Techniques for using iZotope RX to keep your vocals clean
Hi, Jamie’s list-ers — I’m back!
Thanks for bearing with me in my absence; Shannon and I had a bonkers last month and a half or so. We were prepping for and then traveling to execute at a performing arts centers booking conference last week in New York City. It went great, and now we’re finally back home and settling in for a couple months of intense preparation as we spin up our 80s kids album cycle.
For people who are new to the list: you can expect this sort of cadence from me. There will be months where I write a lot, and there will also be months where my focus needs to be elsewhere. I am after all half of a married pair of working artists — and, in 2025, what that means for us is a lot of DIY touring and a lot of DIY business.
So with that said — onward! 🚀
Most of the people I work with record at home — which presents a common set of recurring issues with vocals.
Specifically: because the recording space in most homes isn’t usually in a room whose sound you would necessarily want to accentuate, and there’s typically some amount of home-related background noise, we tend to record vocals close to the mic, in order to maximize our signal-to-noise ratios as best we can.
And when you record vocals close to the mic … you get a lot of mouth noise!
I don’t know what your experience is, but for me personally, I can’t tolerate mouth noise on a recording. It draws me out of the story. It’s like I’m trying to pay close attention to something and someone keeps punching me in the arm. Impossible!
Before I could afford iZotope RX, I used to remove mouth noises by hand. As in, I would literally go into the waveform with the pencil tool and draw out the clicks. It took me hours, and there were some I just couldn’t get.
Eventually I got myself iZotope RX, and as soon as I did I realized that I should’ve gotten it much sooner — because it just works. Almost like magic! Without affecting the sound at all. I’ve saved myself literally thousands of hours of editing out mouth noise since acquiring it.
Here's my trick for using iZotope RX to get rid of mouth noises:
- I put the Mouth De-click plugin at the beginning of my vocal master bus, on the default setting.
… aaaaand, that's literally the entire trick. 😂 But my experience is that it catches about 98% of what I would want removed from any vocal — all the little lip smacks and spit sounds and general mouth movement-related garbage.
And then if there are individual other little clicks and pops that this general treatment doesn't catch, I use the De-click plugin destructively on the precise part of the waveform that needs it — usually with the sensitivity starting at more like 8 or so. I would say that I need to do this on maybe 20% max of the songs I work on, in a couple of places per song at most — the Mouth De-click plugin really does do almost all of the work.
Click — jamie