Monday, May 10th, 2010
A week of Twitter activity from @theaudiogeek
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Happy Mothra’s Day!
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I coulda sworn it was Kenny Loggins that did “Push It To The Limit” but apparently not, just had some rappers here throw down on that beat.
- Girl! [I found out my wife and I are having a girl]
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Mix delivered and by all accounts pretty kick ass. But now what am i going to do?
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Sitting on the balcony auto-tuning. Gotta mix this song today.
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I just did hands on Pro Tools troubleshooting for someone without leaving my computer VIA Team Viewer
http://teamviewer.com
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that was a sour pickle
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first day of working from home, doing my previous job. Getting the store organized without there physically being one.
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1400 followers. It seems more followers = less interaction
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Posted in Commentary; Rants and Jokes, Tweetdump | No Comments »
Monday, May 3rd, 2010
I’m currently working with a band and after each part is recorded I’m spending a good amount of time editing to tighten up the performance. It’s not because they can’t play well, they’re actually really good, I could probably get away with not doing any tightening of the performance at all. I’m tightening the performance not just because I can, but because it sounds better. To me at least. You can disagree, I don’t care.
For me the effort and time spent is worth it. It makes the song sound more polished and another step closer to a professional result. I do this kind of editing on everything I work on, I won’t mix a song that has a sloppy performance.
Pocketing
This editing to tighten things up is often called “pocketing”. It takes time and it’s not very much fun but it really makes an difference.
In this project I’ve edited the drums, bass and guitars to be perfectly in time. Some people like the bass a bit behind the beat by a certain amount and have different ideas about where things should be. I do everything right on the grid and it sounds right to me. I have not yet had a complaint that it sounds too perfect or too rigid.
How Perfect
You don’t have to do every 16th note of the performance, you can do much less than that. I usually start by lining up all elements at the start of each section of the song. Then go through in finer detail if anything sounds off. Often I’m adjusting down to 8th notes especially if parts are double tracked, with two performances panned left and right of the same part. If those parts aren’t tight you get a distracting bounce between each ear. I really hate that.
DIs Really Help
When I record guitars I always like to have a DI track. I don’t usually ever need to actually listen to the DI track, but it’s useful for editing because the transients are much clearer than that of a mic on a distorted guitar amp. Of course the DI is useful as a safety if you end up hating the guitar tones from the mics.
Cutting & Warping
There are two methods to pocketing, cutting or warping.
- Cutting is separating the recording at each section or note if needed and moving the start of each piece into time. Then filling gaps and crossfading between each peice. In pro tools you can do this automatically with Beat detective or manually.
- Warping would be using a function like Pro Tools Elastic Audio or Logic’s Flex editing to stretch and shrink the notes within the recording without making any separations.
Warping is faster but there is a sound quality loss.
I do this kind of editing a lot. In general cutting works best for drums. Warping is usually fine with bass and guitars and vocals but not always, sometimes it can really degrade the sound.
Examples
Here’s an example to show what this is all about. Here are 2 layers of stereo acoustic guitar, each played by different players.
Acoustic Guitars
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I’ve gone through and tightened up the timing by manually chopping and sliding into position. This was a situation where Elastic Audio in Pro Tools just wasn’t good enough for the job and the editing was done in REAPER.
Acoustic Guitars Tighter
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I can hear an improvement that was definitely worth the effort. What do you think? Let’s get a discussion going in the comments
Posted in Audio Editing, Techniques, Tutorial | 14 Comments »
Sunday, May 2nd, 2010
Another week of twitter activity from@theaudiogeek
- AudioMIDI No-Brainer deal T-RackS 3 Classic EQ and Metering for $20! http://trunc.it/7mipz VERY useful plugs. Get these!
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Finally bought my REAPER license. Only took me 450 days to decide.
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Had the fire alarm go off during a vocal take today….and continue for 15 more minutes. Well about 15 min, we were on Hip-hop time.
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Downside to recording with me is my wife will tweet about you RT
@ihazadoodle: OMG, it’s terrible! “Can we fix that with Autotune?” Um, no.
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I don’t like coffee in the afternoon but coffee ice cream wakes me from my nap pretty well.
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@peterkirn “That seems a stretch.” Why is that? Looks like it works perfectly and you don’t have to bash it like a typical pad controller.
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Posted in Commentary; Rants and Jokes, Site News, Tweetdump | No Comments »
