Enter The Haggis - Two Bare Hands - Updated

[Mixinthecloud]

I've been curious about OmniChannel for awhile now. I like the ability to insert other Waves plugs at any point in the Omnichannel. Plus I just like Andrew Scheps.

I'm not in a position to give a critical opinion. though I don't usually anyway. That said. It opens fine. When the drums come in it feels compressed and doesn't "bloom" as much as I'd hope. My attention is drawn mostly to the guitar on the right. The left side of the image is a little empty.

It feels good. The balances, tonally, work. The vocal feels occasionally peaky but not overly so. The only real issue is the dynamics which I'm expecting more because it's a live recording with audience sounds. Emotionally I just think it calls for more.

Does that make sense? hopefully.

Hey Roy,
All valid points you have raised. I feel that in my attempt to raise the over all volume of the presentation, mastering compression and limiting have staunched a lot of the dynamics of the performance. Alas, that is one of the trade-offs we make for volume or at least for the volume I wanted this presented at. I noticed that your presentation levels are much lower than normal for your rendition of this song.

There is no compression on the instruments, save for the bass and the vocal. I did parallel compressed the chamber track to ensure good listenability for the vocal effects. The only added effects are an in-line reverb on the keyboards. The emptiness on the left side I hope was filled with the second guitar and keys.

One of the things that attracted me to the Omni Channel was the dual band de-esser which is a lot more than just that. Each band is fully sweepable throughout the frequency range with four bandwidth options available per detector. In this instance there is a pop on the vocal mic near the top of the song which was handled beautifully by this. It was also working on the 'peakiness' of the vocal which may have needed a bit more control (see Note1 below). It was compressed later in the chain on the same strip. Another really cool feature of the Omni is on the internal side chain filters. Once you establish the band you want to filter for the detector, you can lock the low and high pass filters together and then using one of the controls sweep the established bandpass range to fine tune things. Very cool. I also really like the choices for the compressors (VCA, FET and Optical) and when switching between them it keeps the settings you have established so you can really compare the differences between the various flavors of compressor modeling. It also has continuously variable compression ratios.

Note1: This is not the first time I have felt there is an inherent upper mid resonance in vocals using the Telefunken mic used here (M80). I'm not sure it's the mic or the mic-pre chain but I have had to deal with this on other Telefunken vocals using this mic.