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Very challenging sound mix problem – Any experts want to look?
I shot a musical stage performance. Since we were running the sound also, I recorded right off the board (ADAT at 48k). Each performer microphone and the pre-recorded playback music all were assigned separate tracks, and for the most part it worked beautifully. I have great, dry vocals, track-per-performer and it mixed beautifully. I use the cam mic track only for sync.
Now the problem: In one song there is a male singer and a female singer doing a duet (Baby It’s Cold Outside). While they take turns singing lines generally, there is a significant overlap. While the female singer is holding the last note of her line, the male singer sings a line. We were using some nice Shure wireless headset-style mics, which tend to pick up a lot around them besides just the performer that is wearing it. The male singer has a big, strong voice, so his gain was nominal. The female singer has a tiny, breathy voice so her gain was run up quite a bit.
The male singer’s track is almost nothing but his voice. The female’s track, however, has HIS voice on it with hers, only a few dB down from hers. So, when I mix the two, I can hear the male voice in both tracks. It takes around 3 milliseconds for his voice to go from his mouth to her mic, so the end result sounds like I have a chorus FX on his voice with the delay at around 3 ms.
No problem, right? Just delay his track by that 3 ms or so to put it in sync with his voice on her track, right? Well, there are two problems with that: First, they are walking around, so the delay changes as the distance between them changes. Also, just delaying his track causes this weird “phasing” effect (are you old enough to remember “flanging?”).
So, any of the experts have a thought on this? If you are really feeling brave, I can email a few seconds of the two tracks as a stereo wave file.
Thanks in advance to any help that is offered,
-Don -
4 Replies
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One idea – insert volume envelopes and lower her volume as soon as he starts to sing.
Perhaps you can shape her sound with EQ to lessen his voice in her mic.
The next is way more painful and maybe results wouldn’t be worth it, but if you’re feeling that you really need her trailing notes you can slice and dice any such notes that are “in the clear” and put them where you want. Hard to predict the results until you get into it.
If you really want to spend some time on this you could replicate his track, sync successive tracks wherever they need to sync to her mic according to where he is on the stage, and use envelopes to transition between his multiple tracks. This would probably be most successful phrase by phrase.
But check out how far the first two suggestions take you.
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I’m assuming no Forge or Noise Reduction, or Ed’s plug-in(which I think is probably your best bet), so I’d recommend starting by throwing on a paragraphic eq, or as many as it takes (more is better, as Gene Simons would say) on the female track and see if you can knock out his voice that way. Then render to a new track and see if that kills the flanging. You didn’t say if you tried adjusting the pitch, but it might do something.
Think multiple passes/renders to get this right.
Consider sub-clipping early and often. You might be able to key-frame the audio/distance change, but you’ll probably have better success by cross-fading clip to clip.
Consider adding a chorus to the male voice (If you can’t beat them, join them, as Freddie Mercury once said).
There are better audio folks around, but yes I’ve had that bit of fun.
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You guys have given me some ideas…. I DO have Sound Forge and N.R., but I wasn’t thinking of what I might do with those. I suppose I could capture a sample of his voice and try to get NR to reduce it from her track. Actually, I think I would have to us it to get rid of her, invert what’s left and add back in to get rid of his voice, etc., etc.
I have tried EQ to split him from her in her track. They’re in unison, so the root note is the same. All I’ve been able to do with EQ is make either him, her or both sound really crappy. And they’re STILL not separated, even with that.
I hadn’t thought about grabbing a clean note from her and replacing a piece of her track with that. I know that’ll work, but man is that going to be tedious.
Thanks for the thoughts, guys. I’ll work on it some more.
-Don -
May I suggest panning the 2 in the stereo field? That will seperate them a bit in the mix. And I would take that female track into Sound Forge and mute out anytime she is not singing, like a manual noise gate. 🙂
Good luck and it’s never easy.
Dirk
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