this is getting aggravating

[fivestarpacheco]

I recorded a song with an instrumental I got from a popular hip hop song. Now I know this instrumental already being used and made for the person who originally made the track won't be as good with my vocals on it but how can I get my vocals to sit in the mix , as of now my vocals sound like I'm singing over the song aka on top of it, I kno I need eq and compression, but is there any other things someone also told me try panning it

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

Assuming the track you have has already gone through it's own mixing and mastering, I'd start by "un-mastering" it a little bit by throwing some expansion on it so it's not just a flat brick of sound. Then lay in the vocals and mix the two together, compressing and EQing as needed to create your new mix.

G.

 

[NYMorningstar]

Assuming the track you have has already gone through it's own mixing and mastering, I'd start by "un-mastering" it a little bit by throwing some expansion on it so it's not just a flat brick of sound. Then lay in the vocals and mix the two together, compressing and EQing as needed to create your new mix.

G.

Would adding a touch of reverb help in a situation like this? It's out of my realm but I see lots of hiphoppers ask.

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

Would adding a touch of reverb help in a situation like this? It's out of my realm but I see lots of hiphoppers ask.

I'll be the first to admit that my hip hop experience is limited, I'm mostly falling back on general experience, so take this as you will...

IME, the biggest problem with laying vocals over a pre-produced "beat" track is exactly as the OP described, which is it's difficult to get the two to mix; they wind up being like oil and water with the vocal just laying on top of the beat and the two sounding like they don't belong together.

Adding reverb to the whole shebang may provide a bit of sonic "glue", but I would think that it wold be no different than other genres, that "glue" may help stick the two tracks together, but it won't really mix them; they still will sound like they are just laying one on top of the other. Plus, what if you don't *want* that reverb sound?

So, as an admitted non-hip-hop expert, my best guess would be to take the beat track(s) and "un-brick" them a bit so that there is some space to actually mix in the vocals. It's kind of like (but not exactly identical to) the idea of leaving headroom in a mix for a mastering engineer to do his work, except here we're not talking about overall headroom, but rather leaving some "holes" or dynamics in the beat track to give space for mixing the vocals.

YMMV and all that.

G.

 

[Joza]

If it feels too hard, try mixing 20 tracks of symphonic orchestra stuff with a ready melodic metal song. After that I bet your current problem doesn't seem too complicated after all.

PS: Yes, I've done that. No, it didn't work out too well..

 

[fivestarpacheco]

so then how could i unmaster the instrumental as you say

 

[miroslav]

The reverb and expansion ideas mentioned are where you need to go.

The way to bring the two together is to establish the same "acoustic space" for your vocal as already exists in in the instrumental.

It might take 2-3 processes combined to "glue" them together.
Runnig both through a tape deck would also help some.

 

[Dr. Varney]

Would expanding audio degrade the sound? Would compressing, then expanding and compressing again something which has already been recorded with compression successively degrade? I've never understood how an expander could work or even exist, since reading my studio recording books. I mean - how do you extract information that has been lost through compression? I'm thinking in terms of digital photgraphy. What does it expand into... itself?

Dr. V

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

so then how could i unmaster the instrumental as you say

Expansion, which is the opposite of compression, would be where I start. Look in your DAW software's help file for "Dynamics processor" or "Dynamics processing" for help on how to do this with your native tools if you;re not famailar with this yet.

G.

 

[Chibi Nappa]

I've never understood how an expander could work or even exist, since reading my studio recording books. I mean - how do you extract information that has been lost through compression? I'm thinking in terms of digital photgraphy. What does it expand into... itself?

Dr. V

You cannot restore information that is gone. You can move existing information from one place to another. Say you've got information that is "here". The compressor moves it "over there". The expander might be able to bring it back over "here" again.

Now, a limiter might take that information and fling it into the ceiling where it mushes together with other information. In that case, the original information might as well be gone. If you clip, the information actually is gone.

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

Would expanding audio degrade the sound? Would compressing, then expanding and compressing again something which has already been recorded with compression successively degrade? I've never understood how an expander could work or even exist, since reading my studio recording books. I mean - how do you extract information that has been lost through compression? I'm thinking in terms of digital photgraphy. What does it expand into... itself?

As far as the "degrade" question, that all depends upon one's definition of "degrade". It could be argued that any form of processing - including the original compression - degrades the original signal because any change to the signal is by definition a type of distortion, and therefore by definition, a type of degradation. But when the subjective definition of "does it sound better or worse" enters the equation, all bets are off in either direction.

What I think might be confusing you Dr. V., is that you're looking at audio compression like if it were a form of lossy data compression (similar to the data compression of changing WAV to MP3, for example). And therefore you cannot see how that lost data can be recovered via "expansion". But that's not how it works at all. Audio compression and expansion is not a compression of information, it's simply a fancy form of volume control.

Whether it's a digital plug-in or analog hardware is irrelevant, the process is simply a custom way of adjusting waveform amplitude - a.k.a. "volume". There is no loss or gain of data or information, just a change in the existing information's value. There's just as much information as before, it's just representing a different amplitude. There's no more or less information lost or gained than there is when you turn the gain up or down by moving a fader. It's just that compression acts like a special type of custom fader that only works in certain ways on certain peaks that make it past a threshold setting.

So, with that in mind, an expander is not recovering any lost information. It's just adjusting the volume like a special custom type of fader or gain control, it's just that it is doing so in a way that is opposite of the way a compressor would do it.

G.

 

[philbagg]

Assuming the track you have has already gone through it's own mixing and mastering, I'd start by "un-mastering" it a little bit by throwing some expansion on it so it's not just a flat brick of sound.

I can't imagine this would be very easy, let alone not take several hours.

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

I can't imagine this would be very easy, let alone not take several hours.

Well, like anything else, how easy or hard it is depends upon one's own capabilities. But there's no reason why it should take very long; Expanding is just the opposite of compressing, and it certainly doesn't take several hours to compress something (or at least it shouldn't.)

The toughest part would be if the beat track(s) are compressed into bricks where virtually everything is either mute or full-volume with very little dynamics in-between. Then expansion by itself won't help a whole lot. but as long as there are *some* dynamics left, expanding those dynamics into something more porous should not be all that difficult.

If you are stuck with a brick, then a more manual process in the form of level and/or FX automation might be more effective. And in fact that might still be wanted even after some expansion. But a couple of hours? It shouldn't take *that* long. Heck, one could virtually re-track the whole thing from scratch in that amount of time .

G.

 

[RAMI]

Yeah, I'm having trouble getting my head around "un-compressing" something.

I can't get past thinking that, once you compress something, you've brought down the peaks, and brought the lower signals closer to the louder signals. If you "expand" it, how does the expander know where the original peaks were??? It's working with a flattened out signal ( or, at least a flatter signal). How does it "know" what parts of the signal were originally louder than other parts?

I hope I'm making sense on paper, becuase my question makes sense in my head, but that's a really weird and scarey place.

 

[RAMI]

Looks like you answered it before I asked it.....Thanx G.

The toughest part would be if the beat track(s) are compressed into bricks where virtually everything is either mute or full-volume with very little dynamics in-between. Then expansion by itself won't help a whole lot. but as long as there are *some* dynamics left, expanding those dynamics into something more porous should not be all that difficult.

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

Looks like you answered it before I asked it.....Thanx G.

My pleasure, Rami. But just to hone it a little finer:

I can't get past thinking that, once you compress something, you've brought down the peaks, and brought the lower signals closer to the louder signals. If you "expand" it, how does the expander know where the original peaks were??? It's working with a flattened out signal ( or, at least a flatter signal). How does it "know" what parts of the signal were originally louder than other parts?

It doesn't know. There is no promise or guarantee that things will be returned exactly to their original state. Nor is that really the purpose here. It's not a matter of exactly un-doing what has specifically been done so much as it is just returning some degree of dynamics.

Think of it like this: I have an instrument track which I have knocked down the volume with the track fader. I e-mail it to you but tell you nothing about what the original volume actually was or about exactly how many dBs I knocked it down by. But you do know from listening to it that it's too quiet to suit you. So you push the volume back up yourself. Will you return it to the exact same volume at which it started out before I brought it down? Maybe, but probably not. Does that really matter? No, as long as you get it to a suitable volume for your needs is all that matters.

We're talking about the same kind of thing here, except with compression/expansion instead of overall gain up/down. It's not an exact "undo" function, it's just bending and shaping to suit our needs.

G.

 

[Chibi Nappa]

Give this thread a read:

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/mastering-forum/433905-turn-sh-t-into-shinola.html
People who know way more than me go into detail about "unmastering".

 

[Dr. Varney]

Thanks for clarifying that, Glen. An excellent read. So from that, I'm thinking that the efficacy range of an expander must lie somewhere in the realms of a sensibly compressed signal to begin with? I assume that, while we could restore the range of an instrument, that's been limited as far as one normally would, to make it sound better, that trying to restore full dynamics to a voice, that's been sqaushed to telephone quality, would be more than we could reasonably expect?

I'd like to experiment, but I don't think I have one in my VST bank.

Dr. V

 

[Dr. Varney]

Give this thread a read:

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/mastering-forum/433905-turn-sh-t-into-shinola.html
People who know way more than me go into detail about "unmastering".

Blimey... This is interesting. However, it begs one vital question:
Mr. Katz has clients, which suggests he's in some way professional.... and the data was not backed up???

Dr. V

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

Thanks for clarifying that, Glen. An excellent read. So from that, I'm thinking that the efficacy range of an expander must lie somewhere in the realms of a sensibly compressed signal to begin with? I assume that, while we could restore the range of an instrument, that's been limited as far as one normally would, to make it sound better, that trying to restore full dynamics to a voice, that's been sqaushed to telephone quality, would be more than we could reasonably expect?

Don't over-think it. An expander is not a magical restoration device. All it is is a compressor in reverse.

With a standard downward compressor you set the gain ratio to something-to-1 (e.g. 3:1, 8:1 etc.). Using 3:1 as an example, that means that for every 3dB going into the compressor over the threshold setting, 1 dB will come out. Simple enough in concept. Upward expansion would simply be the opposite of that; i.e. it's simply reversing the compression ratio to 1-to-something, meaning that for every 1dB going in over the threshold setting, some number of dB greater than one comes out. The exact opposite of 3:1 compression would be 1:3 expansion.

This means that theoretically one could "restore" a signal for which only simple compression has been done by simply performing the exact opposite expansion at the same threshold. The problem is that in real life, rarely is that one simple step of compression all that has been done to a mastered signal. Once you start compounding several steps of processing, including multiple compressions or intermediate EQ steps, and so forth, exactly undoing and precisely restoring the original signal becomes virtually impossible. You may get close enough for rock and roll, but exact deconstruction is usually unreasonable at that point.

And, as we alluded to earlier, if everything has been smashed against a wall by a limiter or by clipping, then there are no dynamics left to restore. Trying to expand a brick wall results in nothing other than a louder brick wall; in that case expansion is no different than just pumping up the volume. any attempt at restoration at that point would need a lot more than just passing it through an expander.

I'd like to experiment, but I don't think I have one in my VST bank.

VST Expanders are much harder to find than compressors, but in fact most DAWS come with native expansion built in to their native tools. Most DAWs come with something called a "Dynamics Processor" or some name similar to that. These are not always the easiest tools for everybody to learn, but they are actually very powerful, and once you get used to them, they can actually become pretty natural to use. You can do all sorts of different types of both compression and expansion with them. Search your DAW help files for "Dynamics" or "Dynamics processor" and see what you can find.

G.