Accidental Chair Squeak!

Dammit! There I was, in the middle of a live acoustic recording, and I lean up in my chair to check something on the levels. SQUEAK! The musician was cool enough to let it slide, but come mix down I'm still faced with this horrid noise. The type of music we were recording was Acoustic Jack Johnson-y, so it's not like I could cover it up with layers of other instruments. Here's what I did to fix it, and to the best of my knowledge, I'm its inventor!

• Duplicate the problem track and edit the duplicated track so the only region it plays is the part with the chair squeak in it.
• Load Waves X-Noise (or a similar noise canceling plug-in).
  
• Set the resolution on high, and get a "noise profile" of the problem area. Now here's the thing, the "noise" you're after is actually the sound of the acoustic guitar (in my case).
  
• Play with the Threshold and Reduction settings until the sound of the guitar is gone and all that remains is the sound of the chair squeak. You're not going to be able to get rid of all the guitar, don't worry about it! Get as much as you can!
• Reverse the phase on the duplicated file and make sure that it matches the panning position of the original track.
  

Viola! Now when the track plays and gets to the chair squeak, the new track will cancel out only the frequencies that include the chair squeak and only leave the acoustic. I will try to include an audio file to demonstrate.

Here's the chair squeak before:



Here it is after:



The squeak is still there, and because some of the acoustic was still left in the X-Noise track, some of it got canceled out. But it sounds much better and it's not something you could have achieved purely with EQ. There is another program called Spectro that could have helped with this as well, but I think there would have been a stark difference, whereas this seems less noticeable in context with the song.