original signal (yellow line), ensuring the hum is removed without degrading the speaker’s voice. He notes that because the hum occupies a different frequency range than speech, the reduction typically does not affect vocal quality. After applying the effect, the audio sounds clean and studio‑like. The video concludes with a reminder to record ambient noise for future projects and a call to subscribe to the Blue Cow Marketing YouTube channel.
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And welcome to this video. What I want to show you in this video is a very easy way using Adobe Audition to remove some ambient background noise in a room. Now, I had a client who sent me this file. They were doing a recording in their office boardroom. Now, in the corner of their boardroom, in the ceiling, is an air exchange unit. So there's a slight hum that happens in the room. Most likely you're not aware of it when you come in by the human ear because either you're so used to it or you just don't hear that frequency. But when you turn on the microphone, it is her. Now here is just the sample file that they sent over to me, and I'll just play it for you, and you'll be able to hear that hum when she stops talking about right here. Okay, okay. Hear that hum? There's a little bit of an exhale in her voice there, but that's okay. That's the only part in this file where there's actually a hum. So what I recommend is anytime you're doing a recording, if there is a slight hum in the room, or you know there's going to be, record a couple seconds of just what you would consider silence. Nobody talking, but it's just picking up the ambience in the room. And the reason for that is we're gonna be using a feature of noise reduction here in Adobe Audition to be able to remove that from the frequencies of the actual recording. So the first thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna highlight just that ambient section. And we're gonna go up to Effects, Noise Reduction, and capture what's called a noise print. Okay, get a little popup, click okay, perfect. Now, what I'm going to do, I'm just going to highlight and remove everything before that anyway. We're going to select the whole file and now we're going to come back up to effects, go back to noise reduction, and then we're going to go to noise reduction process. Now in here, this was from when I previously did this, but let's just say, let's just put this back to where it would have been reset. Here, when you come in here, it'll probably look something like this. Now, one of the things that you can do is you can check this little box that says Output Noise Only, and when you press play, you're going to hear the noise and some of her frequency of her talking. Hello there, it's the Apple lady who's broadcasting to bring you sweet— Okay, what you want to do is you want to pull these up till that green is in line and matching the yellow part. Okay, now depending on the voice and the tone of the person that is actually talking, you know, if they have a really high frequency and it's a high pitch, sometimes it'll actually take so much out of the voice that when you play it back with it removed, it sounds a little weird. In this case, and in most cases, that's not going to be a problem because the hum is such a different frequency than the human voice. So now if I go ahead and I turn off that output noise and I just hit play, this is what it would sound like if the noise reduction has been processed. Okay, so very silent. When we listen to like this section right here, there's a bit of silence when she talks. You can't hear that noise anymore. Right? Very studio quality there. Now I'm going to go ahead and click apply. Now watch. This is the noise up here, the little rough section. It will suppress, right? Almost a flat line, almost complete silence. So what we want to do here is we want to now listen to it. Hello there, it's the Apple lady who— Right? Sounds much better than having that hum in the file. So again, record a section of ambient room Use that as your noise print, and then use the noise reduction after you've captured it to pull those frequencies out of the recording, and you'll have a cleaner, nicer-sounding recording in your room. If you like this video, please subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com/bluecowmarketing. We're happy to bring these videos to you. Thanks, have a great day.
