Entourage Paul Tucci
EntourageForum Replies Created
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Nate,
Welcome back. Glad to hear the muse was visiting.
I only dug into House of Love before offering up this an observation or two. I’m in the good habit of listening first and then digging out the tools from the toolbox to verify if my technical instincts are correct. That allows me to listen musically/emotionally first. (Good God man, you sound like Oprah!) editor’s note
The song came across LOUD. Aggressive rock and roll loud. Measured at -8.5LUFS.
The song came across a bit crunchy. I think the piece is aiming more towards gratitude rather than the rebelliousness the kids have later on. They’re cute as hell early on but then they grow up to be teenagers. My True Peak sample metering read well into the red, +2.87dB above 0. That’ll make it crunchy. In fact, the fancy RX 11 metering suspected 200+ possible clipped samples. It definitely sound better/less stressful/musical after the de-clipping process.
Let’s not forget that the mere conversion from your (I’m assuming) high-quality wav file to an MP3 that Mix P has as its file format can cause overs and crunchiness to appear out of seemingly thin air. I’m wondering if you mastered it HOT at 0dB True Peak and the wav to MP3 conversion process is somewhat responsible for your foray into the dark side.
My frequency domain observations….
I hear a low freq explosive at the top. I can’t tell if it’s caused by an edit of the piano or literally a P-pop on the vocal mic. I’m leaning to the latter because my ears say that’s a tonally dark sounding voice AND because my spectrum analyzer (frequency vs amplitude) shows more amplitude at 40 Hz than it does at 2kHz. That shouldn’t be.
To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen from a 1988 Vice Presidential debate, “I mixed Barry White with 40 Hz, and you sir are no Barry White!”
There’s a pretty big buildup at 300ish Hz. There’s only a couple elements to the song but they are surely hard to acoustically separate from each other for my ears.
I trust my ears, I trust my measurements, and I trust that you can sort out any of these unintended quirks and get this piece equally good as your previous offerings.
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Short, gets right to the point, FunkyAF.
They’re back !?
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Bar, I’m glad to hear you back with your soft and mysterious sounding songs. The distorted vocal is subtle, captures my attention, and is way cool to my ear. Subtle but interesting support from a bassist who isn’t concerned about holding down the “One” and playing straight changes coupled with a light-touched percussionist would take this song closer to a Joni Mitchell / Larry Klein collab.
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Dana,
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Dana,
Thank you. I learned something here today. I had previously used my unmasker/ducking tool across an ALL instrument subgroup made of a summation of all the individual instrument subgroups. Creating multiple sends off the ducker channel, in this case a lead vocal, to feed multiple duckee subgroups, is definitely wiser and more target-specific so as not to cause heavy-handed ducking on all all subgroups when only one instrument subgroup is the responsible culprit. 🦆 🦆 🐵🐵 🔫 = 🦆 🦆 🙉
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Speaking of VO ducking, it sounds like you’re dropping the full bandwidth of the track to allow the $ VO $ to have the full spotlight. I wonder if there’s a viable alternative under some circumstances.
Is it unheard of to duck only the overlapping freqs of the Voice and music to allow the groove to carry on with a new “lead singer” if you will? I would think it’s product/vibe dependent to compete with the message of the ad.
The UNMASK tool in Ozone is a frequency dependent ducker that clears the overlapping range of the duckee to allow the ducker to own that range. Great for music when the arrangement is too dense to tuck a voice into a mix rather than just overpowering the mix with a LOUDER voc.
Fascinating stuff.
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Dana,
So I’m curious. Did you just hand over your work to the ad agency and cash the check? Did they fit the copy into your vocal arrangement and just duck the ditty when the voice talent needs the spotlight? I’d guess that.
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Nate,
It’s a room alright. Perhaps that room needs a little acoustic dampening to control the resonant 500 Hz area to keep the focus on the actual vocal performance Does the sound of a crackling fire in the fireplace add to your intent?
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Nate,
attached is your dry vocal with a different sounding verb to hopefully illustrate my point
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Nate,
I love that you included the downloadable stand alone dry vocal, the saturated vocal, and the souped up version. That makes the detective-work a lot easier. The non reverberated ones sound clean and great. There’s a beautiful warmth to your voice and it works very well in this musically stripped down piece of hopefulness and positivity. However, the voice in context of this mix is swimming in the soup to my ear. Bear in mind I have strong opinions. I don’t much like reverb at all. Also, I voted for Trump. I don’t think that’s controversial at all. Clearly he was the most qualified to earn my write-in choice for local dog catcher.
I suspect the reverb choice you made is interfering with the tone of your vocal performance. It sounds like a tight and bright percussion plate. (???) The graphic appears to be a frequency response graph with no high pass or low pass filters engaged on an otherwise flat wide-band response. All that lingering high-mid and high end does not compliment the warmth and fuzziness of the song the way a medium-sized hall program might.
As always, go with the suggestions that resonate with you and leave the rest. They’re not all spot on. After all, my boy didn’t win.
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Dana,
Wow, a video response is so cool. Quick, to the point, immediate reactions without the overthinking that can occur in written responses. Other educators might charge money for that sort of high-def video / highly-intelligible wisdom. Not suggesting that, just saying thx for that effort.
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Historically, it’s accurate. There was a VP debate with those words spoken and yes, I utilized a sub-harmonic synthesis on Barry’s spoken words. Paraphrasing and diversion are such effective ingredients in my secret sauce (thank you Nate) for storytelling.
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Dana, Thank you for detailed response. That was well said, concise, and indicative of some of the gems you spit on the MIXLAB zoom sessions. @-PT
