Filter sounds with an air component

Hi all,

I am referring to sounds that have a part of blown air, such as flute, pan flute, whispered voices.
Since I use MIDI sounds, I’ll give this example: “Pan Pipe” instrument in ZynAddSubFX.
Is there a way to remove the part of the sound and leave only the blown air noise component?
If it’s not possible to do it directly within this plugin, is there a way to do it by adding other plugins? (This would extend the possibility to any audio file.)

I tried using an equalizer, but it doesn’t give good results.

[Ardour 8.1 on Linux]
Thank you,
a.

Are you using synthesized instrument plugins? If you are synthesizing the instrument sounds, and not working with audio which is already recorded, then probably modifying the patch of the synthesizer would give the best results. That doesn’t work of course if the audio is already recorded, or if you are using samples.
So more details about the constraints you have would be useful to give you the best advice.

Exactly, the one I mentioned above, but I don’t know how to modify the patch to achieve this effect.
a.

Probably asking in the zynaddsub forums would be a faster way to get advice on modying the included sounds.
I would not have a chance to look into that patch for a few days, but in general most synthesized instruments like that will have an oscillator for the noise component and an oscillator for the tonal component, and you may be able to just turn off the tonal oscillator.
Different synthesis styles (additive vs. subtractive vs. wavetable vs. FM etc) have different ways of achieving similar types of sounds, so at some level you have to understand how the synthesizer works, but the general approach would be the same: figure out which settings are producing the noise component and which are producing the tonal component, and turn down or off the settings for the tonal aspect of the sound.

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Since you can’t get good results with regular EQ, I suggest you try this option from AirWindows. It’s meant to control high frequencies in a more specialized way. Watch the video explaining how to use it.
https://www.airwindows.com/air4/

Start by disabling the additive synth engine, it is only contributing tonal sounds based on sine waves.
Next open the subtractive synth engine, and see what changes to the bandwidth settings get what you want. I found that increasing the bandwidth just slightly, and decreasing the bandwidth scale very slightly gave a breathy sound with just a slight pitch component. Increasing the bandwidth more gave more of a gated noise sound.

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