Suggestions for reducing room sound tubbiness in a vocal track.

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brassplyer

brassplyer

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Another call for sows ear/silk purse conversion. If someone has recorded themselves in an untreated room and there's obvious ambient tubbiness as a result, any suggestions re: tricks to minimize this? I've been trying cutting at various lower freqs.

Thanks.
 
That's about the most you can do....try to adjust it with EQ.
If the track is in the DAW, you can also try cutting away the tails follwing the words/notes, and then adjusting the fade-outs to taste...either manually (my choice), or you can try applying some sort of gate/comp process.

Once ambiance becomes part of a signal, it's hard to remove it if not almost impossible, and if it's bad ambiance, then you're SOL.
 
You can always mask it with reverb. :facepalm: I mean drown it right out ;)

Is it a mellow piece or what have you?
 
brassplyer said:
Another call for sows ear/silk purse conversion. If someone has recorded themselves in an untreated room and there's obvious ambient tubbiness as a result, any suggestions re: tricks to minimize this? I've been trying cutting at various lower freqs.

Thanks.
Click to expand...

Post up a sample.

Or call me, then it would be teletubbys! Geekin out here. lol
 
Most importantly what is the environment you are recording in? You can use Waves X-Noise to get rid of the noise
 
moresound said:
You can't re-do it huh?
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Yes but I'm doing this remotely for someone who's somewhat in the "Soccer mom" category. Talented vocalist, not so hip to tech issues. We've got a pretty workable process to isolate her vocal for me to work with but trying to narrow the disparity between her onboard laptop-mic recorded vocal and the commercial karaoke track she's using. I've given her suggestions to try and at least cut down on the issue with simple baffling - blankets or whatever behind both her and the laptop and to record in as dead a room as possible - carpeted, few or no windows. But the results are likely still going to be not what I'd hope for.
 
brassplyer said:
....onboard laptop-mic recorded vocal....
Click to expand...

:eek: :facepalm: :D ;)


You can have her take that laptop over to Capitol Studios and let Al Schmitt try to mix/fix it....and it will still sound like ass.
Just tell the soccer mom to go out and buy even the cheapest plug-in mic, and it will make a big difference.
On-board laptop mics ALWAYS sound like they were recorded in a can.

Tell her if she wants to be a vocalist, the least she should do is get a decent vocal mic if she's going to do this remotely with you.
Oh...and she does have a good voice, so she needs to do justice to it. :)
 
Id say re record but in the event thats not possible (which for some strange reason always is) I would say EQ, Multiband Compression and cleaning up the empty spaces with gating or manually cutting, then add a little space with a reverb. It tends to open things up a bit.
 
Even a $50 USB mic is going to give better sound than the little 1/4" diaphragm in a laptop mic. The resultant sound is a combination of the little mic and the entire laptop case picking up the vocal's vibrations.
 
brassplyer said:
If someone has recorded themselves in an untreated room and there's obvious ambient tubbiness as a result, any suggestions re: tricks to minimize this?
Click to expand...
I don't know if this is even remotely the same thing but the other day, I was working on an old portastudio recorded thing that a friend and I did about 12 years ago. We had recorded my guitar and her vocal live together. Some months ago, I transfered it to my DAW and I noticed that there were some horrible popping sounds on her vocal. I put it through a dynafex noise reduction unit but all it did was to emphasize hiss {! !} and you could still hear the plosive. So I set up a mic from the side of and one from behind my monitors and rerecorded the vocal. Most of the plosives were removed and playing about with EQ made it sound better than it ever has. Once I add some reverb and place it within the music, I'd say it will sound passable. Before the rerecord idea hit me, I was just about to give up.
 
I agree with others who've said that the best option is to re-record the part, especially since she would be able to give you a similar or better performance in the studio. You can hear a serious amount of computer noise in the track, not to mention the room tone. If this isn't possible, I'd suggest pulling up a sharp peak on whatever EQ you use (if you use a plugin like many of us do) and moving it around the band slowly until you find the spots that sound REALLY terrible. Cut these down as much as you can without making it sound unhuman. Good luck!
 
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