MP3 Recording of Live Performance - Need a Little Help!

Q

quesne

Member
Hello All:

The attached file is a stereo Zoom H4 recording of one song from a little concert my partner and I did a few days ago. The problem (as I see it) is that the guitar and vocals are quite muddy and far behind in the mix, while the mandolin is better defined and pretty much in front of everything else. This probably has mostly to do with mic placement. I used the built-in H4 mic array, at a 90 degree angle. The recorder was placed about 5 feet away (toward the audience), three feet off the ground and well centered in between us.

I am so accustomed to recording in my home studio with each track independently managed, I am not very adept at dealing with a "fixed" mix. I was hoping that someone could help me get the vocal and guitar a bit more forward in the mix and better clarified. If anyone has a moment to listen and give me some advice, I would greatly appreciate it!

Thank you in advance :-)

P.S. The only post-processing I did in Reaper was to normalize the waveform, and remove noise via the "subtract" mode in the ReaFir plug-in. If the unadulterated audio is needed, I can of course provide it. Thx!
 

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Well, the mic probably picked up how it sounded. A few years ago that would have been that, but now there is some potential to use software to unmix the recording.

Hopefully you recorded it as a 24 bit wave file. Mp3 is not good for music production. It was developed for music delivery in a world with dialup internet.
 
Understood. And unfortunately, that’s very much the issue. I wish I had thought to set the file type to WAV before hitting record. But I didn’t. Hopefully the last time I make that mistake.
 
I just keep my H5 on 48/24 wave. It has literally never been set to record mp3 format.

You've got two additional inputs. Next time, perhaps you could have supplemental guitar and vocal mics. Or just place the mic to compensate for the loud mandolin.
 
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