I Found An New (Old) Track!

(from the Was I Really This Young? department)

Hi everyone!

I was going through some very old backups tonight - and I found a file from 2003 called "Personal Demos.wav".  

Hmm - that sounds intriguing...

Playing back the file, it appears that it contained some early attempts at doing twin-track recording in my apartment - possibly on my computer or on my DAT machine - or some combination of both.

There are about 4 song fragments in there - so I zeroed in on one that was mostly complete:  a cover of Mannequin by Wire.

Two basic parts:  acoustic guitar left channel - vocal right channel.  Talk about early Beatles! Super Wide Stereo!!

Although it was very raw - it was also recorded very cleanly.  It might take a little work - but there was definitely something there I could work with.

I started by importing the stereo file into Audacity and snipping out the song from the rest of the fragments.  

Next - I split the stereo file into two mono tracks so that I could work on the vocal and guitar parts separately.

First the vocal.  I decided not to compress it or tamper too much with it - I liked the live feel.  Instead - I just boosted the gain by 3 dB using Audacity's Amplify to balance it against the guitar volume.

Now - we need to make to sound like I'm actually in a room somewhere - instead of singing directly into the microphone.  I used Audacity's GVerb to add some ambiance - but kept the room small.

Roomsize: 10m

Reverb Time: 4s

Damping: 0.9

Input bandwidth: 0.75

Dry signal level: 0 db

Early Reflection Level: -22 dB

Tail level: -28 dB

(Adapted from The Quick Fix settings here: https://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/GVerb#Instant_GVerb_settings)

That did the trick - vocals sound great.

Next guitar.  After adding the identical GVerb to it, and doing a quick mix panning the vocals slightly right and the guitar slightly left - I realized the guitar needed more work.

Reading thru the GVerb documentation - they mentioned that it was a "mono" reverb.  They also mentioned that by inverting the original signal and summing it with the GVerbed signal - you could isolate just the reverb.  

Viola!!!

So - here's what I did:

• I duplicated the guitar track 4 times, giving me 5 identical guitar tracks.  
• I added the 10m GVerb setting listed above to track 1.  
• I added the same GVerb setting - but with the room set to 20m - to track 2.  
• I inverted tracks 3 & 4.  
• I mixed track 1 (10m GVerb) and track 3 (inverted) and panned it 100% left.
• I mixed track 2 (20m GVerb) and track 4 (inverted) and panned it 100% right.
• I panned the original guitar track - track 5 (dry) - 50% left.

This left me with 4 tracks:

• 10m room reverb (guitar only) - 100% left, 
• guitar (dry) - 50% left
• voice (amplified 3dB) + 10m room reverb (vocal only) - center
• 20m room reverb (guitar only) - 100% right.

All that was left to do was mix it to stereo and make an MP4 out of it!  Here it is!

Pretty neat!  

Cheers,

Paul