TC Electronic Sentry NR pedal

[lkingston]

I've been looking at noise supression pedals as a way of avoiding the step of reducing noise with an NR plugin on my DAW.

As I look, the most interesting of these seems to be the TC Electronic Sentry. Not only is it three rather than one band processing, but you can also edit at least on preset extensively with their Toneprint editor.

Does anyone have one of these? If so, have you edited (or called up) custom setups? Is it as good as it looks on paper?

Is there any other noise suppression pedal I should be considering instead?

Is this a good approach or should I be sticking to software NR in a DAW for the best results?

[YamahaGuy]

I have an MXR Noisegate. I seldom have to use it and it's on a board with about 8 pedals. TC makes great stuff and I really dig the Toneprint technology. Out of curiosity, what is your signal chain? Maybe there is a simpler fix. What exactly is causing the "noise?"

[runamuck]

I believe software will be a better tool, almost certainly. But what kind of noise problems are you having?

[lkingston]

The noise comes mainly from the mic part of my dual system pickup. I would say that it is more the kind of noise you would expect a mic to physically pick up than any sort of electronic noise. I play no-nails fingerstyle with a lot of dynamics coming from my fingers, so that raises the apparent noise floor more than it would for a strummer.

Another possibility would be to use mic modeling instead of the mic in the pickup for recording.

Yes, I could use a mic, but the noise floor of a miked guitar is quite a bit higher than what I am getting with the dual source pickup. When I record a miked guitar I always do NR in something like iZotope afterwards. It works well, but as in the case of the pickup, it is an extra step.

The main guitar I want to do this with is my Godin Doyle Dykes Multiac. Recording with it doesn’t sound completely acoustic, but it is a beautiful expressive sound that I really like and fits my style of playing. I am very happy with the sound I’m getting. I would just like to save a step.

[lkingston]

I found these screenshot of the editing program where you can program the NR presets. The first two are the computer editor, the third and fourth, the iPad editor. Either way I t looks pretty cool, with three band downward expanding and full adjustment of how it responds:

[lkingston]

Anyway, I have one on order. I’ll report back after I have a chance to test it out.

[lkingston]

Ok, I got the pedal. There is good news and bad news.

The good news is that the programming ability of this is really good. I have worked out a really useful three band NR program that helps immensely. I did it from my iPad and the app works really well and gives you what you need.

The bad news is that the TonePrint program that comes loaded in the pedal, and the various templates that come with it are astoundingly bad! I cannot imagine them being useful to anyone at all.

I am really happy with this, but I hate to recommend it because unless you are a tweaker, you’ll never hear what it can do.

[lkingston]

A few months in with this pedal and I must say that I really love it. I have it set for three band downward expanding type noise reduction, and it sounds about as good as loading the recorded parts into iZotope to get rid of the noise. Way easier though. Yeah, I’m happy!

[AlfredFelix]

So, I just got on here from a very, very long hiatus. I really appreciate you following up to show your opinions after you've had time with the pedal. I might end up grabbing one! Thanks for the update!