Ghosts: Does this happen to you? ? ?

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chessrock

Banned
(Insert creepy music bed)

I was just wondering if anyone else has had this experience before?

I was just mixing some stuff I recently tracked for a client. And I noticed there's this brief section in the music where if you listen closely, you can hear what sounds like a child crying/playing off in the distance.

Now here's the creepy part: When I solo each of the individual tracks and crank the headphones, I hear nothing. Well, nothing but the track, that is. :)

Does anyone think my mixes could be "haunted?" (insert shrieky sound in music bed; fade out)
 
If you play the tracks backwards do you hear the "Hush little baby" lullaby?
 
It's probably the result of two or more notes/harmonics beating. I have a tune I recorded with my old metel band and there's this one part of the tune, I swear I can hear a guitar playing a single high note in 16th notes but it ain't there. Either that or your studio's haunted.
 
I never noticed that...

...but I do see Marilyn's face imaged onto the leader tape of all my blank ADAT tapes!

:p
 
Track Rat said:
It's probably the result of two or more notes/harmonics beating. I have a tune I recorded with my old metel band and there's this one part of the tune, I swear I can hear a guitar playing a single high note in 16th notes but it ain't there. Either that or your studio's haunted.
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Yeah...I've heard that kind of stuff before too, and of course, you never hear it soloing tracks. It's the combination of stuff that gives you your homemade, spooky, ring modulator effect.
 
My dilemma is that I sometimes hear what sounds the phone ringing. Like you, I solo the tracks and can't hear it. When I play them all together, there it is again.

Chess, could it be someone from the other side trying to channel to me? Or perhaps an ear problem from years of playing with loud musicians?
 
I hear beeping too, every now and then.

I don't think any one of are going crazy. I think it's just kind of the audio equivalent of staring at the clouds.

When I double-track accoustic and electric guitar doing the same parts, with chorus on one of them, sometimes people think there's a piano part tucked in there somewhere.
 
I agree on the theories posted. The question is should you damn the effects that these things make or just look at it as if the laws of physics make its own art?

(sometimes these new sounds can be annoying as the telephone thing mentioned. For example on Simon & Garfunkle´s Scarbourogh Fair there is a strange sound that sound like my doorbell so I have anwered the door when it came in, I dont think this sound was meant to be by the makers)
 
They're actually called "sum" and "difference" tones." As someone said, they're the result of upper harmonics of two or more instruments combining and creating the illusion of notes or sounds that aren't there. It's kind of an extension of the beats created when tuning notes on a guitar.

There's a famous song by Aerosmith (wish I could remember which song) where a note that we all thing was a played harmony is actually a sum tone.

It's awfully hard to explain the children playing, though. It's probably some squeaky sound that your brain interprets as children because it's fun.

Or... the drummer was playing a trick on you and had children playing on a pocket tape recorder. Perhaps it's not loud enough to hear on individual drum tracks, but when all the drum tracks are on it's audible.

Ken Rutkowski
Outer Limit Recording Studio
 
I had the opposite happen. I was tracking my buddy doing vocals (the Dead's Ripple) and the phone rang (this was my old 1 bedroom apartment). My girlfriend picked it up in the bedroom. It was my brother calling to tell us he just brought a house :)
Now you can clearly hear the phone when the vocals are solo'd (Soundelux U97->Great River MP2), but not at all when you hear the whole song.
 
It's amazing that the phone ringing effect occurs so often. I had a song with two acoustic tracks, just rhythm, but we had them up while tracking vox because there wasn't much else in the tune at the time. We stopped several takes where the singers or me stopped recording because we thought a phone had rung and bled into the mike. There was not even a phone in that part of the studio! We finally tracked it down to the acoustics which sounded fine by themselves, but at one part, the acoustics came together to sound just like a phone. I actually had to fix the tracks because we started to hear it more after repeated listenings. What is even wierder is parts that I did NOT play but they sound better than the parts I DID play. I had one combination of keys and guitar in a run that produced a ghost line that sounded so cool, the parts were not retracked even though I kind of wanted to redo them. No tracks I recorded later sounded better, so the 'mistake' was kept.
 
Same thing happened to me with a double tracked acoustic guitar. In one spot a beautiful harmonic ghost line came to life that I loved so much I played the actual line on mandolin and it filled the spot beautifully! The original harmonic ghost dissapeared within the full mix. This has happened to me before where I could make it out in the final mix and I love just love those little gems that just seem to appear as a gift!
 
There's a woman in the background of a guitar track of a song that I'm mixing currently. A woman's voice telling me that I'm ugly. I know it's a ghost, because no woman has ever told me that I'm ugly. It's just not possible.
 
Shockwave said:
Same thing happened to me with a double tracked acoustic guitar. In one spot a beautiful harmonic ghost line came to life that I loved so much I played the actual line on mandolin and it filled the spot beautifully! The original harmonic ghost dissapeared within the full mix. This has happened to me before where I could make it out in the final mix and I love just love those little gems that just seem to appear as a gift!
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That is an excellent point you make! I've often used these things for that purpose . . . you listen and you kind of hear something, and this gives you the idea to add it in. Could it be that the fact I'm "hearing" a piano in my latest project be my subconscous telling me the next track to add? (insert even spookier music bed)
 
ive had phone problems as well... when mixing at moderate levels i thought i heard the phone so i lower the level.... but there was no phone ringing. this happens all the time.
another thing that happens to me is if i record something like a back up vocal, or whatever and it doesnt get used in the final mix, but i still think i hear that "missing" track. i just listened to a project i finished about a year and a half ago, and i can still hear the stuff that didnt get to the mix
 
AC/DC's title track to "For Those About to Rock" has that phone ringing effect in it. I think it comes to how the cymbals were tracked. There's been more than one occasion where I had to turn the volume down to make sure the phone didn't ring.

I'm not sure if this falls into the ghost note category, but I had a track once where towards the end the harmonics played on the solo guitar, combined with the bass and acoustic/electric rhythm made this eerie musical statement that I can only describe as akin to a good dream slipping into a bad one, or slipping down a stair bannister into a dark room. This sound wasn't in my head when I arranged it, but it really fit the mood of the song. After the first take the machine ate my tape, but when I re-tracked it later, the same passage crept up again..

Cy
 
Cave Dweller said:
but i still think i hear that "missing" track. i just listened to a project i finished about a year and a half ago, and i can still hear the stuff that didnt get to the mix
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Spooky. Kind of like how amputees can sometimes feel pain or other sensations in their missing limbs. Yikes!
 
...

I got a car horn beeping noise in a song I was doing a few weeks ago... had a bass track, drums, and a piano... I thought it was the bass and piano making it, but when I muted out the bass it was still there... soloing the piano it was gone, and soloing the drums it was gone too... some weird harmonic thing going on between the piano chord and the drums I suppose.
 
I can hear it! There's this chick's voice in my mixes that keeps saying "Darth Faders has a small woody." Seriously. What's up with that Darth?
 
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