Guitar + vocal recorded at one time

[MikeBmusic]

Recently had a friend in my studio to record his originals. He's the type who HAS to play and sing at the same time, and because of a bad back (at the time), he had to sit down while tracking.
I had one condensor mic aimed slightly down towards the floor that worked well picking up the guitar only, and another condensor mic up high, aimed upwards a bit to get more vocal than guitar. Unfortunately, he's a loud strummer, and most songs the guitar was in the top mic track too, although lower enough in volume it wasn't an issue to balance everything out (I and others are adding other instrument tracks).
However, on one song he sang at a lower volume, so the guitar dominated the top mic track. I took the bottom mic track, reversed polarity, and summed it with the top mic track and that did reduce the volume of the guitar a little on that track, but its still marginal. Any other ideas? Re-tracking with a close-up dynamic on vocals is not an option (hindsight is great!)

[shufflebeat]

If time travel were an option, or for folks reading this and planning their own recording, this can be done well with fig.8 pattern mics which have opposing "listening" parts and a really profound "deaf" spot equidistant between them.

For rescuing what you've already recorded - if you mute the guitar mic and listen to the vocal only, what's the balance like?

[KevWind]

What exactly does "still marginal" mean ?
Use more specifics to get better suggestions.

That said: I have a couple ideas I deal with this on my One shot series of YouTube videos (i.e guitar bleed into vocal mic track )

#1 perhaps loose the guitar track altogether, if you are adding more instruments perhaps the guitar sound in the vocal track will be sufficient for that guitar element ?

# 2 on the vocal track use a multi band EQ and the narrow Q exaggerated boost, sweep search method, to find the frequency range when the guitar sounds particularly "boxy" and then do a slight narrow Q cut (2 to 5 db) for that narrow frequency range

#3 after or instead of, the EQ trick,,, consider duplicating and using only the vocal track and time slipping the dup to create a faked "doubled vocal" type sound, again with more instruments added this may make the vocal tracks sufficient

[Sasquatchian]

I would think that using something like two AEA R84's horizontally would effectively isolate the voice and guitar but since you've already recorded this, have you tried iZotope RX9's Music Rebalance module to separate the vocal and guitars into their own tracks? When RX works, it's scary amazing and this might be one of those times. I think they have a free two week working demo to try it out.

[jim1960]

Originally Posted by Sasquatchian

...have you tried iZotope RX9's Music Rebalance module to separate the vocal and guitars into their own tracks?

Does Rebalance work that way? I thought Rebalance allowed for readjusting only the volume of something in the mix (vocals, drums, guitar, etc.). I've not heard that one can separate something from a mix and move it to its own track.

[Sasquatchian]

Originally Posted by jim1960

Does Rebalance work that way? I thought Rebalance allowed for readjusting only the volume of something in the mix (vocals, drums, guitar, etc.). I've not heard that one can separate something from a mix and move it to its own track.

Rebalance CAN work that way but a lot depends on the actual music. You can use it as a plugin but it's best used as a standalone app where you export four individual tracks - Vocals, Bass, Percussion, and Other - that can then be loaded into your DAW and treated however you want. It's pretty simple in its operation with only a threshold slider and a choice of Good, Better and Best quality options of which I always use Best even though it's the slowest.

Most recently I've used it to remix backing tracks that were sent to us for reference for my gf's adding her accordion parts. The backing track mixes were so bass and bass drum heavy with vocals being super weak at the same time that they were unusable but after using Rebalance the result was quite usable. Now obviously, it's better when you have access to the original tracks but when you don't, this is the next best thing, and while I've never used it just to separate vocals and acoustic guitar, I have a feeling it'll work quite well for this.

[jim1960]

Originally Posted by Sasquatchian

Rebalance CAN work that way but a lot depends on the actual music. You can use it as a plugin but it's best used as a standalone app where you export four individual tracks - Vocals, Bass, Percussion, and Other - that can then be loaded into your DAW and treated however you want. It's pretty simple in its operation with only a threshold slider and a choice of Good, Better and Best quality options of which I always use Best even though it's the slowest.

Interesting. I have it as part of my Ozone 9 Advanced package but I've only used it a couple of times to pull up the vocal in a mix while mastering.