Entourage Paul Tucci
EntourageForum Replies Created
-
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.
-
Short, gets right to the point, FunkyAF.
They’re back !?
-
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.
-
Dana,
-
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.
-
Phoebe,
v2 of my voodoo.
Great job on your loudness level! I had to work to make it nearly as loud.
-
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.
-
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?
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
-
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
-
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.🏁
-
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.
