Davenhurst
New member
Stick with me here, I'm not sure exactly what I've just done but I'll do my best to describe it. Basically I want to know if I've stumbled across an advanced and neat trick, and if it's widely used anyway. Or indeed, if it's totally pointless and is a long-winded way of doing something simple. I haven't given it that much thought yet....
Anyway, to get to the point.....
I'm setting up for a final mix of a track with acoustic guitar and vocal (plus occasional bits and pieces - don't worry about those). I've been reading up on technique and was keen to try something on the vocals which involved sending the signal to two separate tracks, compressing the balls out of one (not to kill it though) and adding subtle reverb to the other so that the peaks in the uncompressed track would create a beauty of a reverb. Sounds nice, like it. Anyway, I didn't get that far - I started messing around and for some reason inverted the phase of one of the tracks (I guess testing that the two would cancel each other out - this was all done using a dry signal at the same level on each track. They did cancel, so physics still works in my house). I then compressed the first track and played with the level of the second (phase-inverted and uncompressed) track. What I found was that by altering the compression parameters and track levels I had a beautifully clean vocal track with all the noise and unnecessary breath etc. taken out. The signal still had a nice range to it and could then be sent to a group channel for further processing as necessary.
Is this a standard procedure or is it a ridiculous way of achieving an otherwise easy effect? I really love tripping over little production tricks and may do a mix using that one to see how it all sits. Thoughts please.
Anyway, to get to the point.....
I'm setting up for a final mix of a track with acoustic guitar and vocal (plus occasional bits and pieces - don't worry about those). I've been reading up on technique and was keen to try something on the vocals which involved sending the signal to two separate tracks, compressing the balls out of one (not to kill it though) and adding subtle reverb to the other so that the peaks in the uncompressed track would create a beauty of a reverb. Sounds nice, like it. Anyway, I didn't get that far - I started messing around and for some reason inverted the phase of one of the tracks (I guess testing that the two would cancel each other out - this was all done using a dry signal at the same level on each track. They did cancel, so physics still works in my house). I then compressed the first track and played with the level of the second (phase-inverted and uncompressed) track. What I found was that by altering the compression parameters and track levels I had a beautifully clean vocal track with all the noise and unnecessary breath etc. taken out. The signal still had a nice range to it and could then be sent to a group channel for further processing as necessary.
Is this a standard procedure or is it a ridiculous way of achieving an otherwise easy effect? I really love tripping over little production tricks and may do a mix using that one to see how it all sits. Thoughts please.
