Voelund: 'Comfort Lives In Belief' - Olli H

[Olli H]

Thanks for listening, and sorry for causing you any pain.
With this version I tried to do a modern retro sound with more hi-end. Maybe I failed totally?
I did also another version which where my references were 50 years old.

[pauli]

wow, I think there's a lot of good to be said about this mix. I worked on it a bit, trying to comp the guitar solo... I remember a bit of it but it's been a while. Having said this I think your comp sounds great and has a live feel, much as you intended. Jives very well with the vocal performance... I think it could sound a little more present to create the illusion he was playing it while singing, perhaps, but I dunno if you should mess with the balance because I think in that respect it's pretty good.

I think the vocal sounds quite good myself. There's quite a bit of sibilance on the vocal, but that adds a bit to the classic sound you're going for in my opinion... if anyone here has an old pressing of the crosby, stills, nash and young album deja vue, check out "teach your children". they wouldn't have been able to address sibilance without the poor guy in the control room lunging for the fader, and pop filters only go so far, so on that particular tune they made it part of the sound. in all fairness though, our ears are all different and I've noticed Dave's are more sensitive than most to the frequencies around 4k where you'd expect sibilance to live, hence his frustration (my personal "discomfort zone" is in the 500-900 range, so I always have to take breaks to make sure I don't goose too much out ). If it's an issue for you that you feel is worth addressing, maybe you could maintain a classic frequency balance and address the sibilance with some sort of tape saturation/clipping, which might smear those frequencies out a bit like old analogue systems did naturally. Obviously I was just a kid in the very early 90's when analogue recording largely fell out of favor, but I remember reading that in order to compete with the noise floor, they recorded as loud as they could without clipping in the 60s and 70s, and the closer the needle gets to 0, the more smearing you get... so any sorta frequency spikes sorta naturally de-essed.

Which, by the way, the LCR panning strategy works for me, since it reflects the stereo limitations of the era that they made part of the sound.

My main reservations, albeit small ones, are that I feel like the kick has too much low end power for the style and the upper mids get harsh in a couple places, but it's not enough to make my ears too uncomfortable to enjoy the mix! I think vinyl only goes down to 40hz, so filtering everything below that out of the mix and putting a really colorful tape saturation/clipping plugin on the master fader might improve an already solid mix.

[Olli H]

Thanks for listening

With this version I was going after a modern retro sound. When mixing others songs, I always try to find new different references, just to widen my limited taste. Now that I listen my mix again without listening any modern references, I certainly feel, that this one game out to be little too bright.

The low end is certainly one of my weak points. My room is quite good and somewhat flat in the listening position, but I don't have any sub. But main thing, at the moment I don't have needed skills to make modern tight bass sound. In this case hi-pass filter around 30-40 Hz would have been a good idea. But I'm practising and studying the subject all the time. So, hopefully someday.

One reason for modern sibilance problem is that nowadays the mic tends to be too close the singer. But if one doesn't have superstudio in use, one must use close miking to prevent even worse problems caused by room. In those old days recordings were almost always done in good studios where one could have proper distance to mic.

Here's one clip where The Beatles study the artistic possibilities of sibilance.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWkdDKqVvCM

[pauli]

Good stuff, man. I've heard nice and tight low end on your other mixes... I dunno that it's a weakness. Almost everyone in the forum has a sucky room for listening because most of us are working stiffs, so the sub region's gonna be hard on all of us. I only noticed it because my cans for whatever reason are very bass heavy and the subs were distorting the bass slightly, so I checked SPAN and confirmed.

Kudos about the close mic observation. Didn't think about that, though I still think it's worth pointing out that sibilance is all over the place on classic recordings. They couldn't do anything about it, nor did it occur to them to do so (I think) because the natural qualities of tape recordings like hiss and analogue distortion actually sound quite nice so I don't find it too terribly uncomfortable, personally.

Too easy to fall into the brightness trap, no sweat. I do it on every mix until I check it the following daqy because my ears calibrate way too quickly. I think your mix is good, nonetheless, and has the makings of great.

[Pedaling Prince]

I remember reading that [in analog recording] in order to compete with the noise floor, they recorded as loud as they could without clipping in the 60s and 70s, and the closer the needle gets to 0, the more smearing you get...

Not so much as loud as they could without "clipping" per se since, with analog equipment, pushing the level that hard would cause an unacceptable level of distortion, and you'd bury the needle on the VU meters.

Actually, recording level meters weren't calibrated the same way in the analog era as they are now. Digital meters are "peak" meters, meaning the measure exact sound level at all times, and they define "0 dB" as the absolute maximum level. It's a "hard limit," that is to say it is physically impossible to exceed it.

Analog levels, OTOH, were generally measured using VU meters, those physical needles that swept across an arc of dB measurements from -20 dB to +3 dB (+6 dB on some meters). In this case, 0 dB was a reference level of specific electrical strength but not a hard limit; it was possible to go beyond it without clipping the signal, hence the reason the scale goes beyond 0. VU meters, unlike peak meters, measure only overall average volume at any given point; brief peaks or drops in the sound can't be measured because the needle, being a physical mechanical device, can't move fast enough to measure them. So, to prevent clipping, 0 dB on a VU meter is actually about 20 dB below the equipment's absolute maximum signal strength; that way, brief peaks have lots of headroom to kick around in so they won't get cut off. The idea with a VU meter was to get the overall average level of your recording to ride the needle between about -6 and 0 dB with only occasional peaks into the red zone above 0 dB; this was designed to give you a good, solid level above the noise floor without clipping the signal.

This method of measuring recording level was mostly meant to compensate for the limitations of VU meter technology since the meter, by its very nature, was not a precise measurement. However, the VU meter's unique properties do make it useful in modern recording as well. Peak meters measure absolute volume from instant to instant but not overall average volume; in other words, they don't give a good idea how loud a recording will sound to the ear since we (humans, that is ) perceive loudness based on overall average level, not the brief peaks in level. So a VU meter can actually show you how loud a recording will sound to the ear. For example, if you take most of my recordings and run them through a properly calibrated VU meter you'll probably see them only peak into the red on a small handful of occasions, but put something like Metallica's Death Magnetic through the same meter and it'll likely move very little, staying in the red zone a vast majority of the time.

In that sense, getting the best level with digital meters is a lot simpler. In your final recording, just boost the overall volume until the loudest sound hits, but does not exceed, 0 dBFS. Voila: perfect level. With VU meters, though, that kind of precision was impossible so the best overall level was much more a matter of judgment in the analog era than it is today.

[Pedaling Prince]

Here's one clip where The Beatles study the artistic possibilities of sibilance.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWkdDKqVvCM

Hm. Interesting, insofar as the noise level and poor high frequency performance actually render the sibilants kind of dull in the actually recording.

Audio recording technology was capable of much better than this even in the era in which this was recorded; is this the best version of this recording available?

[Olli H]

It's found on "The Beatles Anthology" which is full of thier jokes, demos and test versions of their song. I'm quite sure that this one wasn't developped any further to real production.

[Pedaling Prince]

It's found on "The Beatles Anthology" which is full of thier jokes, demos and test versions of their song. I'm quite sure that this one wasn't developped any further to real production.

Ah. Too bad; it's a cool song.