Repairing-Deleting renegade noises & mistakes.

[Eleanor Fudd]

I get glitches on tracks which are difficult to replicate or replace. Example: I had an acoustic guitar track which took 12,000 takes (+ or -) and on playback, it was indeed the best track - except for the bit where I lightly kicked the mic stand. Also, hand squeaks on the guitar neck are sometimes too loud to be acceptable, fingers banging into strings......

How do you remove these? Is it always possible? If a note (or 'blob,' as Melodyne calls it) contains guitar sounds and kick-the-mic-stand sounds, can they always to separated?

So what works: pitch correction software? Which one? Cutting and boosting frequencies? I haven't got the hand of that, because ignorant noises seem to have the habit of not confining themselves to any particular frequency band, near as I can tell.

I'll throw in a question about pitch correction software generally: someone on a forum posted that some of those softwares analyse an entire track and make subtle but audible changes to the track, even if you actually change only one note, leaving the track with a "plasticy" sound, whatever that is. So..... do Melodyne and competitors guilty of that? Is the nature and/or quality of the sound changed at all by whatever translation goes on in the software?

Whew!

Thanks for any advice.

 

[Tadpui]

First thing I'd try is to find a similar passage elsewhere in the song and see if I could find inconspicuous places to splice the track and paste in the other part in its place.

Or see if that 10,001st take could be done without kicking the mic stand

For finger squeaks, I have to wonder if a de-esser might help. It'd be worth a try, if the squeaks are of a consistent pitch that you could hone in on with the deesser trigger frequency.

I've never noticed Melodyne doing anything to sections of my vocal tracks that I haven't pitch-adjusted. It probably does do something since it has to read in the notes and assign them a length and pitch. but I just don't notice it. The only time I notice Melodyne's processing is when I try to change a pitch too far from the original note...then it sounds conspicuously pitch-shifted. Even a single semitone adjustment sounds artificial to me. But if I'm missing notes by entire semitones, I just need to rehearse the part more and track it again.

 

[mjbphotos]

You can comp pieces of different takes together to make one seamless mistake-free track. Can be difficult to do with acoustic guitar due to strumming differences. If there are breaks/pauses in the music, those are the places to use for cutting different takes together.

On the Melodyne question - yes if you have it ON for the whole track, it will correct everything it finds based on how you've set it - so just use it for the piece of track you want to correct.

I can't imagine de-essing or any other technique is going to sound good trying to remove a finger-string squeak. Try using coated strings, work on your technique. If it takes you 12000 takes to get one 'almost good', then you need to practice a lot more before recording.

 

[fat_fleet]

Why can't you just punch in where you kick the stand?

 

[Robus]

If you did a lot of takes and saved them, then it's just a matter of editing in a segment from a different take. As Tadpui said, try to find an inconspicuous place to make the edit. If it's just a background part, easily done. If it's a featured part, it's more dicey but usually still possible. Personally I haven't tried Melodyne on anything but vocals. It does leave a signature though. My suggestion is not to leave it running on auto-correct. Transfer just the part you want to correct into Melodyne, make the correction, render it, then cross fade the rendered bit back into the main track. Then take Melodyne offline. Melodyne is a resource hog that you won't want running in the background all the time, and there is no reason to have it messing with parts of the track that don't need correction.

Doing lots and lots of takes in hopes of finding one keeper is inefficient. Assuming you know and can play the part, four or five takes ought to give you enough material to comp together a keeper track. The exception is when you are composing on the fly. Then it might be worth doing many takes until you are happy with what you hear and can play it through consistently. That's how all my guitar solos come about.

 

[RAMI]

Why can't you just punch in where you kick the stand?

Exactly. I don't hear people talking much about punching in any more. It's either "Play the whole song through" or "comp multiple takes". Nothing wrong with either of those. But you can also take your best performance and simply punch in the few little 1 or 2 second spots that can be done better.

 

[bouldersoundguy]

Exactly. I don't hear people talking much about punching in any more. It's either "Play the whole song through" or "comp multiple takes". Nothing wrong with either of those. But you can also take your best performance and simply punch in the few little 1 or 2 second spots that can be done better.

And then you're thinking about that particular part so you can play to fit. With comps you aren't thinking about fitting a part to another take, you're just trying to get through the take.