Ah, thanks for chiming in Bob! You just flagged something I intended to say in the last instalment, but forgot.
Actually, surprisingly, I didn’t automate each background vocal track in the same detailed way I did the lead vocal. In fact, I don’t thing I did any automation on the individual tracks. I certainly automated them as a group, though, but that was simply to increase their presence in the mix as a whole, rather than to control their dynamics.
The dynamics of the individual vocal tracks were controlled adequately with 2 instances of compression on the individual tracks. Normally, in a mix where I wanted the backing vocals to be really slick and smooth, I would put and additional compressor on the group vocal track, but I deliberately avoided that tactic here. That results in a very homogenionous, almost “pad-like” sound that works well for certain styles of music, but it was the wrong choice here IMO.
I mentioned before, the “loose gospel/soul” backing vocal vibe, and what I’ve noticed with that style of presentation is that things DO “poke out”. The levels of the individual singers are uneven… But that’s what MAKES it sound so great and passionate.
A good example of that is The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter”. The female backing vocalist is absolutely shredding at the top of her range, and she sounds way louder than Mick in the choruses, but it’s absolutely perfect for the shambolic, apocalyptic vibe of the track.
So I deliberately erred on the side of less dynamic control, or “just enough” to maintain the vibe.
@ColdRoomStudio
Wonderful continuation thanks… so interesting to read this stuff and especially when it is a track that I’m familiar with. Thanks so much for taking the time and effort to write this stuff - awesome!!
Okay, it’s time to take off the gloves. Take a day off from work, call in sick, claim you were kidnapped by aliens, your dog ate your homework, you were lost in the time-space continuum, but please tell me what you did to the ivories before I’m too old to fulfill my bucket list. Sheesh.
Yikes… Sorry, don’t think it’s gonna happen this week or the next - I have a paid mix to do…Each of these instalments involve a SERIOUS commitment of time.
A quick thought on this…When I’m dealing with a music recording (and not film or gaming) I send and receive roughs with ‘suggestions’ on the processing. So…I’d get on the phone with the guy, find out what DAW and plugins he’s using, then figure out what we both have in common. When I receive the rough (and pray to God it doesn’t bug out with errors when I load it), I take a look at their EQ and compression choices. This helps me get an idea of what they started with and what they wanted to hear. Even if I completely disagree with their choice and have no intention of using their initial preset, it lets me get inside their head a little bit and sort of deduce what they wanted a particular instrument to sound like. Unlike this example Andrew @ColdRoomStudio posted, the direction of the track is not always strait forward.
I read this through pretty thoroughly and paid attention to the audio example as well. Thanks Andrew, so much, for taking the time to put this together. What I think has really made this helpful so far is the amount of detail and CONTEXT. You can’t make those same observations by reading a quick tip online.
Its was interesting to me to observe your choices of plugins. And its double helpful to me (and hopefully anyone else here) who has a lot of those same plugs.
I actually tried this with one of @Chordwainer 's songs…Tennesee Plates if you remember that one. I was attempting to document the tweaks I was making inside the AD drums plugin, and I lost track of where I was with my written notes pretty quickly. I struggled to just document the process for one instrument, I don’t know how your’e managing to do what you’re doing here!
I don’t think I caught your choice of de-esser. I see you’re using some UAD stuff here…my go-to depends on what I can get to the fastest. If the UAD Voxbox is already on the channel I use it. If there’s already a VMR open, I pull the Eiosis. Love the waves R-desser, and if the signal chain is already going outboard (which is rare but it happens), there’s a really handy de-esser on my DPR 402 compressors’s. You?
I noticed you were using the Bricasti for room and plate. I like tend to leave mine on the “sunset chamber” preset, and let the UAD and Waves plates to the heavy lifting. Do you favor the Bricasti over the UAD in general, or was that specific to this particular song?
I see you use the Micro-shift. Do you have any thoughts on the UAD Eventide H-910, or their Dimension D vs the Micro Shift? I actually keep a pair of micro shifts strapped to one aux bus, and a pair of 910’s strapped to another. And then the Dimension D is on the swap auxiliary incase the Micro Shift doesn’t get the job done. I constantly go back and forth, mainly between the Micro-shift and the 910. Have you tried all 3?
…I favor the devil loc deluxe over the radiator for mangling a lead vocal, but I violently agree with you on the importance of the mix knob.
Ohhhh. Also…Avox was a really interesting choice. I’m not real familiar with it but I like what you did with it. However, looking at the screenshot, it seems like it could be very tedious to dial in…and it would be hard to control, since there’s no way all that junk would map neatly onto a DAW control surface. Is it hard to get up and running?
I do this quite a bit. I prefer the BFD library to Addicitive for cymbals, mostly because I have yet to get my hands on a better sample set than the Zidjian Gen16 set. Usually slate for Kick and Snare replacement, but sometimes I have to go to BFD because the library and options are much larger than XLN’s.
I’m not familiar with reaper. Did you have to draw the hits in manually, did you do this natively, or use 3rd party transient detection plug?
Ps…can you toss in a short sample of the room mics by themselves? In your final drum mix I was curious to see what was responsible for parts of the blend…
Up until recently I used Waves, but I used mainly Eiosis here. On occasion, I’ve used Fabfilter ProMB as a de-esser I actually do very little de-essing since incorporating VTM into my workflow. Usually only backgrounds get de-essing if the esses are poking ou too much.
I noticed you were using the Bricasti for room and plate. I like tend to leave mine on the “sunset chamber” preset, and let the UAD and Waves plates to the heavy lifting. Do you favor the Bricasti over the UAD in general, or was that specific to this particular song?
This was the first time I used the Bricasti, as it is part of the Slate Reverb which I only recently updated to all the latest plugs. I haven’t tried the Sunset Room. Usually I use Valhalla Room or IK’s CSR Room. I don’t use many of my UAD plugs because I only have a Solo card, so it’s more about preservation of DSP - I keep the UAD card set aside for Fatso, Neve 88R on bass, and Pultec Pro on the master.
I see you use the Micro-shift. Do you have any thoughts on the UAD Eventide H-910, or their Dimension D vs the Micro Shift? I actually keep a pair of micro shifts strapped to one aux bus, and a pair of 910’s strapped to another. And then the Dimension D is on the swap auxiliary incase the Micro Shift doesn’t get the job done. I constantly go back and forth, mainly between the Micro-shift and the 910. Have you tried all 3?
No, I’ve only tried Little Microshift. It seems to do what I need. I like its simplicity. Boz’s Imperial Delay can do a similar trick.
Ohhhh. Also…Avox was a really interesting choice. I’m not real familiar with it but I like what you did with it. However, looking at the screenshot, it seems like it could be very tedious to dial in…and it would be hard to control, since there’s no way all that junk would map neatly onto a DAW control surface. Is it hard to get up and running?
Reaper has great transient detection tools, which I haven’t fully explored yet, as there are already a number of different ways I have of doing this type of thing - in this case, I used “Tab to transient” to grab the cymbal hits only from the OH track, put each different crash on a separate track, then I think I might have used Melodyne to extract the midi.
Ps…can you toss in a short sample of the room mics by themselves? In your final drum mix I was curious to see what was responsible for parts of the blend…
Kick and snare are usually balanced by ear, but I usually check the balance against my reference. I always have Span on the master buss to check overall frequency response.
Pretty interesting what you did there. The unprocessed mic sounds pretty natural, maybe a little boxy. The processed sounds like you really pulled a lot out of it without losing the transients, which made the cymbals work better and kept the hit of the snare without the ringing. Reductive eq with some transient shaping?
I’ll have to check in the session - pretty sure it was just EQ and compression.
Wait a second, here it is! I already described it above:
The room mic processing involved a 412 hz cut to take that boxy room resonance out, followed by a broader cut at 600hz to further clean up the low mids, and a boost at 4.9k to bring out some of the crack of the drums. I then smashed it into an 1176 compressor emulation set to 20:1, slowest attach, fastest release, with about 5dB of gain reduction, but working in parallel on about 75% of the signal. This was then followed by an 80hz boost to push the low end a little and bring out the beefiness of the kick and snare. The same annoying resonance that was in the overheads was present in the room mic. In this case, a fairly narrow cut at 6.44k seemed to nix it.