PTravel
Senior Senior Member
Last month, I mentioned that I had recorded a group of actor friends in my writing partner's living room -- hard-walled, hard-floored, hard furniture and rectangular. I've recorded successfully there a number of times. However, this group, being actors, weren't used to staying close to the microphones -- their experience told them the "sound guy" with the boom would pick them up wherever they went and, as the 2-day session wore on, they got further and further away from the microphones (and closer to each other).
The result was virtually all tracks have really bad reflections. I should have caught it at the time, but keeping everyone moving along (we're all long-time friends) was too much like herding cats, and I never really checked the recorded quality. Stupid, I know.
This is what I have tried:
- Dyvision Reverb Remover: this VST actually works, in that it can effectively remove reverb tails. However, it can't do much for early reflections, and, particularly, those that occur underneath the primary signal. If I had recorded in a cave, this probably would have fixed it.
- Ozone 5 "Maximizer" and "Exciter." I was hoping these could bring out some of the lower and mid-range frequencies while leaving the higher frequencies, were the reflections are, alone. They did, to an extent, and also provided a bit of thickening, but the effect is subtle and the hard reflections are still there.
- EQ: I've tried tweaked the EQ, but cannot lose the reflections without losing the full range of the voice. My choice appears to be, "sounds like a well," or, "sounds like it was recorded on a primitive lo-fidelity toy tape recorder from the 60s."
After spending hours on this, my writing partner, who is generally pretty accepting of less-than-perfect recordings, described the vocals as "hollow," and she's right. What makes it worse is that, for one of the songs, the accompaniment is a very minimalist, jazzy bit of piano, bass and brushed snare, so there's not much music to cover up the vocal and the reflections are glaringly and painfully obvious.
This is just for a personal demo of the musical that we're writing that will only be heard by a small group of friends and acquaintances for the purpose of providing feedback on the show itself -- it's not a "studio recording," or "concept album" or anything like that. Once the project is finished, we'll go back and re-record everything, including the music (which I admit is sloppy in parts), and use THAT recording as a traditional demo to send out. Still, just as a matter of personal pride (and because we listen to the CD of the show a lot as we proceed and it's ANNOYING
), I don't want to settle for a couple of songs that are grossly inferior to the rest of the cuts on the CD.
Short of re-recording, which is not an option at this point, is there anything else I can try to at least minimize the the hollow, reflective sound?
The result was virtually all tracks have really bad reflections. I should have caught it at the time, but keeping everyone moving along (we're all long-time friends) was too much like herding cats, and I never really checked the recorded quality. Stupid, I know.
This is what I have tried:
- Dyvision Reverb Remover: this VST actually works, in that it can effectively remove reverb tails. However, it can't do much for early reflections, and, particularly, those that occur underneath the primary signal. If I had recorded in a cave, this probably would have fixed it.
- Ozone 5 "Maximizer" and "Exciter." I was hoping these could bring out some of the lower and mid-range frequencies while leaving the higher frequencies, were the reflections are, alone. They did, to an extent, and also provided a bit of thickening, but the effect is subtle and the hard reflections are still there.
- EQ: I've tried tweaked the EQ, but cannot lose the reflections without losing the full range of the voice. My choice appears to be, "sounds like a well," or, "sounds like it was recorded on a primitive lo-fidelity toy tape recorder from the 60s."
After spending hours on this, my writing partner, who is generally pretty accepting of less-than-perfect recordings, described the vocals as "hollow," and she's right. What makes it worse is that, for one of the songs, the accompaniment is a very minimalist, jazzy bit of piano, bass and brushed snare, so there's not much music to cover up the vocal and the reflections are glaringly and painfully obvious.
This is just for a personal demo of the musical that we're writing that will only be heard by a small group of friends and acquaintances for the purpose of providing feedback on the show itself -- it's not a "studio recording," or "concept album" or anything like that. Once the project is finished, we'll go back and re-record everything, including the music (which I admit is sloppy in parts), and use THAT recording as a traditional demo to send out. Still, just as a matter of personal pride (and because we listen to the CD of the show a lot as we proceed and it's ANNOYING
), I don't want to settle for a couple of songs that are grossly inferior to the rest of the cuts on the CD.Short of re-recording, which is not an option at this point, is there anything else I can try to at least minimize the the hollow, reflective sound?
