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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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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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
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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.
