DrewPeterson7
Sage of the Order
Ok, I haven't posted here in ages, so first off, hi everyone!
I've been working on a project for a while now with my dad and my uncle, which in many ways has been a lot of fun - both were critical in getting me into music as a kid, so it's been a lot of fun to, as an adult, work on an album with them. Of course, there's a few ways where it's been LESS fun, one of them being that I have much higher standards for recording and performance quality than they do, which thankfully has mostly just resulted in a lot of studio Nazi jokes and Dickens inspired "can I have one more take, sir" good natured teasing and the like.
Anyway... We're nearly done with the tracking, and I've been spending some time working on getting the music ready to mix. For the most part, I think I'm in good shape, but there's this one particular track that's been a struggle. We've recorded it twice now, and while I think the other two view this as "good enough," there's still some things really bugging me about it.
The biggest is, my uncle plays guitar VERY softly, and there's some extremely audible breathing on his acoustic guitar tracks that, in some places, is louder than the performance:
[MP3]https://drewpeterson7.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/mr-breathing.mp3[/MP3]
I'm kind of at a loss what to do about it. I know the RIGHT thing is to just re-record the acoustic guitar on this. And, while I hate to spend any more time on this one, more likely than not that's what I'll end up doing, especially as there's a few other issues, the biggest being the fact that (despite my one-week-out email with a list of things to get ready for the session - hey, I'm embracing this studio Nazi thing - my uncle showed up with a fairly dead set of strings on his guitar, and I didn't realize until we were just about to start tracking).
Before I bite the bullet and ask him to start brushing up on his part before the next session, though, is there anything else you'd try on this? I didn't have much luck trying to find the "problem" frequencies with a de-esser or multiband compressor, partly because the acoustic is such a full-range instrument to begin with. Are there any approaches you've tried in the past on things like this, or plugins designed for surgical removal of a particular type of noise?
I can't really edit out the breathing and drop in parts from elsewhere, largely because I already had to splice this together to hell and back just to get a clean performance in the first place. Normally I'd deal with this by buying it in the mix and letting something else drive the song, except this is a song that really needs to hang on the fingerpicked acoustic part so changing the arrangement isn't really working (or, if it could, I haven't found one that works yet). Suggesting taking the arrangement in a radically different direction with instrumentation etc isn't an option either because my uncle is pretty hung up on his original demo, and while I'd be tempted to just throw my hands up and use the demo on the final recording, the recording quality is pretty abysmally bad even if, objectively, it's a better performance. Re-recording is probably the only real answer here, except I'm loath to do that because it took us an hour or two and probably more than a dozen takes to even get here, and since my uncle rarely plays for more than a few minutes at a time, the more time we spend on this, the less time we have to work on the material we have left before his fingertips give out.
Really it's my own fault for not 1) forcing him to restring before we started tracking, and 2) really honing in on just how obvious his breathing was in the tracks we were recording. Lesson learned. :lol:
I've been working on a project for a while now with my dad and my uncle, which in many ways has been a lot of fun - both were critical in getting me into music as a kid, so it's been a lot of fun to, as an adult, work on an album with them. Of course, there's a few ways where it's been LESS fun, one of them being that I have much higher standards for recording and performance quality than they do, which thankfully has mostly just resulted in a lot of studio Nazi jokes and Dickens inspired "can I have one more take, sir" good natured teasing and the like.
Anyway... We're nearly done with the tracking, and I've been spending some time working on getting the music ready to mix. For the most part, I think I'm in good shape, but there's this one particular track that's been a struggle. We've recorded it twice now, and while I think the other two view this as "good enough," there's still some things really bugging me about it.
The biggest is, my uncle plays guitar VERY softly, and there's some extremely audible breathing on his acoustic guitar tracks that, in some places, is louder than the performance:
[MP3]https://drewpeterson7.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/mr-breathing.mp3[/MP3]
I'm kind of at a loss what to do about it. I know the RIGHT thing is to just re-record the acoustic guitar on this. And, while I hate to spend any more time on this one, more likely than not that's what I'll end up doing, especially as there's a few other issues, the biggest being the fact that (despite my one-week-out email with a list of things to get ready for the session - hey, I'm embracing this studio Nazi thing - my uncle showed up with a fairly dead set of strings on his guitar, and I didn't realize until we were just about to start tracking).
Before I bite the bullet and ask him to start brushing up on his part before the next session, though, is there anything else you'd try on this? I didn't have much luck trying to find the "problem" frequencies with a de-esser or multiband compressor, partly because the acoustic is such a full-range instrument to begin with. Are there any approaches you've tried in the past on things like this, or plugins designed for surgical removal of a particular type of noise?
I can't really edit out the breathing and drop in parts from elsewhere, largely because I already had to splice this together to hell and back just to get a clean performance in the first place. Normally I'd deal with this by buying it in the mix and letting something else drive the song, except this is a song that really needs to hang on the fingerpicked acoustic part so changing the arrangement isn't really working (or, if it could, I haven't found one that works yet). Suggesting taking the arrangement in a radically different direction with instrumentation etc isn't an option either because my uncle is pretty hung up on his original demo, and while I'd be tempted to just throw my hands up and use the demo on the final recording, the recording quality is pretty abysmally bad even if, objectively, it's a better performance. Re-recording is probably the only real answer here, except I'm loath to do that because it took us an hour or two and probably more than a dozen takes to even get here, and since my uncle rarely plays for more than a few minutes at a time, the more time we spend on this, the less time we have to work on the material we have left before his fingertips give out.
Really it's my own fault for not 1) forcing him to restring before we started tracking, and 2) really honing in on just how obvious his breathing was in the tracks we were recording. Lesson learned. :lol: