Hello Folks;
My apologies for disappearing.
Thank you all, very much, for your knowledge I very much appreciated it.
I've spent a good deal of time hunting down noise, re-arranging gear, and moving my rig around the house. My conclusion is: I've got noise, and there's not a lot I can do about it. The best solution I've found is to keep the bass as far away from my Fractal and Macbook Pro as I can.
Knowing that sometimes I gotta belly up to my gear, here's how I'm addressing the problem:
- I bought a speaker stand to place the Fractal unit on. I lowered the Fractal unit so that the electronics on my bass don't get too close to the screen.
- Put my laptop on a laptop stand on top of the Fractal, to prevent the electronics on my bass from getting too close to my laptop.
Here are some more details, in the hopes that y'all will find it useful.
I've three sources of noise:
- My laptop screen
- The Fractal screen
- An annoying grounding buzz that mostly goes away when I touch the strings or the electronics on the bass
So, as long as I'm touching my bass and the bass' electronics don't get too close to the Fractal screen or the the laptop screen, I'm good.
I also find that the more activity on either the Fractal screen or the laptop screen, the more noise my bass electronics pick up and re-broadcast into the signal chain.
Here are some of the experiments I've run to deal with the noise:
- Routed audio as such: Fractal -> Ableton running a noise filter plugin -> Fractal
I tried every noise filter plugin I could trial. Some worked better than others, but all took the meat out of my tone.
I could find no good way to bolster my tone once it returned to the Fractal.
- In the Fractal, used a Crossover block to split the noisy signal out to the right channel. I then ran the right channel through Ableton to filter out the noise.
In this case, whilst the left channel with the lower frequencies was good, the upper frequencies again were badly abused by the noise filter plugins
- In the Fractal, used a Crossover block to split the noise signal out the the right channel and try used a Parametric EQ to lessen the noise presence.
This was a better solution sonically. However, the removal of the high end was not to my taste. This approach may work for you
- Used a multi-band compressor to filter out the noise in the higher end of the spectrum.
This didn't work as well as using a Parametric EQ and a Crossover block, but could work for light amounts of noise
- Used two filter blocks in parallel to separate the low frequencies, and the noisy upper frequencies
This didn't work very well at all. I could not fashion a sharp enough slope between the lower and upper frequencies to provide a decent tone
- Using the Tone Matching block, I created an IR of the noise sound and then loaded that IR into the Cab block.
This was the "mad scientist" approach. I was hoping by swapping the phase of the IR I might be able to affect some "subtractive convolution" - if such a thing exists. It didn't work at all.
So, again, my best solution is to keep the electronics of my bass as far away from the Fractal screen and the laptop screen as possible.
It's not perfect, but at least it's the cheapest solution.
Vittorio