Have you tried the integrated Melodyne in MC 8 Pro Dave?
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WHAT? Oh now that makes me downright mad!!! Melodyne licensed their tech to Acoustica!? While we Avid users that paid $2400 for our software are still stuck without a native autotuner?? Avid should be embarrassed by that. UGH! Thats frustrating 
ā¦but a great thing for you guys 
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Well to be fair, itās only the āEssentialā entry level version but itās still awesome. Plus because itās integrated, you donāt have to play it into the plug in real time, itās just āthereā as if by magic.
Plus itās upgradeable if you want more tools and/or polyphony.
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And thatās way more than avid gave us. Having a copy of Melodyne on a plugin insert in PT isnāt the same (to me) as having it hard coded in the architecture of the DAW like in Logic and Nuendo.
Its very convenient to have it in Nuendo. I donāt have Mixcraft. Just out of curiosity (and not to dilute this thread too far), inside Mixcraft, does the tuner scan the audio track for pitch offline, then automatically render the pitch analysis to a piano grid?
Its great to know that tool is thereā¦is this new, or has it been there for a while?
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Hi @AJ113, Would you please enlighten me as to what a reference track is? And how to use it? This is new to me.
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Indeed, I have used the integrated Melodyne. Very excellent addition. And because I already owned the full version before v8 came out (@Jonathan: Native Melodyne is new in v8), Mixcraft has detected that and integrated the full version. Sweeet! I use it on everything I sing, because where I need help is reaching my note quickly-- my natural ability is not good enough, I kind of slide in to notes. I can hold them pretty well once I get there, but I need that help to get there just a hair quicker.
And Mixcraft Pro Studio is only $179. 
[quote=āJonathan, post:24, topic:1706ā]
Its very convenient to have it in Nuendo. I donāt have Mixcraft. Just out of curiosity (and not to dilute this thread too far), inside Mixcraft, does the tuner scan the audio track for pitch offline, then automatically render the pitch analysis to a piano grid?[/quote]Basically, yes.
[quote]Its great to know that tool is thereā¦is this new, or has it been there for a while?
[/quote]New for MC 8 (pro version only).
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Basic idea here is to a/b your mix with a commercial release of similar genre/style and compare sonic elements. One need not use just one ref track for a mix-- one might use one tune for how the guitars and bass interact, another for how the vox and guitars interact, etc. I rarely use more than one myself on a given mix. Google up āusing reference tracksā and you will get a billion hits of ample descriptionā¦
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Iāll start a new thread.
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I mentioned this in the thread that AJ just started on ref track use, but I picked up a plugin called REFERENCE by Mastering the Mix.com a few days ago and have just been playing around with it on this tune (you can read more comments about the plug in that other thread).
I chose as a ref track a tune by one of my Americana heroes, Steve Earle, called Somewhere Out There, which has similar instrumentation ā acoustic & electric guitars, bass, drums, vox. The good news is that my LUFS matches almost exactly, with a range of -10.9 to -11.3 throughout both tunes. The stereo spread is narrower in my mix in the sub-200 Hz region, but wider in the range from 200 to 2000 Hz and also above 2000. It demonstrates also that the perceived loudness is lower in my mix below 200; higher between 200 and 1K; about the same between 1K and 5K; and significantly lower above 5K. My mix is also more compressed above 200 Hz in all these bands than is the ref (all of this is immediately apparent by inspection of this REFERENCE plugins highly intuitive display, takes two seconds to get all that info just by glancing).
Iāve already done some experimenting with the vocal processing too, and yep, Iām ditching the slapback.
Anyway, more soon!
Hi there, nice track. I was thinking some parallel compression could be nice to give the drums and bass a bit more punch and lock them in nicely.
good effort all the same.
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Good choice. Itās good that youāre checking out the frequencies and EQs etc. but I think the levels are more important. For example check out the lead vocals, snare, and background ooohhs.
Oh, definitely. And this tool makes that task easier too because one can solo any of the up to five bands one can chop the song up into and a/b just that band. Their ātrinity displayā includes level, eq, and compression comparison in one graphic element. Frankly this plug removes all excuses for not using a ref track, because it removes so much guesswork about what one is comparing. Iām fired up about it! All those comparative insights took me a couple minutes to understand instead of maybe hours of more painstaking work (yeah, I know you experienced folks can do such things in much less time than I can), and thatās a huge improvement in workflow for me.
After I use this for a few weeks I might work up a video review to post-- really needs to be seen in action to be fully appreciated.
Hey folks, hereās an interim version-- not an official revision (those go only in the OP), because I still want to try some of the suggestions for adding some interest/ear candy, such as some of the stuff @Jonathan suggested, and work on the drums some more as @Stan_Halen suggested. But I spent some quality time with the Steve Earle reference track (thanks @AJ113 for kicking me in the butt on that!) and that REFERENCE plugin, and I wanted to post how that is sounding. I abandoned the lead vox slapback entirely, and I think that was a big improvement; instead, Iām using the same reverb plug as a send that Iām using for the instruments, so it should sound much more like itās all connected than it did previously. Iāve got a close match to the levels in my ref track now, and the REFERENCE plug has also given me some good guidance on eq, compression, stereo width, and other stuff. Sounds a ton better IMO.
Iām off to Oregon in the morning for several days, during which weāll be viewing the total eclipse on Monday. Iāll have a writeup on that in the Science Nerdliness thread after I get backā¦ and it will be after I get back before I can experiment with other changes on this. Stay tuned, but meanwhile:
Iām listening on laptop speakers because my monitors are sitting in a closet so I can mount those new traps.
There are a lot of really cool improvements, but I miss the slap. Maybe not quite to the extent you had it last time, but its helped it feel old school. Are you using the scuffham rig? Maybe try one on the guitar from within the Scuffham FX rack?
On the vocal, if you need a slap track to not get in the way, one trick is to simply roll top off. Another thing you can do is insert a lo-fi plugin after it.
Hereās some tricks worth tryingā¦If I were you, I would fight for it, and go the extra mile to see if you can make a slap work.
First of all, if you anna play around with it, donāt insert it directly on the vocal track and try to use your wet/dry knob. If you want to experiment with it, put it on its own aux bus so that you can play around with placing other effects before and after it.
You can mimic a tape delay by just using a regular delay. All a tape delay is, is a 125-175ms delay with a very very short tail. If your tape delay plugin has an option of 30ips (that stands for inches per second), or 15 ips, try the 15 ips setting. The 125-175ms range varied depending on the specific tape machine. If you just put it right in the middle at 150ms, the difference between 150ms and 175 ms is hardly discernible, because its relatively low in the mix. When youāre trying to decide between 125 vs 175 ms (which does start to become discernible in the mix), donāt over think it. I just park the tape delay somewhere audible, then toggle back and forth between the two, then listen to the FEEL of it effects the track in context. Donāt solo it either. Make sure youāre listening to what its doing to the whole mix.
-You can place any imaging plugin after it to widen it.
-You can also throw a compressor after it to help manage it.
-Another thing I do with slap delays is throw a transient designer plugin after it to help mellow it out.
-Its really super cool to take the tail of the tape delay, then feed it back into itself again and again. So youāre creating a feedback loop from its own tail.
-You can also put a reverb after a tape delay, but make sure its a room reverb and its shorter than they delay is long. So automatically dial it somewhere lower than 125 ms.
-Since youāre using one master reverb, you can also take the output of the tape delay and send it to that master reverb. Just put a bus send the reverb bus track.
-Again you can add a lo-fi plugin after it (as mentioned above)
-Another neat trick is to saturate only the tape delay. Try placing your voxformer after the tape delay, turn everything off except for the presence and saturation, then turn knobs until something sticks. 
Hmm, they sound better already in the interim version. But you didnāt say you did anything to them yet. (?)
I had kind of liked that slapback from a historical sound perspective, but now it sounds okay without it and I realize the slapback had been a bit overcooked. Still, thereās some weird plosives on your voice coming out of both versions (that I didnāt notice much before). Your Tās, Cās, and several other consonants are producing some kind of spit/sputter plosive that is kind of distracting.
Is it true that you donāt have to wear the āshadesā during the total eclipse? Someone told me that, but I thought totality was actually very intense due to the Sunās coronal envelope.
Thanks for the quick responses guys!
I always use sends for delays and reverbs, never on the actual tracks themselves.
I used Boz Imperial Delay for the slapback send, and it comes with a couple of slapback presets, and I started with one of those and then adjusted some parameters to suit. Iād already thought of eqāing the high freqs on the slap send (see my reply to @Emma above). Iāll give your suggestions some thought when I get back in the studioā¦
Copy that-- I had not noticed those, will also take a close listen. And on the drums, all I did was adjust (increase) levels of the kick and snare to match my ref track, and I agree, that did a lot of good. No other mods to the drums yet though.
Yes, this is true-- but ONLY when it is 100% totality. The corona is actually much much fainter than the Sun itself (although it is also much much hotter, which is an unexplained paradox). At totality, the brightness of the Moon-covered Sun is about the same as the full Moon, so itās perfectly safe to look at. But the MOMENT totality ends you better have your eye protection back onā¦ always put it on a bit before to be safe.
Iāll be able to visit the forum here and there over the coming few days but not back in earnest til Weds. Cheers!
Sounding great!.. Nice revision. Love the lead guitar tone too. Everything sounding nice and balanced in my room.
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The new mix is a massive improvement, Dave! Sounding good! In fact, the better balances seem to create have much more energy overall.
The guitar sounds a great, although the lead has a touch too much bite in the high mids to my ear. The vocal may be a touch that way too. Iām hearing some compression artifacts at the beginnings of words where the hard consonants are passing through the compressor before it turns them down, causing them to appear to leap up in volume for a micro-second. Possibly speeding up the compressorās attack may help to tame that.
Nice work!
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