The room was wrong, and the session could not be repeated
We decided how much of the room to keep.
The situation
A crew from the London Contemporary School of Piano filmed a series inside Blüthner's piano factory: a building made for building instruments, not for recording them. Large, hard surfaced, and generous about giving sound back to you slightly late. The schedule could not slip, and nothing could be filmed a second time.
The decision
The straightforward route is a noise reduction plug in: set a threshold, let it run across the whole take, move on.
We took a longer one. The room noise was isolated onto its own track, aligned in phase and start point with the original recording, and then dosed by automation, decided passage by passage rather than set once.
Why
Because the room is part of the recording. On a channel that teaches piano, room sound carries the size of the space and the fact that someone is playing an object inside it. Strip it out and nobody writes to complain; they simply stop hearing a room with a person in it. A threshold separates by noise print rather than by meaning, so the character of the room goes with it.
Because the performance moves. When the teacher moves into improvisation, the posture changes and the speaking voice lifts with it. A fixed setting cannot follow that: calibrate it for the quiet explanation and it overworks the louder passage. The right amount of intervention had to change as the take did.
Because of who is watching. This audience tends to be older, and many are involved with music themselves, which makes them more likely than most to notice detail. That sets the standard: an attentive viewer should find nothing to correct.
The mechanism
Automatic noise reduction hands the decision to an algorithm. An isolated noise track hands it back to the editor, and lets the decision change as the recording changes.
What the result sounds like
A room with a person in it. Which is what it was.
One decision from a partnership with the London Contemporary School of Piano, now in its fourth year.
The free preliminary audit is where every partnership starts. We do not quote before we have looked. Request yours.
Keep reading
This is a service, and the method is written down.
Everything above came out of doing the work rather than writing about it. If you want the method instead of the story, it runs in order on one page.
Start with a free audit
Tell us where your content is now. We will come back with what we would change and what result to expect.
A person reads the channel and writes the audit by hand: a considered read typically takes three working days. That is the usual shape, not a promised turnaround. We use these details only to reply to you: no lists, no lurking.
What you will get
A fit snapshot: where your channel stands, and whether we are a match.
Two to three opportunities: specific, prioritised, yours to keep.
A recommended next step, even if that step is not us.
The audit is free and commits you to nothing: nobody follows up with a call you did not ask for.