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Music creators habitually record their ideas into their phones. It’s comforting to know that all the musical snippets you may want to revisit are in your pocket, but if you’re just using your phone’s basic built-in audio recorder, the ever-growing list of ideas can be intimidating to unravel. This is why more songwriters opt for smarter apps like BandLab Studio to organise and store their creativity.

Having your instrumental and vocal ideas in one place is much more efficient than singing into the void. But a noisy vocal recording can easily take you out of your flow state while making music. The distracting environmental sounds won’t match the pristine sonic quality of the virtual instruments you’re working with. Suddenly, the mood is ruined.

BandLab Studio’s Denoise feature is a helpful tool to snap vocals into focus. But when it comes to vocal isolation, it’s the new AI Voice Cleaner that’s hard to beat. It removes ambience from recordings so that you can adapt even the roughest phone-recorded vocals into your mix.

Testing different environments

As the holiday season is already in motion, many musicians hope to travel with a compact, portable setup. This was me on Thanksgiving week, as I left New York to visit my in-laws in Milwaukee. Though I didn’t plan to work every day, I wanted to be able to capture moments of inspiration on my phone. With so many distractions in and around the house, I had small windows of opportunity to do so.

Away from the chatter, I found some peace in the bathroom to record a verse I had in mind. With droplets of water and plenty of natural reverb, the environment was less than ideal to record in.

But this is where the Voice Cleaner shines. Using my earbud microphone, I recorded the part into the BandLab Studio app on my phone. One tap on the resulting audio clip, and the Voice Cleaner option comes right up, with three options to choose from: Noise Remover, DeReverb, and AutoEQ.

This was my first time using Voice Cleaner, so I left the AutoEQ switch off at first. All I had to do was select Apply to separate my voice from the rumble and echoes bouncing off the tiles. My vocals sounded clean and dry with very minimal artefacts. Intrigued, I ran the Voice Cleaner again, this time switching only AutoEQ on. Now, each word was crisper and clearer.

Here’s the process, step by step.

Having heard what the Voice Cleaner is capable of, I wanted to challenge it further by turning the bathroom fan on. Despite the loud noise, the Voice Cleaner differentiated my voice from its surroundings. It was a bit grainier compared to the earlier version, but it was still usable as a scratch vocal in a demo track.

Denoise vs AI Voice Cleaner

BandLab Studio’s AI tools are available with a Membership, but you can still benefit from the regular Denoise feature in the free version of the app.

Denoise can reduce the volume of consistent interference, like an AC running in an acoustically treated room. Try it on vocals that you recorded outdoors, and it’ll fall short.

To compare, I re-recorded the same verse on a balcony by the river. In the following video, you’ll hear the raw recording, as well as how Denoise and Voice Cleaner each processed the vocals.

There was plenty of wind, as well as boats and cars passing by. Might Denoise work better indoors? Let’s run the test again, this time in the kitchen, with the water running in the background.

Evidently, Denoise can suppress some noise. But it can’t eliminate all types of noise and reverb.

Taking mobile recordings to the next level

Although it’s as close to a miracle-worker as you can get, there are challenges even Voice Cleaner can’t overcome.

While recording another take in a separate room, the earbud microphone picked up the family dog’s barks in the background. With Voice Cleaner, I managed to erase one of them. But the other bark, though muffled, was still there. Would I use the voice-cleaned version over the original take, though? Absolutely.

Organised creativity, stored in the cloud

My biggest takeaway from this experiment is that with BandLab’s Voice Cleaner, any vocal recording can find a place in your productions.

In a basic voice memo app, you can’t record to a click, and importing a voice memo into a DAW and building a track around it requires a significant amount of effort. Before you can focus on the instrumentation or what comes next in the song, you’ll first have to quantise the recording. Then, you’ll have several stages of EQ, noise suppression, gating, and audio editing to look forward to.

That’s a lot of work for a scratch vocal that may not even appear in the final version of a song.

Now, imagine opening up BandLab Studio from the get-go instead. Maybe you already have a few chords in mind, so you write the notes in on a synth track. Maybe you look into the vast collection of BandLab Sounds to find a sample to start your song with. Maybe you grab a full instrumental from BandLab Beats to keep your focus on your songwriting process.

Next, you record your melodic and lyrical ideas on the grid. You hit Voice Cleaner, which gives you a clean slate to mix your vocals into the instrumental. You confidently run your voice through AutoPitch, apply a vocal FX preset, or build your own chain with EQ, compressor, reverb, and delay.

Because BandLab Studio files get stored in the cloud, you have access to your sessions on your smartphone, tablet, and computer. An idea you start on the road can quickly turn into a fleshed-out arrangement before you get back home. By combining the power of Voice Cleaner with a USB microphone, you can even achieve studio-quality vocals you’ll want to keep forever.

No matter how you use it, you’ll always be ahead of the details that hinder your creative output with Voice Cleaner.

The post How to remove background noise from your vocals within seconds using BandLab’s Voice Cleaner appeared first on MusicTech.