need help removing pedal squeaks from piano track

[joninc]

I recently recorded an artist who played very softly on the piano and had a habit of lifting the sustain pedal in the middle of long held chords. At the time it didn't catch my attention (sadly). Basically we're getting a little clicky/grindy sound with each lift and because it's not being done with the chord changes (right before a new chord is stuck like most players would use it) it's more audible and annoying.

Now I am being asked to remove as much of that pedal noise as possible in the mix and have been futzing around a little with Izotope RX4 trying to see what I can do to minimize the offending sounds... Seems like this is better used to go in and manually erase each one - there must be 100 in this song alone so that is not practical. It seems with things like hums and buzzes it's a lot easier to just find the offending sound and run a real time plug in that will eliminate that sound.

looking for audio repair help! plug in recommendations etc..

working in Cubase 7 and have izotope rx 4.....

(YES Obviously this would have been better addressed at the source but it's too late for that now. I use this piano all the time and have never had this problem before so there's a large part that is related to technique but again - can't address that now. )

[joninc]

it's an upper mid/treble frequency BTW - between 800hz and 8k....

trying a multiband compressor but it's not working well either... Gonna try ESSENCE and see if I can dial right into the offending zone...

[kslight]

I haven’t been using RX long enough to know what changed between 4 and 6, but was gonna be my suggestion...

Can you “learn” that sound and apply a debleed? I mean...I think you would probably still be doing this mostly manually, you probably don’t want to do too much to the overall piano sound.

[losthighway]

Alternate idea:

If it's only a few times on really long sustained notes you could just do some editing. If it's at the very end of the note you could just trim the last few miliseconds before the next note hits. Try a quick fade out, or if that's awkward copy a region right before the squeak, copy, slide it over, then automate volume shenanigans so it doesn't sound artificial from the note suddenly getting slightly louder from the copied part.

You could do a more laborious version of this if the squeak is somewhere in the middle. Copy and paste a little of the note from either side of the squeak to patch over the squeak, automate volume to recreate a natural note sustain.

I know all of this sounds arduous, but sometimes sitting with de-noise software and sweeping for the magic frequency that's all noise and not damaging the timbre of the instrument can be worse.

[joninc]

it's many times throughout the song and often in the middle of a long held chord as opposed to right before a change,,,

so far using ESSENCE and automating the threshold is working ok. still somewhat audible but dampened a bit at least.

[kslight]

Possible to set a dynamic EQ maybe?