PG Music Home Forums General Discussion User Showcase We Are People, Too (mix by David Cuny)

REMIX DETAILS:

David first wrote to me:

"Among other things, I used the compressor to:
Even out your vocal - among other things, I added compression in a number of steps.
Even out the final mix - I compressed the heck out of it.
But that's not really the most important bit I used the compressor for.

As I mentioned earlier, the music to vocal volume contrast was too low (in my opinion), so I boosted the volume of the music.

But this caused a problem: the music starts drowning out the vocals.

The solution is ducking. "Ducking" is when the volume of the music is turned down when the vocals are sounding. This is used all the time in commercials, to make sure that the vocals are clearly heard over the music.

This is where the compressor comes in. Normally, a compressor listens to the volume of the music it's compressing. But for ducking, you can use the vocal to trigger the compressor, so the compressor turns down the volume of the music when there's a vocal. This is called "sidechaining", because the control is coming from a different signal - one from the "side" of the track, if you had a traditional mix desk. The "chaining" refers to the fact that the two signals are "chained" together, with one driving the other."

We had an email discussion afterwards (about normalising, ducking, micro-editing, etc.) which I think is a little too long to reproduce here - and then he finally wrote to me:

"The last bits I got done with the help of my son. I'd already been using the Greg Wells' VoiceCentric effect on the voice, adding some compression. He dialed that back a bit, and we agreed that it should use delay instead of reverb to give your voice additional splace

He dialed bit back a bit, and we replaced the Reverb effect with the Delay, which sounded better without getting muddy, Basically, it mostly added compression:

He added the Scheps Omni Channel. Looking at it, I see it's only in Mono mode, so that's causing it to lose the stereo effect from the prior effect. Ooops!

He started with an "Air Vocal" preset, which and tweaked it a bit.

It adding a touch of saturation, which takes some of the signal and clips it, which adds additional harmonics. This makes the sound a bit brighter and easier to hear. It basically simulates an artifact that you'd get if you transferred it to tape.

Then it goes through an EQ, cutting the lows and mids and boosting some highs. This takes some of the low-end mud out of your voice, as well as some of the harsh mid-range tone.

The DS2 is a de-esser, typically used to cut some of the harsh sibilance from the voice. It's called DS2 here because there are two de-essers.

It's then run through a compressor, which used to smooth it out:

This then goes into the "Mellow Verb" reverb preset in EZMix to add some space. It's a medium size room, with not too much reverb added:

And then it goes into the SpitFish de-esser to have another go at cutting the sibilance. He actually added this first, and the Scheps Omni Channel later.

All this reverb causes the plosives to "pop" a bit more, so I went through the vocals and cut the amplitude of a lot of the consonants. I edited a lot of /H/ sounds, which were harsh to my ears, since English has a relatively soft /H/. Along the same vein, I modified a number of final /D/ and /G/ sounds, cutting down on the aspiration.

I then had to go back and dial a number of the consonants back up, because I'd over-edited them. I think I got them to a nice space, where they don't "pop" out in the verb, but they're still clear.

The "you know" vocal has a ton of effects on it:
EQ to cut some mud and boost the highs
Compressor to even the sound out
A bit of the VoiceCentric to add some more compression
The "Bright Reverb" from EZMix to add reverb
A de-esser to cut the harshness

We also played a bit with the settings on the compressor used to "duck" the signal, and got something that worked a bit better.

On a lot of sustained sounds, you get quiet too quickly, so it's hard to hear:

So I sliced these and normalized the sustained sounds they kept a good volume throughout:

And, as you pointed out, I added some panning to make it more interesting."

He accompanied all this with images to illustrate precisely what he did.

Thanks so much, David!!! Incredible amount of work on this with a small miracle (in my view) of a result, especially when bearing in mind the original! What do you think? I'd love to hear your feedback - thanks for listening!!! :-)