Eliminating vocal pops in Protools

In my last post I gave you guys a rundown on vocal pops and a couple of ways to avoid them when tracking vocals.  Unfortunately, plosives will sometimes rear their ugly heads during mixdown.  This can happen for several reasons, but if you come across one in your vocal track there is a way that you can fix it, or at the very least temper it to where it’s nearly unnoticeable.  Remember that a vocal pop is really nothing more than a loud, distorted low frequency burst, so we can essentially filter out the offending frequency.  This is where the wonderful world of non-real-time audio suite plug-ins really earns their keep.

First you have to identify the offending plosive in your vocal track.  It’s actually extremely easy to pinpoint, just listen for it, hit stop and zoom in to find the distorted waveform at the beginning of the phrase.

Once you’ve isolated the sucker, your next step is to highlight the portion of the waveform that is visibly distorted.  It’s also advisable to include a couple milliseconds before and after the plosive in your selection to make the eventual processing you’ll do sound smoother.

Now that your pop is selected in the timeline you need to go into your AudioSuite menu and select the very basic, EQ3 1-band.  Selecting the 1-band is important because your really only using it as a high-pass filter, any more bands are unnecessary and confusing for this operation.

In your EQ window, the first thing you want to do is change the type of filter to “high-pass”, 

which is the button that looks like a ramp going up.

Once you’ve done that you then need to select the cutoff frequency for your filter.  For vocals any frequency between 100Hz and 250Hz usually works best.  Anything above 250Hz won’t effect the pop, but will effect the overall sound of the vocal.  It’s important to experiment, as each one is different.  You can easily do this by clicking the speaker icon in the lower left hand corner of the window.  This will allow you to preview the processor on the track.

Now you’ve created a simple high pass filter that should eliminate your vocal pop.  After you’re satisfied with your settings you want to click render in order to apply it to the selected region of the track.

Once rendering is done, there will now be a new “processed” region created in the space of the old selection.  Your old clip will still be in your region or clip list if you need to recall it for any reason.  As you can see, your plosive is immediately better.  Listen to it a couple of times in the context of your mix to see how it sounds.  Hopefully this trick will alleviate some frustration when it comes to less-than-stellar vocal tracking.