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Old 06-03-2021, 03:21 PM
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Default Mark Daniel Nelson On Mixing Acoustic In A Pop Song

Nice new video from Mark Daniel Nelson today. He's someone I happen to like quite a bit. Not so much about solo guitar, but has some thoughts here about getting acoustic guitar to sit in more a song mix. Glad to see him using one of my favorite plugins, SoftTube's "Tape" https://youtu.be/I-KvirJOKpg
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Old 06-03-2021, 06:28 PM
Glennwillow Glennwillow is offline
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That was interesting.

The SoftTube Tape plug-in does seem like a really useful plug-in.

I found it interesting that he was actually able to do something to soften up that guitar track and make it usable. I suppose recording engineers are presented challenges like this a lot.

- Glenn
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Old 06-08-2021, 07:49 AM
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Definitely some great info on mixing acoustic. IMO well worth a watch , regardless of whether ones interest is solo or in a mix
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Old 06-08-2021, 08:38 AM
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interesting! Were I to be the producer on that song I would either ditch that particular guitar, which sounds like an archtop, or add something like a mahogany/sitka flattop with the mids carved out. To my ears the current guitar simply competes with the voice for the same same spectrum bandwidth. I realize its a current trend to go for different guitar sounds, but darn. With either the replaced guitar or the complementary part blended you can reduce that upper-mid rake or clack of the current guitar and still have the guitar's rhythm presence, but it will be moved up out of the way of the vocal's intelligibility range. It's a case of "don't raise the bridge, lower the water." Production Jiu-Jitsu.

My two cents.

Bob
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Old 06-08-2021, 09:20 AM
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Originally Posted by Bob Womack View Post
interesting! Were I to be the producer on that song I would either ditch that particular guitar, which sounds like an archtop, or add something like a mahogany/sitka flattop with the mids carved out. To my ears the current guitar simply competes with the voice for the same same spectrum bandwidth. I realize its a current trend to go for different guitar sounds, but darn. With either the replaced guitar or the complementary part blended you can reduce that upper-mid rake or clack of the current guitar and still have the guitar's rhythm presence, but it will be moved up out of the way of the vocal's intelligibility range. It's a case of "don't raise the bridge, lower the water." Production Jiu-Jitsu.

My two cents.

Bob
I had much the same reaction you did, Bob, and I don't have near the pro-level experience you have. I personally thought that guitar track sounded awful. But I realize as the engineer on a session like this, you have to make something acceptable out of what you've been given.

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Old 06-08-2021, 09:47 AM
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But I realize as the engineer on a session like this, you have to make something acceptable out of what you've been given.

- Glenn
So true -- as a pro mixer, you're mostly having to play the cards you're dealt. I say mostly, because drums are so often replaced with samples now. Not the case with guitars... yet.

But there's also a lot of salesmanship in that gig. Like when he fiddles with a plugin for a few seconds and then says, "that sounds great." It doesn't, but we buy into it anyway, even if the improvement is negligible.

You're even further ahead if you have an English accent.
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Old 06-08-2021, 10:53 AM
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Cut the volume of the guitar part at bit and frequency sweep for offending frequencies and cut a bit at those points is probably what I would try first. Perhaps a short tailed warm verb worth a try.
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Old 06-08-2021, 11:18 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Brent Hahn View Post
So true -- as a pro mixer, you're mostly having to play the cards you're dealt. I say mostly, because drums are so often replaced with samples now. Not the case with guitars... yet.

But there's also a lot of salesmanship in that gig. Like when he fiddles with a plugin for a few seconds and then says, "that sounds great." It doesn't, but we buy into it anyway, even if the improvement is negligible.

You're even further ahead if you have an English accent.
Hi Brent,

I apologize for taking things off track, but that's interesting that much of recorded drums are often replaced by drum samples.

Are you getting the drummer to record a midi track? Or are you having to replace the actual recorded sounds, one by one, with samples? That seems like it would take a lot of time and work!

Maybe you build a midi track off the recorded track?

- Glenn
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Old 06-08-2021, 11:30 AM
Brent Hahn Brent Hahn is offline
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Typically the way it works is that the entire kit is recorded with a mic on each drum (going to a separate track) plus a pair over the whole kit, maybe another pair further out in the room, and probably a mic on the hi-hat. Every mic going to a separate recorded track. The signal from each drum track triggers the playback of a sample of that same kind of drum (only better-sounding, we hope). The overhead, room and hi-hat tracks are usually left alone, so what you hear is predominantly the samples, with a bit of the original drums from the overhead and room tracks mixed in.

The process is a lot closer to automatic than it used to be, but it can still involve a lot of editing and cleanup to deal with "false triggers" and such.
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Old 06-08-2021, 11:46 AM
Glennwillow Glennwillow is offline
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Originally Posted by Brent Hahn View Post
Typically the way it works is that the entire kit is recorded with a mic on each drum (going to a separate track) plus a pair over the whole kit, maybe another pair further out in the room, and probably a mic on the hi-hat. Every mic going to a separate recorded track. The signal from each drum track triggers the playback of a sample of that same kind of drum (only better-sounding, we hope). The overhead, room and hi-hat tracks are usually left alone, so what you hear is predominantly the samples, with a bit of the original drums from the overhead and room tracks mixed in.

The process is a lot closer to automatic than it used to be, but it can still involve a lot of editing and cleanup to deal with "false triggers" and such.
Thanks Brent!

Fascinating information!

- Glenn
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Old 06-08-2021, 01:46 PM
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Yup. I'm in the middle of a project right now where the kit wasn't wonderfully recorded. I've replaced the kick within a plugin called "Drumagog." I drop the plug into the track and allow the natural kick to trigger the samples. The plug has multiple sample layers for each sound to reflect the loudness and sharpness of the original. So we may have forty kicks to chose from and each is twenty to thirty layers deep. The plug also has the ability to blend between the original and the samples.

Bob
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Old 06-08-2021, 02:00 PM
Glennwillow Glennwillow is offline
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Originally Posted by Bob Womack View Post
Yup. I'm in the middle of a project right now where the kit wasn't wonderfully recorded. I've replaced the kick within a plugin called "Drumagog." I drop the plug into the track and allow the natural kick to trigger the samples. The plug has multiple sample layers for each sound to reflect the loudness and sharpness of the original. So we may have forty kicks to chose from and each is twenty to thirty layers deep. The plug also has the ability to blend between the original and the samples.

Bob
That's great information, Bob!

I had no idea this was going on.

Years ago I was helping my son and his metal band record their album in our studio and nobody was happy with the snare and the kick drum as recorded. So we built a midi track to follow the drum kit recording that triggered sampled snare and kick drums. It was fairly tedious. It came out well, but wow, that took a lot of time!

- Glenn
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Old 06-08-2021, 02:49 PM
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The process is a lot closer to automatic than it used to be, but it can still involve a lot of editing and cleanup to deal with "false triggers" and such.
I've never done it but a friend of mine does it all the time. He complains about a lot of things that slow him down in the studio at times but I've never heard him complain about the time it takes to replace drums, so I'm thinking it's very much automatic these days.

I'm guessing here, but I'm thinking that if one puts gates on all the drum tracks, very little would get through to cause false triggers ...but that likely only works if you know you'll be replacing the drums when you're recording them. But like I said, I've never done it so that might be misguided thinking. I use Superior Drummer when I need drums these days.
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