Just wanted to update on my noise extermination journey.
Made some of these using Mogami 2524 and Neutrik NP2X-B ends (including one of the silent ends for the guitar input) from redco. I’m not sure I can tell a huge difference, but they feel very nice and they were fun to make!
After a lot of trial and error, I have found a method that allows me to get to unnaturally low levels of noise with, in my opinion, no difference in feel.
- guitar ->
- front of amp pedals (tuner and EQD plumes) -> front of amp
- amp fx send ->
- intellijel pedal i/o (this is similar to an active DI, it has a very high input impedance, also has a triode emulation apparently) to get to modular levels ->
- er-301 (which exhibits the hf digital noise issues when I try to put it in the guitar chain as mentioned here) ->
- RIP (this part probably isn’t super important, I could go out of the 301 directly with some attenuation) ->
- Interface ->
- Ableton (so ableton is basically getting a 301’d DI guitar signal. Within ableton, I’m using the ACON digitial denoise plugin, which is basically an FFT EQ based on a noise profile that you can set the reduction curve with an FFT) ->
- Interface out to DIYRE L2A reamp box (ground lift here is important) ->
- Reverb/Delay pedals.
This is obviously a very complicated and specific setup, but I’ve learned some lessons that I think that could be more generically applied:
- Don’t muck with a bunch of weird stuff in front of the amp. The front of the amp and preamp tubes are where a lot of the real feel of the amp comes from. Even in terms of pedals, keep that part of the chain as light as possible.
- Using FFT-based noise reduction works best on DI’d guitar signals. If you try to do it after reverb you get artifacts and you definitely can’t get as aggressive with it. You still need to be careful not to lose hf pick attack, but you can sweep around with the emphasis curve and figure out what needs to be present to give you that. A cool thing about having it in the effects loop of the amp is that you can get rid of the natural hf “white noise” that’s just generally present with tubes that would be amplified by the power amp section (so thus my mention of this method being “unnaturally quiet”…but IMO not in a bad way).
- If you’re interface has a “zero”-latency mode (like monitoring through UAD console, or RMEs totalmix, or whatever) you can switch between monitoring out of that (so bypassing the noise reduction) so that there’s no awkward latency when recording, while being able to do a second pass of the DI’d signal you recorded in ableton through the noise reduction.
- Impedance matching is important. Trying to use a passive DI (i.e. RIP) going into the synth from the guitar signal was getting me this real dull sound I couldn’t fix with any sort of eq. You could probably figure out some sort of active front end in pedal format (maybe some sort of preamp pedal) in lieu of the intellijel pedal i/o.
I hope these ideas are helpful for anyone who tries to go on this journey.
