Entourage Paul Tucci
EntourageForum Replies Created
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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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Phoebes,
I’m thinking you have another mix possibility in you for this super-poppy (comin-in-hot-at- (-9LUFS) love song.
I read your critique and then listened. My first impression was that no, you’re not lacking air in the intro KB/ BS/SYNTH line. But then the vocal appears and it can’t compete (frequency bandwidth wise) with the music. That contrast of a dull vocal against the music might just be the crux of your identified lack-of-air problem. Your singer might be emphysemic, but I have another diagnosis worth pursuing.
I put a Mid / Side EQ on your track and soloed up just the Mid thinking I could add a high frequency shelf to bring the vocal’s airiness to the forefront. Listening with that EQ in place revealed what I think might be a big contributor to the problem. The vocals in the middle are not very loud. It sounds like the two vocal performances are interfering with each other time wise. It’s phase-y. It’s a cool, effective sound when used for creating width on a stereo track, but if you had a solid foundation of vocal center panned and then hard panned the two additional vocal takes L and R, you’d have a wide, lush, vocal presentation that would be easy to brighten up to save your patient and bedazzle your audience.
To be fair, I am not an actual doctor, but I do like analogies.
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Phoebe,
v2 of my voodoo.
Great job on your loudness level! I had to work to make it nearly as loud.
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Phoebe,
Welcome.
I agree with my colleague from NY who suggests the vocal is getting a little lost during louder passages. If the spotlight is on the singer, and it should be, let’s keep her prominent and easily accessible for the audience / listeners.
You mention finding a space for the vocal and ask if it needs more FX to make it fit better. I said a few incantations and put the song back in the oven to let it cook it a little longer. My ears and tapping toes tells me that this version works better. Specifically, I turned up the vocals 1.5 – 2 dB, then used the separated vocal stem to trigger the overlapping frequencies and gently ducked the rest of the music a dB or so. See if that feels closer to what you’re aiming for vocally. I think you’ll find the vocal production work you did with FX is more audible now.
I sat out the disco era but certainly had some good fun messing with your production.
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Jesse my man,
You did such an efficient and succinct job describing my technique that I would ask your input on an acronym that failed miserably in my old neighborhood.
L, (left of R) (right of L), R.
It was a trick for panning a signal with delay rather than amplitude. Better for the listening audience, well outside of the center and hearing predominantly only one of the speakers, to not miss out on the opposite side hard-panned information. The folks in the middle would hear hard panned info as hard panned info. Peeps hearing only one side of the speaker system would hear the opposite side later, but just as loud.
The Hoss Cartwright Effect?
ps… Just to clarify terms here, I need to ask…
To qualify as “legend,” and that’s very generous of you to say, one is still alive, correct?
It’s that “Lifetime” status one wants to avoid, eh?
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Patrick,
I recall after your first posted piano piece and saying how I reacted. The unbridled joy just bubbling through your playing was contagious.
Now you’re back with an absolutely disarming, tender vocal performance. I’m not sure if this is a fatherly prayer for a kid (like @JLew ‘s recent offering) or perhaps, a dream visit from a deceased loved one. I don’t know, and I don’t care because the sentiment is palpable. You’re onto something here, young man.
You had asked if I produced, and if I did, I would suggest flipping the two movements. The more immediately-focused guitar outro, starting with Ruby calling your name, gets the listeners’ attention. It’s riveting, kinda shocking and I think makes for a great intro. Play the guit, sing the song, and then save the acoustic trip to the cosmos for the ending fade-out.
Am I onto something here?
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Joe,
This is a gorgeous gem of oh-so-tasty pickin’. I can’t believe I didn’t comment/praise it earlier.
Your song was stuck in my head yesterday as I took a Memorial Day ride on my scooter. It’s a good toe-tapping riding companion!
-@PT
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I extended the low end of the big drums the same way I did for @JLew ‘s acoustic guitar.
ie, send a duplicate channel low passed (100 Hz ish) to a pitch shifter down an octave and feed just that thunder back into the stereo buss with the original. Voila! You create bigger balls than that Bigger Balls DOGE kid.
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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
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Phoebe,
Your stylistic choice for the slightly distorted and split vocals supports the song better than does a main center vocal as I suggested. That’s a polite way to say the singer sounds appropriately off center. Following that path, I put the M/S EQ across your track and gave just the SIDES a +2 dB high shelf (Baxandall shaped filter.) That seemed to clarify the vocals and draw a little more attention to them off to the side and away from the thumpin’ good Middle music. Perhaps that will get you to the finish line.🏁
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Dana,
No, you’re not crazy, and in the words of Waylon Jennings, even if you were it would keep you from going insane. What you accurately heard was a single acoustic guitar pickup feeding both a DI output AND through an SM57 on a guitar amp. Panned them to spread them out but not completely. Had I done that I could have effectively separated the two sound sources paths with my stem separations and done a more thorough examination. What I could do was this. … on just the instrument separation stem containing just guitar sounds, I ran the stereo stem through my RX11 audio-fix-it machine and found a tool I was as-of-yet unfamiliar with. The ADAPTIVE PHASE TOOL. I suspect it does some phase alignment much like the Little Labs IBP. The processed guitar stem was then reintroduced to the stem mix.I think it helped lessen the “swimminess” of the guitar. The drummer’s vocal shifted slightly more center as did some of the kick and snare. I’m guessing that the phase rotation of the RX11 tool was working in the lower freqs. The attached song version has my best fix in it.
Consider this a formal request 🙏 for an article/video/discussion of your process on this topic.
So I learned a few things from this adventure and my resultant experiment.
One, it’s possible to have too much haze in the theater.
Two, when the fire/smoke alarm in the theater goes off, a relay system disconnects the AC power to my speaker system. That’s probably a good safety measure.
Three, neither the responding firefighters, nor management agree with my sense of humor. There could be no better song choice than Burning Down the House (Talking Heads) to test the sound system after I got power restored.
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I’m glad it moved you too! Drums are powerful and primal.
I had a blast mixing the show at the time, revisiting the recording 20 years later and then doing some mild mastering voodoo. My peak Samurai sorcery, (TM @dana) took place in a different venue, post-event celebration.
The US Womens’ synchronized swimming team stopped by the club to celebrate a win and give the crowd a demonstration. I had to integrate their underwater speaker to my sound system. There’s a couple issues. The swimmers hear their music under the water. Sound travels quicker in water, (denser medium than air) than it does in air. Compound the situation because my PA was a short Elvis delay (100 feet) away from the pool. Pop your head out of the water and there goes synchronicity. I calculated the rough footage away from my speaker to the middle of the pool and add that amount of milliseconds of delay to the feed to the underwater speakers and “kichijutsu!” Their aural world is now re-aligned. Science.
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Yea, to me, some of the “octavized” bass sounded off and unneccesarily deep when the second-biggest drums were playing so I just deleted that in sections and held back the oomph for a more dramatic effect when the biggest drums re-entered.
…Commit the processed track to audio, then chop it out where it’s deemed illegal. I suppose automating the level is a more elegant approach. It’s good to be a king.
I have a couple more drum pieces from the event to dig into for some more moments of fun.
