t4.5 part 1 write up

8/13/2019 T4.5 Part 1 Write Up

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T4.5 Recording Clients: Part 1 Write Up

For this assignment we had to do a multi-track recording of a song and use Melodyne so tune the

vocals and fix any instruments that made mistakes. We also had to use EQ and Compression like we

had done on out previous assignments and after we had done this we had to mix the track making

sure we left enough headroom and that there were no peaks in the song.

Melodyne:

Down below I have a picture of the whole melodyne screen and you can see the individual

waveforms of andies voice and what note they are.

Firstly you have to get your audio file into melodyne for it to actually work.

To do this you have to click the transfer button in the top left corner of the

screen, once you have done that you need to go back to the arrange page on

logic and play the section of audio you want to be transferred

into logic.

After you have done this you can see all the little audio files like

the ones to the right. The lines in the audio file are called

vibrato and they change how the note is actually sung. In the

top left corner of melodyne you can click the drop down menu

to the left of the curser and you can change the vibrato. You

can reduce the dynamic range but you have to be careful when

doing this because it can sound very processed which is

normally bad unless youre doing it as an effect on the voice.

Now to actually tuning the vocals. Once you have transferred your audio into melodyne you will see

all the waveforms on a big grid and on the left hand side of the screen you can see the notes that

they are. If you look closely at your audio you will see that the audio isnt perfectly in the center of

each note. This si where the pitch correct tool comes

into play.

To acces the pitch correct tool you have to look in the

top right hand corner and click on the Correct Pitchbutton. Once you have done this you will see this

window pop up. Now you have to highlight the pieces

of audio you wish to pitch correct and use the top

slider, as you move the slider to the right you will see

the pieces of audio move to the center of each note.

Be careful when doing this though and make sure you

listen to it afterwards because it can sound very

processed if you correct it 100% and sometime it can

pitch correct the audio to the wrong note so you need


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to pay attention. We had this quite a few times where the note would correct to the wrong note

because the singer sung the note flat so you have to listen back to all the audio you correct to make

sure it sounds correct and natural.

Another thing to look out for is when melodyne sticks two notes together and trys to make them

one. We had this a few times where our singer change note halfway through a word and melodyne

tried to keep it the same so we had to cut up the audio and put them on the correct notes for it to

work correctly. This can take some time and effort to complete but the finished product is always

worth the hassel.

EQ:

As for EQ we did some major EQ on some instruments but mostly we did minor EQ just to boost

some frequencies the performer was actually using

and to cut useless frequencies.

Here we have a simple EQ used for out right

overhead for the drums. Now we didnt want to do

much to this ebcause it was picking up various

frequencies from each drum. The only thing we

wanted to do was cut out the 540hz because this is

the sound of the room and produces a low hum

which we dont want! So we cut that out and we

wanted to keep this EQ simple.

Now this is an example of drastic EQ! We never cut

this many frequencies on a guitar or a bass etc but

this was a tambourine. The tambourine has very

few active frequencies so we cut out all the useless

low frequencies and boosted the small amout of

frequencies it was actually using.


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This is a simple piece of EQ we did for out electric

guitar. We boosted the active frequencies and we

raised the Q factor so make it have a nice slope so

it brought up the range the guitar was using.

Lastly we have our main vocal EQ. For this we

wanted to cut out all the very low end frequenciesbecause our vocalist was singing in quite a high

pitch and wasnt using them. On the top end we

have done a simple shelf EQ to boost some of the

very high frequencies and just to the left we have

done a gentle slope for the active frequencies of

out vocalist.

Compression:

For our vocals we applied a very small amount of

compression while recording so we could apply

further compression while mixing. We have a low

signal to noise ratio on our compression because we

dont want to bring up the sound of the headphones

in the backround of the vocals. We have a high

amount of make up gain on here because the vocals

were very quiet but we didnt apply to much because

we didnt want it to peak our speaker. The threshold

is set quite low because we didnt need adrastic amount of compression on the vocals because the

dynamic range wasnt that high, we still needed a nice amount of compression on It but not as much

as we thought.


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Replacing drum hits witgh samples:

Something we did to our drums was that we replaced some our snare hits and kick hits with our

recorded samples.

To do this you need to start of and create a software instrument channel and set it to our EXSsampler. Next we need to double click on our audio file so it pops up with the sample editor. Then

we need to click factory and click audio to score.

At this point we need to set the velocity threshold so it only picks up the snare hits for example and

not the bleed from the microphone.

Once we have done this a window will pop up with notation all over it but we dont need that so

ignore it and close down the window.

Next we need to move the midi file that we just created onto the software instrument channel and

then we need to select the piano roll.

After this we need to select funtions at the top of the piano roll and then click transform - random

velocity. Then we need to select fix and change the number below to 127! Once we have done this

all our midi regions will have their velocity changed to max (which is a dark red).

Next we need to select functions again and the click transform - random pitch. Then we need to

change it from random and then select fix. Now we need to set it to whatever note we want (C1 is a

good choice) and now after this we just need to select our sample presets on the sampler and we

will have succefully replaced our drum hit with a sample and this will improve the drum kit overall.

t4.5 part 1 write up

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