Acoustic Song Queries

[CJMelchizedek]

Hi all. I'm working on cleaning up a track that has an irish bouzoki type instrument, with a rhythm and lead track and spoken word on a Condenser Mic. The Instrument is dually recorded in two tracks with a DI input and into the same Condenser Mic.
Just been embarking on this for the first time and hitting some walls.

For example, I'm sucessfully adjusting volume levls in snippets of the vocal and rhythm that are too high, then when I heal the splits in items, it reverts back to its old volume.

Also, the track was done in segments, and the quiter part of the rhythm track has really bad background noise. Having done some work on the vocals already (which made them sound worse, mostly) I learned the De Essing technique of creating an EQ and sending it to a compressor which took a recurring nasty high frequency out of the rhtyhm track. Other than Verbing eveything with sends, and panning the dual rhtyhm track and EQing them both differently to make the instrument sound good, this is the only sucess I've had really with production at all. I tried to run ReaFir on the noisy part of the rhythm track but this didn't work. It was on the Condenser track of the rhythm track and just took all the sound away.

Essentially I'm just trying to clean the tracks up on the most basic levels in terms of manual volume adjustment and merging split aspects of the same tracks, taking out background noise, and removing really noisy parts and substituting them with other tiny bits of the track to make them sound good.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

[CJMelchizedek]

Just wondering did I somehow hide my post? I'm new here and last time I made a post I received a lot of replies quickly.

Any help appreciated.

Thanks

[numberthirty]

Two quick questions...

- This DI signal... How usable is it? Any of the noise along the lines of the condenser?

- How open are you to stepping off of the beaten path when it comes to this?

[numberthirty]

Also -

The vocal...

On a track of it's own, or is it a live pass with the instrument where you are having trouble with noise?

[Bazzbass]

Originally Posted by CJMelchizedek

The Instrument is dually recorded in two tracks with a DI input and into the same Condenser Mic.

do you mean the bouzouki is going though the mic at the same time as the vocals?

if the vocal track has bouzouki in it too there isn't a lot you can do.

you could copy the track, EQing one for the bouzouki and the other copy EQing for the vocals?

[CJMelchizedek]

Originally Posted by numberthirty

Two quick questions...

- This DI signal... How usable is it? Any of the noise along the lines of the condenser?

- How open are you to stepping off of the beaten path when it comes to this?

Good question about the DI signal. It does seem usable. We've used it before, but on a different machine with a different Audio interface, and as with this, we also miked it up simultaneously. However I will re-check. The DI signal itself on the instrument is totally raw, without a preamp (maybe? I don't know enough to know for sure), but definately without the ability to change anything when you line into an amp or PA. Theres no volume or tone modulation on the DI line of the instrument at all. I use the mic as well because it brightens up what is otherwise a bad representation of a very beautiful sounding instrument.

I've definetly heard some noises along the condenser lines. At one stage I was trying to remove a noise from the track, when I realised it must be coming from what I had plugged in in real time, which included the condenser, even though it was turned completely off. Sometimes, there is also bad noises in general, I suspect from the DAW hardware not meeting the USB port properly.

How open Am I to going off the beaten track. Definately open - in essence, I just want to get this done. The track is very developed, my capacity to record and particularly produce it is not.

Thanks

[CJMelchizedek]

Originally Posted by numberthirty

Also -

The vocal...

On a track of it's own, or is it a live pass with the instrument where you are having trouble with noise?

The vocal is on a track of its own, spoken word style, but slightly louder, as its poetry, and is recorded on the round type of condenser usually used for spoken word and capturing acoustic recordings where they sing and play at once.

[CJMelchizedek]

Originally Posted by Bazzbass

do you mean the bouzouki is going though the mic at the same time as the vocals?

if the vocal track has bouzouki in it too there isn't a lot you can do.

you could copy the track, EQing one for the bouzouki and the other copy EQing for the vocals?

No the vocals were done seperately. The dual Bouzoki track was done with a DI interface and a condenser track at the same time.

Also, it might not have come across from your replies, but I'd love to just be able to get into each track and just pick tiny sections, lower or raise their volume, then knit them back together. How do I do that?

CJ

[numberthirty]

Originally Posted by CJMelchizedek

Good question about the DI signal. It does seem usable. We've used it before, but on a different machine with a different Audio interface, and as with this, we also miked it up simultaneously. However I will re-check. The DI signal itself on the instrument is totally raw, without a preamp (maybe? I don't know enough to know for sure), but definately without the ability to change anything when you line into an amp or PA. Theres no volume or tone modulation on the DI line of the instrument at all. I use the mic as well because it brightens up what is otherwise a bad representation of a very beautiful sounding instrument.

I've definetly heard some noises along the condenser lines. At one stage I was trying to remove a noise from the track, when I realised it must be coming from what I had plugged in in real time, which included the condenser, even though it was turned completely off. Sometimes, there is also bad noises in general, I suspect from the DAW hardware not meeting the USB port properly.

How open Am I to going off the beaten track. Definately open - in essence, I just want to get this done. The track is very developed, my capacity to record and particularly produce it is not.

Thanks

Copy that.

Here is the "Off Of The Beaten Path..." approach that you could try to see if you can work around the issue with the condenser microphone.

Assuming that the DI track is in decent shape, here is something you could attempt. A while back, my younger brother helped his friend's acoustic band record. Took a DI track from the acoustic pickup. At the time, I'm not even sure how much it played into the mix.

Later on, I used an impulse response in Reaper's convolution reverb. The impulse came from this blog -

http://micirp.blogspot.com/

Lots of different microphone impulses, and I was pretty surprised at how well they stacked up against the actual "Microphone..." component in the recording I mentioned.

With a couple in instances of that DI track attempting to mimic the microphones they took impulse responses of and a send to a "Room..." type of reverb? I wonder if you might not be able to cobble together a decent approximation of the instrument in question being recorded with a microphone.

[numberthirty]

Originally Posted by CJMelchizedek

...

Also, it might not have come across from your replies, but I'd love to just be able to get into each track and just pick tiny sections, lower or raise their volume, then knit them back together. How do I do that?

CJ

If I say "Volume Automation..."?

Do you copy?