How did they do this?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Whoopysnorp
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Whoopysnorp

Whoopysnorp

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I have here a snippet of a Kool Keith track called "Lost In Space". There's a woman's voice at the beginning that they did a very good job of placing 'behind' the listener. The first time I listened to this track, I about whirled around to check what was going on behind me. The effect was very pronounced when I listened to it on headphones earlier yesterday. How do you suppose they did it?

 
An SRS effect works here but I belive that you can achive these results from mixing the track out of phase from the others.
 
How do you record a track out of phase?
 
I think I know this...

My psych prof was talking about this the other day, but with a dog on an old beatles album.

The reason your brain knows whether something is in front of you or behind you is because of your pinnae. This is simply the fleshy outside part, what people normally identify as "the ear". You know the things that Mike Tyson likes to bite off.

Anyway, your pinnae, the way they are shaped, create different "echo" patterns depending on if the sound comes in front of you or behind you that your brain has learned to recognize.

Here's what the Beatles did (and probably what they did in that song too, but I couldn't get it to download)... They made a reconstruction of a human head with ears (pinnae, remember) and then stuck two small microphones in each ear. They then had the dog run behind the "head".

Also, I'm guessing this works better with headphones then stereo speakers.

-Sal
 
There's a surround sound dx plugin that's in the Ultrafunk Sonitus:fx collection that does a pretty good job of spatial placement.
 
demo

-Elevate

tried the demo of the surround for Ultrafunk Sonitus:fx, yeah it works pretty darn good in my monitors. My voice sounded as if it were behind me. However didn't work so well in headphones... hmmm, weird.

Is this plug-in 32 bit?

-Sal
 
I have no idea if it's 32 bit. As to it not sounding so great in the headphones, that's to be expected. A drawback of headphones is their inability to convey spatial qualities of sound - though I can still hear some of the effect in my AT M40fs phones. Actually, the first time I tried the plugin, I was using headphones, so I made the effect extreme so I could hear it. When I played it back on my stereo, the vocal track was miles away.
 
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