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Old 04-16-2018, 09:28 AM
jim1960 jim1960 is offline
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Default Odd Studio Solutions

I'm wondering what stories some of you might have for when you've had to think outside the box in the studio.

Here's my own tale...
Back in the early 2000s when I was recording my cd, I needed a violin track for a song and the studio owner recommended a friend he had in New Jersey. We sent the tracks to the guy and we sent a synth violin track to give him some idea as to what we wanted. We get the violin track a few weeks later and give it a listen. There was a lot to like about it... it captured the emotion of the song well ...but the player had a tin ear and just about every note was either sharp or flat.

Today, five minutes with Melodyne could fix it, but back then the tools we had available in that studio were very limited. We did have pitch correction available in whatever version of ProTools we were using but we had to guess at how much correction each note needed. We did a few that way but realized all the trial and error guesses on correction would take us a week or two at minimum. We spent an entire day trying to come up with a way to save that violin track and at the end we were pretty sure we'd have to scrap it.

We were going to record acoustic guitar the next day so that night I was changing the strings on my Martin in preparation for that when I got an idea. The next morning, I showed up to the studio with my guitar and my guitar tuner, a Boss TU-12H. My idea was to put the tuner on top of one of the studio monitors and get a reading from the tuner for each note in the violin track to avoid the hunting and pecking we had been trying to do. We tried it with a passage. I read the cents-off from the tuner, and the other guy made the adjustments on the track. We were both surprised when we played it back and it worked. The slurs still slowed us down because we had to break those notes up into segments to apply the correction because how much they were off at the beginning and the end was usually very different. But in the end we pulled it off. It took us about eight hours but we saved the track.

That studio owner and I have become good friends since then and we still laugh about what we went through to get that violin to work.

The end result is on this song...
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2023 Iris ND-200 maple/adi
2017 Circle Strings 00 bastogne walnut/sinker redwood
2015 Circle Strings Parlor shedua/western red cedar
2009 Bamburg JSB Signature Baritone macassar ebony/carpathian spruce
2004 Taylor XXX-RS indian rosewood/sitka spruce
1988 Martin D-16 mahogany/sitka spruce

along with some electrics, zouks, dulcimers, and banjos.

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Old 04-16-2018, 09:41 AM
Brent Hahn Brent Hahn is offline
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... violin track... tin ear...
Good save, lovely song. Great idea with the tuner on the speaker, too. And fortunate that he was mostly playing whole notes. I wonder if his intonation problems arose from trying to play along with the synth.
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Old 04-16-2018, 10:16 AM
jim1960 jim1960 is offline
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Good save, lovely song. Great idea with the tuner on the speaker, too. And fortunate that he was mostly playing whole notes.
Thanks.

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Originally Posted by Brent Hahn View Post
I wonder if his intonation problems arose from trying to play along with the synth.
That's possible but we never asked him because we didn't want to hurt his feelings. He has no idea how much work we had to do on that track.
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2023 Iris ND-200 maple/adi
2017 Circle Strings 00 bastogne walnut/sinker redwood
2015 Circle Strings Parlor shedua/western red cedar
2009 Bamburg JSB Signature Baritone macassar ebony/carpathian spruce
2004 Taylor XXX-RS indian rosewood/sitka spruce
1988 Martin D-16 mahogany/sitka spruce

along with some electrics, zouks, dulcimers, and banjos.

YouTube
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Old 04-16-2018, 11:51 AM
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Bob Womack Bob Womack is offline
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Necessity is the mother of strange bedfellows!

Bob
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Old 04-16-2018, 11:53 AM
Brent Hahn Brent Hahn is offline
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Necessity is the mother of strange bedfellows!

Bob
There's a scene in "My Cousin Vinnie" about that.
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Old 04-16-2018, 01:21 PM
jim1960 jim1960 is offline
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Some of you well-seasoned vets must have some good studio stories to share.
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2023 Iris ND-200 maple/adi
2017 Circle Strings 00 bastogne walnut/sinker redwood
2015 Circle Strings Parlor shedua/western red cedar
2009 Bamburg JSB Signature Baritone macassar ebony/carpathian spruce
2004 Taylor XXX-RS indian rosewood/sitka spruce
1988 Martin D-16 mahogany/sitka spruce

along with some electrics, zouks, dulcimers, and banjos.

YouTube
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Old 04-16-2018, 01:49 PM
Brent Hahn Brent Hahn is offline
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Some of you well-seasoned vets must have some good studio stories to share.
The coolest Hail-Mary save I can recount is one that didn't actually get done.

I had a project where an artist was going to add an orchestra to a live video recording. The first song of the show had the snare drum accidentally printed on every track of the 24-track, along with whatever instrument actually belonged there. My proposed solution was to sync up a second 24-track with timecode, reverse polarity on the snare track, and track by track, mix the phase-flipped snare with a single track, thereby cancelling out the snare on that track, and then printing the de-snared track on the slave tape. With tracks that had compression or limiting, you'd have to ride gain on the snare track and you'd probably have to do it in in short segments, but it was doable. The main hitch was that the machines at my place were a different brand from the one that the recording was made on, meaning the gap scatter of the record head was different, so flipping polarity on the snare track wouldn't make it cancel completely. The only right way to do it was on the same machine it was recorded on, which was at that moment on a remote truck in Washington D.C., while I was in New York City. I was totally willing to go down to D.C. and get this done, but the record producer and my bosses both nixed it. So we wound up re-tracking the entire first song. Same players and singers and the same gear, aside from the piano and drums, and I did a really good job. But it wasn't a match.

My way would have worked, dammit. :-)
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Old 04-16-2018, 02:30 PM
jim1960 jim1960 is offline
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...reverse polarity on the snare track, and track by track, mix the phase-flipped snare with a single track, thereby cancelling out the snare on that track...
That's brilliant!
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2023 Iris ND-200 maple/adi
2017 Circle Strings 00 bastogne walnut/sinker redwood
2015 Circle Strings Parlor shedua/western red cedar
2009 Bamburg JSB Signature Baritone macassar ebony/carpathian spruce
2004 Taylor XXX-RS indian rosewood/sitka spruce
1988 Martin D-16 mahogany/sitka spruce

along with some electrics, zouks, dulcimers, and banjos.

YouTube
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  #9  
Old 04-16-2018, 02:30 PM
rockabilly69 rockabilly69 is offline
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Originally Posted by jim1960 View Post
I'm wondering what stories some of you might have for when you've had to think outside the box in the studio.

Here's my own tale...
Back in the early 2000s when I was recording my cd, I needed a violin track for a song and the studio owner recommended a friend he had in New Jersey. We sent the tracks to the guy and we sent a synth violin track to give him some idea as to what we wanted. We get the violin track a few weeks later and give it a listen. There was a lot to like about it... it captured the emotion of the song well ...but the player had a tin ear and just about every note was either sharp or flat.

Today, five minutes with Melodyne could fix it, but back then the tools we had available in that studio were very limited. We did have pitch correction available in whatever version of ProTools we were using but we had to guess at how much correction each note needed. We did a few that way but realized all the trial and error guesses on correction would take us a week or two at minimum. We spent an entire day trying to come up with a way to save that violin track and at the end we were pretty sure we'd have to scrap it.

We were going to record acoustic guitar the next day so that night I was changing the strings on my Martin in preparation for that when I got an idea. The next morning, I showed up to the studio with my guitar and my guitar tuner, a Boss TU-12H. My idea was to put the tuner on top of one of the studio monitors and get a reading from the tuner for each note in the violin track to avoid the hunting and pecking we had been trying to do. We tried it with a passage. I read the cents-off from the tuner, and the other guy made the adjustments on the track. We were both surprised when we played it back and it worked. The slurs still slowed us down because we had to break those notes up into segments to apply the correction because how much they were off at the beginning and the end was usually very different. But in the end we pulled it off. It took us about eight hours but we saved the track.

That studio owner and I have become good friends since then and we still laugh about what we went through to get that violin to work.

The end result is on this song...
You are a patient man. I would have hired a local pro and told him to reproduce the same solo, but just play it in pitch

I've had some fun times fixing stuff in my studio... I asked a very close friend of mine to come over and sing a harmony with me on one of my songs, but some reason she wouldn't phrase the way I was doing although she was singing in perfect pitch, so I just erased my part and sang to her phrasing. You know "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em
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Old 04-16-2018, 02:52 PM
Brent Hahn Brent Hahn is offline
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That's brilliant!
I thought. :-)
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Old 04-16-2018, 03:07 PM
jim1960 jim1960 is offline
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You are a patient man. I would have hired a local pro and told him to reproduce the same solo, but just play it in pitch
Once we hit on the solution we didn't know it would take 8 hours to fix the track. I'm sure we both thought we'd get through it a lot faster.

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Originally Posted by rockabilly69 View Post
I've had some fun times fixing stuff in my studio... I asked a very close friend of mine to come over and sing a harmony with me on one of my songs, but some reason she wouldn't phrase the way I was doing although she was singing in perfect pitch, so I just erased my part and sang to her phrasing. You know "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em
A friend of mine few in from Arizona some years back to record some of his originals at my place. On one song, I pointed out to him that the melody of the chorus and the verses were pretty much identical and I suggested some melodic changes within the same chord structure to better define the chorus. He liked the changes but when it came time to sing them, he'd constantly revert back to the old melody line. There were some lines of that song that he sang the old melody 30-40 times before he finally sang the new melody. Funny thing is, he couldn't tell if he sang it right or wrong. After he take, he'd ask me if he sang it correctly.
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Jim
2023 Iris ND-200 maple/adi
2017 Circle Strings 00 bastogne walnut/sinker redwood
2015 Circle Strings Parlor shedua/western red cedar
2009 Bamburg JSB Signature Baritone macassar ebony/carpathian spruce
2004 Taylor XXX-RS indian rosewood/sitka spruce
1988 Martin D-16 mahogany/sitka spruce

along with some electrics, zouks, dulcimers, and banjos.

YouTube
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Old 04-16-2018, 03:41 PM
Johnny K Johnny K is offline
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Necessity is the mother of strange bedfellows!

Bob
+1

I use my FIshman Artist Loudbox as a 2 channel mixer to record my drums to an I Rig PRE HD attached to my iPhone when I practice. I mic in the kick and one overhead pointed at the snare. Works good. Easy to setup. Sounds not half bad.
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Old 04-16-2018, 04:31 PM
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Bob Womack Bob Womack is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Brent Hahn View Post
My proposed solution was to sync up a second 24-track with timecode, reverse polarity on the snare track, and track by track, mix the phase-flipped snare with a single track...
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Originally Posted by jim1960 View Post
That's brilliant!
Thta was the basis of a form of analog single-ended noise reduction. In the film and video industry we would have the location audio guys record "room tone," the sound of the room with no-one talking. If we had problems with a background noise we'd create a loop of the room tone, lay it up with any periodic sounds in sync, reverse phase, and blend it in, cancelling the background to one degree or another.

I've long said that our best and hardest work was taking horrible tracks and making them marginally presentable. Polishing excellent audio is far easier.

Bob
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Old 04-16-2018, 04:39 PM
jim1960 jim1960 is offline
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Thta was the basis of a form of analog single-ended noise reduction. In the film and video industry we would have the location audio guys record "room tone," the sound of the room with no-one talking. If we had problems with a background noise we'd create a loop of the room tone, lay it up with any periodic sounds in sync, reverse phase, and blend it in, cancelling the background to one degree or another.
I've long wondered why they record room tone apart from the more relevant recording. Thanks for that.
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Jim
2023 Iris ND-200 maple/adi
2017 Circle Strings 00 bastogne walnut/sinker redwood
2015 Circle Strings Parlor shedua/western red cedar
2009 Bamburg JSB Signature Baritone macassar ebony/carpathian spruce
2004 Taylor XXX-RS indian rosewood/sitka spruce
1988 Martin D-16 mahogany/sitka spruce

along with some electrics, zouks, dulcimers, and banjos.

YouTube
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  #15  
Old 04-16-2018, 05:36 PM
Brent Hahn Brent Hahn is offline
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I've long wondered why they record room tone apart from the more relevant recording. Thanks for that.
The main reasons are 1. to cut in between lines of dialogue (in place of random noises and/or the director yapping), 2. to help make ADR'ed lines match the live stuff, and 3. to use for the foreign language M&E.
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