[Ardour-Users] After normalize, clipped but sounds OK

[Justin M. Streiner]

Ben:

I wanted to point out one last thing.  I've used the multiband compression 
technique below with great results.  I recorded a show in a bar with about 
8 vocalists and musicians packed onto a pretty small stage (~5m x ~5m) and 
the on-stage volume was absolutely nuts.  The bass guitar was swallowing 
up everything in the recorded mix.  I had two ambient mics on stage for 
crowd coverage, plus patches of the on-stage stuff from the house PA.  The 
bass was really loud in the stage monitors (of which I had no control), 
and it was getting picked up like crazy by the kick drum mic and the drum 
overheads.

Luckily it was just a few bass notes that really seemed to blow everything 
out, so I was able to back a pretty narrow frequency band off in the 
respective inputs and then give it a once-over with the multiband 
compressor when I mastered the show.  In jamin I was able to compress the 
low frequencies a little more aggressively, and set the range covered by 
the low comopressor/EQ to <200Hz, and it worked like a charm.

There were a few spots where I needed to do some more aggressive spot 
filtering of some boomy bass notes that snuck through the compression, 
which I was able to do in Audacity.  Since I knew the frequencies that 
were blowing out, I could notch those out with no noticeable impact on the 
master track.

So, without listening to what you recorded, I'd say you can do what you're 
looking to do, but it might take a pass or two to get things fine-tuned to 
where you want them.

Hope this helps.

jms

On Wed, 2 Apr 2008, Justin M. Streiner wrote:

> On Wed, 2 Apr 2008, Ben Powers wrote:
>
>>  Hello Ardour-users!
>>
>>  I have a region that starts with very soft music and  moves on to a
>>  region of medium volume with lots of loud clapping. I normalized the
>>  region according to the quiet section by shortening it to the quiet
>>  section and then normalizing, and finally expanding it to full length.
>>  The whole region, including loud parts, was therefore normalized as if it
>>  only contained quiet parts.
>>
>>  Now I have a region looks like its intensely clipped, to alleviate the
>>  effect of the clipping, I automated the gain way down. When I play it
>>  back, it sounds ok to my untrained ears, but I can't escape the feeling
>>  that even though the meters arent peaking except for on the claps (which
>>  I'm fine with) the sound will come out badly in the final mix. Are my
>>  fears unfounded?
>
> If you're happy with the overall balance of the mix, you could pipe it 
> through jamin to make use of its multiband compressor to tame the dynamics in 
> the clapping part.  Bounce the output back to a stereo track in Ardour and 
> you have a finished track that you can export/burn/etc.
>
> If the applause is on a specific channel or two, you could apply compression 
> to those channels to minimize the effect of the compression on other elements 
> in your recording.
>
> jms
>
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