Noise filter on high-gain instrument

[vomitHatSteve]

So I was recording some bass, and decided to go for a really gritty, high gain thing. I ran into an interesting conundrum.

My noise floor was very high. Specifically, my noise floor really started to cut through during fades and mutes. Normally, this isn't a problem; I just comp, cut, and quantize like all good modern metal kids. But I also wanted some fades building into feedback, which meant there were distinctly noisy sections that needed to be handled a little more smoothly

Ok. Plan B: use reafir. Get a section of just noise floor, and build a noise profile in subtract mode. Interestingly, this created newer, more unusual issues. It started to add quiet bursts of static throughout the quiet parts instead. I also started hearing an unusual click sound (it's not the metronome; it has nothing to do with the timing of the song)

You can hear my results in the attached zip: I have the silent section I used for the noise. A track template with a few examples of reafir profiles. The original audio. And the filtered audio.

Noisy-highgain-bass.zip

Any recommendations for better solutions?

[rayc]

Reafir is pretty good but, just by watching its filter graph in action, does a lot of reactive jumping.
The way I get around this is to track cleanish bass, put a distortion plug on a sep. track, send the bass signal to it and automate that track so it's not making noise when I don't want it & blend the two.
I listened and, honestly, they don't sound too bad. The ReaFir filters look a bit aggressive - it's mainly bottom end.
No solution from me sorry.

[vomitHatSteve]

The way I get around this is to track cleanish bass, put a distortion plug on a sep. track, send the bass signal to it and automate that track so it's not making noise when I don't want it & blend the two.

That makes sense. One of the reasons I wanted to track dirty was so that I could get the actual feedback of the speaker into the bass.

Fortunately, I do have a clean DI, so I can try adding post FX to see if that helps.

[JD01]

This sounds way beyond my pay grade.