How can I remove chit-chat from phone video?

TheBigDipper

I did a 30min set last Saturday, and some of it was filmed by a friend, using their phone and the phone mic. It wasn't planned that someone captured what I was doing. They just decided to do it. 

The audio has lots of spill from the audience - it was a pub, and I didn't manage to interrupt everyones conversations with my stunning performance. :-)

I've exported the audio track from the clip and dropped it into Logic Pro. The stem splitter isolated the guitar really well, but the vocal track still contains the audience vocals. I know I can silence the vocal audio when I'm not singing, but it's still very noticeable on the bits where I am.

Any suggestions how I can clean it up? Any magic plugins I should know about?

Ta! 

Stratavarious

Can your record your live sound from the mixer?  Synch it / mix it after?  

You can also often use an interface with a phone and get the desk or a better mic audio too instead of the internal mic which is often compressed and EQ’d for speech frequencies, 

andy_k

Maybe try a duplicate track, with some fairly extreme eq / compression / gate FX, and blend it in parallel with the original- to maybe reduce the effect of intrusion.
I have Izotope RX6, which can do some basic denoise, but in this case, maybe aggressive eq can help - and edits.

TheBigDipper

Stratavarious said:

Can your record your live sound from the mixer?  Synch it / mix it after?  

You can also often use an interface with a phone and get the desk or a better mic audio too instead of the internal mic which is often compressed and EQ’d for speech frequencies, 

Thanks, but it wasn't a question about how I would record it if I wanted a decent recording. I'm fairly comfy about that! :-) I use iMovie to edit video. Extracting audio or introducing new audio into clips is pretty easy with that (for my needs, at least). I usually drop audio files into Logic for any processing and then drag them back in later. 

This time, my mate just got his phone out on the night in an unpremeditated way and shot it whilst I was playing. It was a good performance that I was proud of. I'm trying to rescue the sound on the recording, that's all. 

idiotwind

If you've got a vocal stem from the splitter there are other models that can work to clean that up.  I like to use mvsep.com - it's free and they have a good choice beyond basic splitting.  There are ones like Crowd Removal or Lead/Backing Vocal splitters that might give you a cleaner stem for the vocal

Keefy

Maybe put the audio into Moises and split it vocal-guitar-other? Then export vocal and guitar, hopefully with much less chat (other).

TheBigDipper

Keefy said:

Maybe put the audio into Moises and split it vocal-guitar-other? Then export vocal and guitar, hopefully with much less chat (other).

You can do this within Logic, and I have. It did a great job of isolating the guitar - which sounds really good and has no chat. The vocals include all the chat! I can edit and clean up the times when I'm not singing, and have a gentle transition in and out of vocal regions, but the chat is still there and very obtrusive. 

I'll give Moises a go, though, in the hope it is smarter than Logic Stem Splitter. 

idiotwind said:

If you've got a vocal stem from the splitter there are other models that can work to clean that up.  I like to use mvsep.com - it's free and they have a good choice beyond basic splitting.  There are ones like Crowd Removal or Lead/Backing Vocal splitters that might give you a cleaner stem for the vocal

Will research this in hope rather than expectation. 

Thanks, both! 

TheBigDipper

Sadly, neither did any better than Logic Pro Stem Splitter. I guess there's enough clear speech on the recording (rather than generic crowd murmur) that it just can't tell the difference. 

Oh well... 

Stratocosta

you may try this:

https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/sonible-primevocal

https://www.sonible.com/primevocal/