Another mandolin recording

keith.rogers

keith.rogers

Well-known member
This is actually a Norman Blake song (Church Street Blues), with my friend on guitar. Quick home recording - we were just fooling around with the recorder on. 3 mics, 1ea (Soyuz 013 FET) on the mando and guitar plus a vocal mic (SM58). Lots of bleed in my small music room and enough clams to make soup, but let me know how the mix sounds. Vocal might be a bit hot and maybe the whole thing over-compressed. (And, if there's any noise over 10k, I probably am not hearing it!)
 

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  • csb1.mp3
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I really like this recording! The mix sounds great to me, and I love the vocal performance. The only thing I could suggest would be to lower the volume of the vocal a bit, but that's just personal taste. The guitar and mandolin sound fantastic, and the overall sound is very warm and pleasant. Nice job!

_______
Jason Hook. Audio Enthusiast and Software Developer
Remove or Isolate Vocals from any Song 👉 https://www.UnMixIt.com/
 
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I like the mix. The guitar sounds especially nice in tone. Your voice is good, too. It sounds like the mandolin wavers between center and left - which is nice, I think.
 
spantini said:
I like the mix. The guitar sounds especially nice in tone. Your voice is good, too. It sounds like the mandolin wavers between center and left - which is nice, I think.
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There’s a lot of bleed on that side and I’ve got the 58 panned center with the mandolin pretty far left so that’s probably what contributes to that. (Kind of makes me wish I’d kept at least one of the hyper-cardioids I had, but I wasn’t using them at all…)

My friend’s old Taylor 714ce has a really nice tone and always records well. (The electronics have driven him a little crazy though.)
 
I think I would bring up the guitar a bit. The mando an voice are clear, but it seemed the guitar was a bit buried. It's got a pretty warm sound, which moves it back in the mix. Either raise the volume a bit or perhaps add just a bit of presence. I would try volume first.

Maybe changing the strings to Black Diamonds would bring it out a bit!!!
 
Just wanted to thank all for the listen.Earlier today I had to head out of town for a few days and so haven’t gone through the rest of the stuff we did, but I will tweak any subsequent mix(es) with those comments - if I find another song we didn’t screw up (we haven’t been getting together often…)

My wife just wants me to dress better and comb my hair, which you’ll understand when you see the video of this take:

 
mark skinner said:
I Really enjoyed this ! Both versions were Very Nice and it looks like you guys are having a good time. I enjoyed visiting your living room.. mark
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Thanks. It’s my 11’x11’ music room you’re seeing here!

The audio in the video was the same mix, though the compression undoubtedly different as it was uploaded with lossless FLAC and who knows what YouTube did to it. (Watching a video really changes the way we hear, I’m convinced.)
 
Ok, here's another one from yesterday. I tried to dial the vocal back a smidge and bring the guitar up, maybe -1/+1dB or so. It's not a direct A/B, mostly key-related, and the previous week was from early in the jam and this near the tail end, so my vocal is about done. The other change that may or may not be noticeable is I took the foam pop/wind filters off the SDC mics.

 
The vocal sound about the same to me. Actually, it sounds more like you lowered the mandolin rather than raised the guitar. The instruments are better blended here. If your friend would jump in on the vocal in a few small spots it would be a nice improvement.
 
spantini said:
The vocal sound about the same to me. Actually, it sounds more like you lowered the mandolin rather than raised the guitar. The instruments are better blended here. If your friend would jump in on the vocal in a few small spots it would be a nice improvement.
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I told him a couple years ago if he'd took 10% of the time he spent practicing guitar and worked on singing, he could cut me out completely!

I guess I could go back and just bounce out the individual tracks and measure them. I used the previous project to create a template, but deleted all the automation I had used there to try and get the guitar/mando mix trading off a tiny bit (like 1.5dB moves when there was a guitar break), and the levels, save master fades in/out, this time are 100% just done with clip-gain, i.e., it's a static mix. I did pull back make-up gain a half dB on the vocal, but I think I got the threshold a little off, so it still might be doing more gain than I intended.
 
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