Why You Should Be Recording Room Tone Along With Sound Effects

I was recording different impacts and the recordings came out with a rather large noise floor. Now, whether this was me not realizing I had the gain turned up to high or was it just the microphones I was using. 

Whatever the reason, the only thing to do now is to get on with cleaning up the recordings so they're usable. 

A bit of a side tangent quickly, these kinds of mistakes are actually great in my mind. Making a mistake and learning from it means you’re not going to do it again, and that kind of experience is invaluable. So get out there on your own time and make mistakes! 

I don’t think I’ve met a sound designer / field recordist that at some point or another hasn’t wrestled a recording that has annoying birds or other world sounds that we don’t want in the finished product. 

So in today’s post we’re going to talk about white noise and room tones and how you can use the tools at your disposal to take your recordings to a more professional level. 

What is Room Tone?

If you’ve ever been on a film set or shadowed a production sound mixer you’ll often hear “Can we hold for room tone?” followed by a collective sigh from every other department on set.

Recording room tone is a short ambient recording of the session location. The recording should be of “Silence” of course this recording won’t actually be silent, but the most important thing is there’s no intrusive audio interrupting this tone.  

When recording dialogue or sound effects, you’re not only capturing the sound source but the reflections off any materials and the dimensions that are combined with any background sounds. That’s what makes the audible atmosphere of the recording. Even a well treated Foley studio or vocal booth will have some simulance of a noise floor. 

You’ll find that microphones have their own noise floor. Depending on the gain setting of your mixer it may also bring up the audible hiss of the preamp on the gear itself. The more you use and experiment with your gear the more you’ll understand it. 

What is White Noise?

White noise is all audible frequencies between 20hz to 20khz at equal intensity. It can originate from different sources, electronic equipment, background ambience. It’s often more noticeable during playback, and can affect the overall quality of the recording.

Why Recording Room Tone is Helpful

Production Sound Mixers and Dialogue editors are all familiar with what capturing room tone is. But It’s also helpful for sound effects recording, but for a different reason. It helps when mastering sound effects. 

The process of recording room tone assists when creating a noise profile. Noise profiles are best used for de-noising sounds. Why would this help with sound effects? Having clean source material to work with when sound designing will help avoid build ups of white noise which if left unaddressed can become problematic within a mix.  

It’s pretty easy to get caught up in the moment when recording sound effects as it’s often quick performances or rapid fire takes. Pre planned documentation will help take some of the stress away, but I’ll save that for another blog post. 

The results of these quick takes between sfx recording is there isn’t much free space for creating a decent noise profile. 

Why do sound effects editors need clean recordings?

Ah &@$% I Forgot To Record Room Tone

Don’t worry we can fix that! Go into the recording you have and pick out some points within the recording between the sound effects you were recording that are silent. Glue those together and boom, you have some room tone to work with. Although as stated above this method takes time and can be time consuming. 

Izotope RX has a module that can create a room tone. This was designed to help dialogue editors, and does work fairly well! 

However this artificial tone won’t really be helpful for extracting noise from recordings because it’s an artificial interpretation of the noise recreated by the learn software. So it won’t be as great as your own recording. 

Room Tone Indoors vs. Outdoors

Recording indoors will be a much 

Recording outdoors is more challenging. There’s more unknown variables for you to think about such as, a plane flying by overhead, car honking, sirens, distant people talking, birds chirping, and the list goes on. 

What Tools Can I Use To Clean Up My Recordings?

There are so many de noise plugins available for dealing with the noise floor of a recording to get rid of that pesky white noise. 

First, an EQ is your most powerful weapon within your editing arsenal. My favorite is Fabfilter Pro-Q 3, but if you're on a budget using Reaper (or whatever your DAW of choice is) native EQ will work just fine, it’s how you use the gear not the gear itself.