Polishing up this recording...

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PizzImperfect

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Any tips of polishing this up? Other than compression i'm pretty noob to making things sound clearer and more polished!



Thanks
 
As a guide.. all i've done it use compression and alittle reverb on the vocal..
The acoustic guitar has been EQ'd alittle but i'm far from fluent with it!
 
Yeah the compression is way way too much on this track. It so squished there's no bounce or air in this mix. You have a great voice, great song, good guitar, but it's fatiguing to listen to this....
 
Great comments, thank you.
Yeah, the compression is coming from a JJP Vocal plugin.. I agree easing off it would probably give it more personality.
I'll have a tinker tonight and post a hopefully improved version.
The next part of the track does change alittle so it's not quite and repetative to listen to.. I just wanted to get the sound right before i went on and did the rest :)

Thanks!
 
Too much vocal compression, and have you autotuned it? something sounds weird there like it's been pitch-shifted or time-stretched or both.
 
Hey,
No, no auto tune at all and the odd thing is when I went home last night and started to play with it I realised the compression setting on my JJP Vocal Plugin is actually very low... *confused*
It could be the crappy mic I use (£20 dynamic)..?
I did do alittle work on it though.. I'm aware on listening today that the volume of the vocal needs reducing, but do you think this is an improvement?



Thanks all!
 
Have you put in much compression on the master bus? It's possible it's coming in there a bit strong.
 
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As far as i'm aware... The only source of any compression for the track is the VST Insert I have on the vocal track.. And the difference it seemed to make was very suttle when i turned it right down, or up... When i turned off the JJP vocal plugin all together, there was a difference in sound but again, not huge.
The guitar has 0 compression on it. It's EQ'd and the difference between the first and second clips I posted was I just duplicated the tracks and panned one L and one R... Obviously added alittle lead too.
 
PizzImperfect said:
I just duplicated the tracks and panned one L and one R
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You mean you just copied the track and pasted it onto another track? That does absolutely nothing other than make it louder, no matter how you panned them. Solo the tracks and you'll see they're still coming right up the middle in mono. You have to do 2 takes for it to make any difference. You can't just magically create stereo by copying a track.
 
A great way to record acoustic guitars is with the XY mic position.

Give it a search on here, it gets GREAT results :)

Oh, and aside from too much compression and the cheap mic, your voice is great dude!!! Its hard to believe there isn't autotune on that!!! Keep up the good work man.
 
Hey,

Ahh.. Well it definitely seemed to make it sound better anyway! Having only 1 mic until next month i'm a bit stuffed for recording in stereo :(
However.. i did pan one track totally to the left.. and the other totally to the right.. so it doesn't sound like its 'in the middle' anymore. I'm not sure if its true stereo but it certainly sounds much better.
I know that exactly copying to another track would make no difference :)

And if i could use autotune i would... However melodyne has always refused to work on my system, crashing as soon as i try to load it up.. Think it's windows 7 64-bit being a tool as usual.

But it usually takes me a take or 2 to get it right, i'm far from perfect but the comments are awesome thank you!

I've had a sore throat the last couple of days but tonight i'm going for the rest of the track so i'll post it up :)
 
And i think its the JJP vocal plugin making it sound so compressed.. even with it's compression turned down it seems to add that sound to the vocal.. Though i kinda like it? Maybe i'm down-right wrong..
When it's all recorded i'll have a mess around and try to perk it up abit.
 
PizzImperfect said:
Ahh.. Well it definitely seemed to make it sound better anyway! Having only 1 mic until next month i'm a bit stuffed for recording in stereo :(
However.. i did pan one track totally to the left.. and the other totally to the right.. so it doesn't sound like its 'in the middle' anymore. I'm not sure if its true stereo but it certainly sounds much better.
I know that exactly copying to another track would make no difference :)
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OK, I don't want to dwell on this because this is your thread for your tune.

But when you say you know that copying a track doesn't do anything, but isn't that what you did? I'm just trying to understand what you did. If you simply copied the track, then panning them doesn't accomplish anything. If you think it sounds better, that's a false perception we get from something being louder.

Only having one mic shouldn't stop you from being able to record a part twice....THEN you pan them and hear the separation. That's how it's supposed to be done, and you'll hear a huge difference compared to just copying the same part, which does nothing.

Good luck. :cool:
 
I like your voice fella - are you from Manchester-ish or are you a yank trying to sound English ?

Either way I'd like to hear the finished track.
 
@RAMI .. No doubt your knowledge far surpasses me my friend. I just thought it sounded better. You're right though, i re-recorded and panned and I hear the difference.

@lasgne .. Cheers mate. I'm from Burnage, Manchester :D It's almost done, although having my motorcycle stolen on Friday night has taken all my attention away from it atm... Welcome to Burnage, Manchester!
 
PizzImperfect said:
@RAMI .. No doubt your knowledge far surpasses me my friend.
Click to expand...
Well, I don't know about that. This subject comes up a lot, though. I just wanted to help you.
You're right though, i re-recorded and panned and I hear the difference.
Click to expand...

Cool. It really does sound better that way because it's the proper way to do it. :cool:
 
Although there's literally 1 chord i hit .5 second late on the dub and every time I hear it i cringe... I need to redo it :P
 
To me the sound is very gated... probably to get rid of the hiss of the cheap mic.
 
What do you mean by 'gated'? Sorry for the amateur question..
I do use 'Waves X-Noise' on the vocal as it did seem to reduce exactly what you said, the cheap mic hiss.
 
If you don't know what gating is then you can't be using it, but some parts of this song come out of nowhere.

Gating is a part of the compression/expansion/limiting family of effects. Basically whenever a particular track reduces in volume to a certain level it is completely silenced (the idea being to silence noise when nothing is going on). It can be very abrupt when things start up again... and it gets quite choppy if the threshold level for the silence is set wrong.

I always manually edit/silence my tracks (he said pompously).
 
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