06-04-2013, 10:03 PM
As others have pointed out, there’s a lot of spill on most of these tracks. However, the organ, re-recorded lead vocal and two backup vocals were overdubbed and have no spill at all. I took that as an indication the group wasn’t really trying to make a live recording. They probably just lacked a good recording environment.
I only checked phase on the overheads but found they go out of phase very consistently. The song is mainly 4 bars repeated (2 bars of A, 1 bar of E and 1 bar of D). The out-of-phase portion always happens in bar three, on the E. I thought guitar spill was causing the phase problem but didn’t try to fix it. Here are the main things I did:
Discarded the room mic. I thought it made things sound muddier.
The snare, kick and overheads seemed to have the worst signal-to-spill ratios so I tried to replace the kick and snare. With some pre and post-processing, kick replacement worked well. I couldn’t get the snare replacement to work well enough to use so I stuck with the original track. (Note I used Avid’s SoundReplacer, a very basic drum replacer.) I gated the toms and reversed the overheads left-for-right.
I noticed the re-recorded lead vocal had a much brighter sound than the original, possibly due to using a different microphone. Still, I chose to use the scratch vocal because there was so much of it on the overheads and other tracks. I tuned the scratch vocal lightly with Melodyne and also tuned the backup vocals.
I replaced the organ with DB-33. I like a B-3 sound for this kind of southern rock.
I mult’ed the guitars during the interlude so I could change panning and volume easier. I also edited Gtr3, the slide, to fill in a spot around 1:16 where he stopped playing for some reason.
I put low EQ cuts, compression and reverb on almost all tracks. The compression peaked at -3 to 5 dB of gain reduction. The reverb was fairly short at 1.1 seconds. I finished with a small amount of volume automation.
I only checked phase on the overheads but found they go out of phase very consistently. The song is mainly 4 bars repeated (2 bars of A, 1 bar of E and 1 bar of D). The out-of-phase portion always happens in bar three, on the E. I thought guitar spill was causing the phase problem but didn’t try to fix it. Here are the main things I did:
Discarded the room mic. I thought it made things sound muddier.
The snare, kick and overheads seemed to have the worst signal-to-spill ratios so I tried to replace the kick and snare. With some pre and post-processing, kick replacement worked well. I couldn’t get the snare replacement to work well enough to use so I stuck with the original track. (Note I used Avid’s SoundReplacer, a very basic drum replacer.) I gated the toms and reversed the overheads left-for-right.
I noticed the re-recorded lead vocal had a much brighter sound than the original, possibly due to using a different microphone. Still, I chose to use the scratch vocal because there was so much of it on the overheads and other tracks. I tuned the scratch vocal lightly with Melodyne and also tuned the backup vocals.
I replaced the organ with DB-33. I like a B-3 sound for this kind of southern rock.
I mult’ed the guitars during the interlude so I could change panning and volume easier. I also edited Gtr3, the slide, to fill in a spot around 1:16 where he stopped playing for some reason.
I put low EQ cuts, compression and reverb on almost all tracks. The compression peaked at -3 to 5 dB of gain reduction. The reverb was fairly short at 1.1 seconds. I finished with a small amount of volume automation.
