EQing a Carillon (church bells)

VomitHatSteve

VomitHatSteve

Hat STYLE. Not contents.
My band played in a bell tower yesterday. We set up a mic outside and bootlegged the whole thing.

Now I'm trying to mix the thing to make it sound good, and it turns out it is quite the exercise in turd polishing. You can vaguely hear all the voices, but they are quite overwhelmed by the bells.

Any suggestions as to how to bring out everything else and tone down the Carillon?

Here's how things sounded in the raw bootleg.
Here's what I've made of it so far.
 
The carillion is dominationg in level from 1khz and up . This is right into and beyond the hump (extra sensitivity) in the fletcher-munson curves .
I don't want to discourage you , but if I were a betting man .......

What I suggest is ..re-record and...

1.) if you have a sampler that can sample ( a rarety ) then do that ( sample the bells and use midi to sequence).

2.) look for a free soundfont vsti type player and a carillion soundfont so you can sequence it and get it on a descrete track and mix .



I found a carillion patch on an old roland dxi midi synth and looked at the harmonics of a C5 note ; it is a very pure sound in isolation and it's easy to see the primary harmonics and the upper harmonics are sloping -4db ( approximatley) after the primary .
Those bells must have been really loud or the mic was closest to them because even when they are semi-isolated in the begining of the song the upper harmonics are flat instead of a slope !!


Good luck.
 
Thanks for the suggestions.

I wish I could re-record and get a better balance, but we were just passing through town. We had a friend who had a key to the tower, so we decided to play a show there.

I'd hoped the bootlegs would turn out better to immortalize the event.

(More info about the circumstances surrounding the event here.)

Anyway, if the clarilion doesn't start dominating until the 1 kHz range, would it be possible to roll the EQ off at that level and bring the vocals forward a little more?
 
VomitHatSteve said:
Anyway, if the clarilion doesn't start dominating until the 1 kHz range, would it be possible to roll the EQ off at that level and bring the vocals forward a little more?
Click to expand...
If the carilon starts dominating at 1k, that means about the only thing it's not dominating are your kick, you bass and the first couple of string or so of you guitar. Roll off at 1k and your'e rolling off everything else.

You're probably pretty much stuck with what you've got. You could try some tight Q EQ to match the various fundamental notes of the carilon as they're struck, along with harmonic filtering to attack the overtones. Or if you pass through town again, you could try the same mic setup, record only the bells, and use an inverse of that recording to try and phase cancel the bells from the original, but Ill bet you it'll be real hard to separate the baby from the bathwater very well.

G.
 
I've "mastered" in bathwater so often, I'm surprised more babies don't come crawling out of the drain. :eek:




------but I digress---------
 
RAMI said:
I've "mastered" in bathwater so often, I'm surprised more babies don't come crawling out of the drain. :eek
Click to expand...
WAAAY too much information :eek: :p

It's not just babies I used to worry about, it was the weird half human/half alligator babies I feared would grow up in the sewer system ;) :D

G.
 
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