Thread: Chasing clarity
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Old 05-31-2020, 01:57 PM
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Originally Posted by Doug Young View Post
Hey Barry, I took another quick look at these tracks this morning. You've already heard almost all the advice there is :-) But I have a few more comments, anyway.

First of all, what you're doing is exactly what I try to do - pick a segment of a recording I like and try to duplicate it or at least look at it close enough to learn a bit about what's going on. I just did this last night with a recording by Eric Skye that I heard and liked. A bit of detective work...

Listening to these 2 tracks, I think it's very clear that the number 1 issue is room acoustics - it's not "noise", its the reflections and so on of an untreated space. Your recording sounds distant, which is what happens when the room is too lively. The noise level is good tho.

Beyond that, tho, El's track is mastered, and in fact has too much clearly evident compression for my taste, so that's one issue in comparing commercial recordings. I could add some mastering steps to yours, but the amount of room sound on yours tells me it wouldn't help.

There's also the guitar and playing aspects. El has a lot of nice guitars that work well for him. Hard to know what this was recorded with, maybe his Franklin? A good responsive guitar can sound bigger.

What I usually find is that the playing aspect is the hardest. We all have our own touch, phrasing and so on. Your playing sounds fine on this - good job - but it's really interesting to compare the waveform of your recording and El's. Take a look (El's on top):

Attachment 38591

If you just showed these waveforms to someone, they wouldn't guess it was the same song. You can see that El's track is louder overall - bigger, fatter waveform, but more interesting is how his attacks and note bodies are quite different. This isn't unusual, I see it all the time when I do this kind of exercise. Just look at the first note, and how different your attack is from El's. Toward the middle, notice how fat his is compared to yours. He seems to be "blooming" on his notes, while yours is not. Could be the guitar, could be his technique, dynamics, phrasing, could be the guitar, your nails, mic placement, the room, on and on. Some of this could be due to El having added compression, but probably not all of it. This sort of thing is often the biggest mystery to me when I try this, but often it comes down to how I'm playing, and if I focus on my attack, sustain, etc, sometimes I can get a bit closer.

But the overarching thing here is room sound. Kev posted a great list of all the considerations, but you have to prioritize, and keep peeling away layers, and the first layer in this case is really simple - you need some room treatment, or to find a better sounding room. That will get you 90% of the way there, and none of the other options, whether it's different strings, or mics, or whatever will matter until that part is handled.
Thanks Doug. I was just thinking earlier "can I get just one note to sound the same",

I'm going to keep working on this and see what I can come up with. Thanks for taking the extra time to review this.
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