Need help mixing Layzie Bone's vocals - after a bad recording engineer...

[bino_5150]

Hey yall, I need some advice, so gather all slutz...

I am an aspiring rapper/producer/engineer in Houston. I'm trying to bulldog my way up the ladder.

The other day, I flew to Atlanta to do a song with Layzie Bone. That's a big accomplishment for me. It's Layzie and I rapping on a beat that I produced. We ended up in Playaz Circles studio, which was a rinky dink hole in the wall... not up to my standards to say the least.

Anyway, I brought the session back to Houston to mix it. When I get here, put it up on my monitoring system, I noticed 2 things right off the bat...

1. They had carpet on the wall in the booth, which of course only attenuated the higher freq's. They had one patch of auralex foam in the corner by the mic. This left the vocals sounding a bit boomy and stuffy, and there is a horrible room verb that's a bit hard to shake. No big deal, I can work with that.

2. The big problem is that they had no compression/limiter on the input signal, and Layzies vocals clip hard with this horrible audible distortion that I am having a real hard time working with. This is Layzie Bone, he's not here, and re-recording isn't really an option at this point.

Now, not only am I trying to make this song sound top notch, but I have vocals from a multi-platinum Grammy winning artist, and I want to make it sound just as good as his other material.

I'm trying to show and prove here.

Does anyone have any advice as to how to deal with the clipping?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

[phillysoulman]

Izotope RX has a de clipper.

You could try that.

[codeman]

some programs have a distortion remover / clip remover... i know cool edit does... id try that, then run a compressor over the vocals afterwards..... i dunno about the boominess of the room reverb, that might be tough to fix..... but then again.... wu tang had some grimey ass recordings that people like...

[bino_5150]

Cool Edit/ Audtion's clip restoration only works on something you just recorded... and I don't believe it gets rid of the distortion; it just brings the signal down.

But either way, that's useless after the file has already been saved that way.... (trust me, I tried already!)

I've tried various filters, from vinyl clip/pop eliminators, to de-essers. I can't seem to get any results without further degrading the audio.

[Heezzi]

Only thing I can really say is see if you can get Layzie Bone to rerecord.

[TonyBelmont]

Depending on how severe, you likely will have to re-record the parts... I've done some heavy reconstructive editing for things like this, and it's next to impossible to do what you are asking to do.

[Darm]

Try to get in touch with LB and tell him what kinda trouble you are in.
I wonder why you couldn't notice all that bad stuff in ATL in the first place, but...
Otherways- try mixing the song starting with the vocals, make them sound as good as possible, then bring up drums, bass and everything else.

[Nahuel]

jus an idea: in wavelab there's a "restore waveform" function: to use it you need to analyse the wav file and wavelab will detect all the peaks, then you press the "focus" button and you can see the peak in the wave form window, then u use the "retore waveform" function (select the right preset depending on the clipin peak lenght, 1 n 3 ms work very well, above it does not work so good), you'll have to do it for all the clippin peaks, very long but it works and you aint doing anything to the good parts of the audio file.

[psycho_monkey]

Originally Posted by lpuma

jus an idea: in wavelab there's a "restore waveform" function: to use it you need to analyse the wav file and wavelab will detect all the peaks, then you press the "focus" button and you can see the peak in the wave form window, then u use the "retore waveform" function (select the right preset depending on the clipin peak lenght, 1 n 3 ms work very well, above it does not work so good), you'll have to do it for all the clippin peaks, very long but it works and you aint doing anything to the good parts of the audio file.

that's a good idea - manually, you could gain the waveform down 6db, then redraw manually the clipped peaks, rounding them off so they're not square (and thus producing the horrible clipping sound).

Very very tedious, but might save it.

Only other option - go for a very filtered vocal sound on the track. No idea who's doing which bits, but if your vocal line is clean (or you can redo it) it might sound pretty cool to have the two voices with totally different sounds. Damage limitation really though.

[thethrillfactor]

Originally Posted by bino_5150

1. They had carpet on the wall in the booth, which of course only attenuated the higher freq's. They had one patch of auralex foam in the corner by the mic. This left the vocals sounding a bit boomy and stuffy, and there is a horrible room verb that's a bit hard to shake. No big deal, I can work with that.

Use a multiband compressor first in the chain to clean all of these trouble spots.

Then send it out to your chosen processing chain and work it. Even after the multiband comp you may have to down the line make what ever comp you choose to process your vocal with freq dependent in the mids, especially if after EQ it gets a little mid peaky. Also in trying to add back some air you may encounter some sibilance as well.

Sounds like a lot of fun.

[bino_5150]

The reason it wasn't all that noticeable there was because their control room is about 5x8 (smaller than the booth, actually...), with the monitors basically touching 2 walls (the desk was all the way to the back, and it was as wide as the 5 foot room. you basically had to stand in the little main room (about 12x12 maybe?) outside the booth and control room and listen. This room basically had plywood on the walls.

The control room was also carpeted wall to wall, floor to ceiling, basically turning it into a big ass bass cannon. And there were mirrors all over the booth and the control room. The acoustics there were atrocious.

They had the little 5" Mackies cranked all the way up, both facing straight ahead and wedged in the corners. and it was a raw session, with like 6 tracks of vocals playing stacked.

Everything was LOUD. It wasn't until I began the mix and began soloing tracks that I saw the damage that was done. You should have heard me yelling and cussing.

And it's funny, I was talking to one of the guys in the studio, and he was basically chastising me because I don't use Pro Tools, and "REAL" studios use Pro Tools...yada yada yada... And then half way through recording, they ran out of tracks! Had to start bouncing things down, which made it more of a pain in the ass, because the intro underdub, part of the hook, my 2nd verse adlibs, and part of Lay's 3rd verse are all on one track, etc. etc... so I had to slice it all back up in Audition.

Then to make it even worse, I brought a blank DVD to burn the session data to... but that wonderful Mac of theirs doesn't burn data DVD's! WTF?!? So, in order to make it fit on my 2gig jump drive, I had to ditch all the outtakes and only came with the consolidated session files.


My microphone probably cost more than everything in there.

I was trying not to be an asshole and respect the engineer and not tell him what to do lol...

The experience was great; the studio was terrible. But I'm determined... I'm going to clean it up and make it right. Maybe at a later date, we can re-record in my booth, but until then, I'm going to have to do the best I can with this.


I'd post a short clip of the vocal damage, but I'd have to make sure that's cool with Lay first.

[bino_5150]

One more thing that I thought I'd mention for the record:

I've been in discussions with many engineers about artist stacking vocals, and the use of plugs such as vocalign and autotune to get "that" sound.

Being in the studio with Layzie, he spit like 6 vocal tracks, still reading out the notebook, and it is SOOOOOO precise and EXACTLY on time, harmonizing with himself and everything.

It's almost scary at how good he is at that... to be in perfect time, rapping that fast, reading the verse... these young rookie artists need to get off the software and step their game up!

[Biggsheff]

Sounds like red flags were waving all over the studio. The deeper I get into Recording and Mixing, the more I learn that most people don't know what the hell they are doing. I'm sure LB has recorded in better equipt studios before. Somebody should have called bullshit right out of the gate. I've made many mistakes myself. Thank god I have learned from them. Hopefully it will work out for ya. Can't tell you how many times I've been asked to try an fix a bad vocal recording. I just refuse an say it has to be retracked before I touch anything. Good luck man.

[ninjasoards]

Originally Posted by bino_5150

And then half way through recording, they ran out of tracks! Had to start bouncing things down, which made it more of a pain in the ass, because the intro underdub, part of the hook, my 2nd verse adlibs, and part of Lay's 3rd verse are all on one track, etc. etc... so I had to slice it all back up in Audition.

Even if you had to bounce down tracks, you should still have the original waves. Unless the consolidating erased them. It shouldn't have tho, if you just made the individual tracks inactive and kept them in the session.

Who was the "bad recording engineer?" Was it you?

[dahkter]

Sorry to hear about the recording and the wack ass studio.
I use Tracktion 3 primarily (not DP/not Logic/ not ProTools) and get a lot of shit even though at the end of the day a wav is a wav is a wav.

Regading the material, I just dealt with some similar ****ed up files. Some had incredible amounts of tape hiss, another song had a third verse where the mic was feeding back big time. That performance was dope though, so I ended up doing a ton of fade ins and fade outs to make it work (although you can still hear some feedback).

If I were you, I'd isolate that vocal and start to experiment, the wavelab feature people were mentioning is a good idea, also to cut the track in two, one heavily effected, one dry, and to do some new shit with it, maybe you can come up with some new vocal effect.
You can also isolate word by word and see how they're looking, maybe some are decent and only a few require that fix.

Good luck.

[HoPMiX]

your only as good as your weakest point.
cant polish a terd Nor
shine up shit!

good luck

[bino_5150]

Lol! HELL NO it wasn't me! It was one of their in-house engineers they called in for the session.

Like I said, their wonderful mac woudn't burn data DVD's, so I had to squeeze the session on my jump drive. So all I have is the consolidated session with the active takes... that's all that would fit on the 2 gig drive.

I only wish I could've recorded in my studio. I wouldn't be having all of those problems. I don't clip... and my booth doesn't sound like boo-boo either.My 414 sounds crisp, clear, and dry when I track. I don't suffer from these issues.

[chris carter]

Originally Posted by bino_5150

And it's funny, I was talking to one of the guys in the studio, and he was basically chastising me because I don't use Pro Tools, and "REAL" studios use Pro Tools...yada yada yada... And then half way through recording, they ran out of tracks!

LOL!!!!! I love that. I get shit too sometimes, but I say, "listen to your stuff... now listen to MY stuff." That usually shuts them up pretty quick.

I think you are pretty much in deep shit with the distortion. I've had a couple moments with very minimal distortion where I've litterally redrawn waveforms (VERY hard and VERY time consuming). But we're talking a couple of tiny several cycle clips; nothing big. I honestly don't know of a way to get rid of distortion - if anyone had a sure fire way to do it they'd be a millionaire. If the distortion is bad and it's all over the place, then you might try adding some distortion to the entire track and make it a cool 'effect'.... hide one tree in a forest of trees kind of thing. Another trick is leave the vocal clean but put a delay on it and distort the delay (distortion before delay in terms of signal flow) which might be just enough to 'trick' the listener.

That said, keep it in perspective. Sometimes the perfectionist in us freaks out about technical things that might not be that big of a deal. I just mixed a record that had enough clipping on the vocal tracks to have me cursing and holding my head in my hands. But honestly, after I mixed it you could barely tell where the distortion was and it didn't sound bad. And the track is being picked up in rotation here in market numero uno. Go figure. I guess some distortion in the vocals isn't that big of a deal sometimes! So my point is, maybe after you get a good mix cookin' the distortion won't seem to noticeable.

[Stitch333]

ouch!

[bino_5150]

I'm actually making some pretty good progress on the mix. It's not exactly where I want it to be, but it's getting to a point that is almost acceptable. I think I'm almost to the point that if I didn't know it was there, I might not notice it on consumer-end listening systems.

I'm still working on it though. About six times already I've completely trashed the mix and started back over from the session files.

I refuse to give up on this... I WILL get it right lol...

The spectral analysis tools in AA are coming in real handy right about now...

[3rd&4thT]

No one has mentioned the Sound Forge Clipped Peak Restoration plug.

It used to be sold only as part of a separate Noise Reduction Pack, but is now include with Sound Forge 9. I've had good results with it. Normalize the track to zero and let 'er go.

The Clipped Peak Restoration Plug-In mathematically recreates the shape of the audio waveform beyond the clipping threshold, rounding the tops of clipped peaks. Then it applies peak limiting to immediately surrounding areas of the audio clip, which automatically restores the track to its proper level.

Well, that's their story anyway. Noise Reduction 2 is available for free trial download.

3rd&4thT

[E.rOk.stA]

Originally Posted by phillysoulman

Izotope RX has a de clipper.

You could try that.

I second, third, and fourth that. Izotope RX is an excellent product. The $279 will save you soooo much time and effort. Watch the demo on their site and I guarantee you will be sick. Seriously.

[bino_5150]

I have Izotope RX, and that's actually the next thing on the list to try...

[bino_5150]

Originally Posted by dahkter

Sorry to hear about the recording and the wack ass studio.

Good luck.

Well, they couldn't afford to properly sound treat the studio, but hey, they had a plasma screen in the lobby where they were watching the game! It can't be that whack, right? lol

[bigwillz24]

Originally Posted by bino_5150

Well, they couldn't afford to properly sound treat the studio, but hey, they had a plasma screen in the lobby where they were watching the game! It can't be that whack, right? lol

Sounds like the "typical rap studio" in the hood round these parts.

[CRYSCO]

Tuff break dude. Sounds like they need to break out the ole' trusty SM-57 for recording vox over at that joint. Ive been doing some construction (no treated booth) and been using it alot more these days. It's perfect for poorly treated booth's like these. as condensers record everything (good and bad) about the room.

[bino_5150]

Ok, after days and days of re-constructive surgery and sleepless nights, I believe I have come as close as I am going to come this mix, unless I can get Lay to re-record at some point.

And it didn't help that the first thing I did when I got home was re-record my vocals (the right way), so it was real hard to even get them to sit on the track together.

I am not completely satisfied, but hey, this is about as good as it's gonna get...

I guess next time I am recording in someone elses studio, I just gotta be that asshole and be like "dude watch out, lemme show you how to do that right..."

That's a damn shame...

[slvicick]

any chance for a clip?

[bino_5150]

Yeah I'll post some clips when I get back to the house.

I'm also editing the video footage to throw up too...

[poncival]

That's a bummer man. Not having heard the tracks I don't know how bad the distortion is but even though the control room was a zoo I am sure and sounded like crap, if you weren't hearing it coming out the speakers while you were tracking it, chances are 99% of the people listening to it aren't going to be noticing a few clips.

Like you say, Layzie knocks it out and it's killer and all in all the only thing that would mess it up at mixdown is if you mix the vocals too quiet.... A little distortion here and there can be cool, like someone else said maybe you can fuzz the whole thing out a LITTLE (i.e. run it through some outboard gear or something to give it a little roundness overall) and let the performance do the talking.

Also if YOUR vocals sound all nice and crystal clear and his sound fuzzy and weird you may have some problems down the road so if I was you (I can't rap a present to save my life but..) I would take liberties with my own vocal sound distortion wise (I'm talking "slight" THD, not Boss Heavy Metal Pedal type distortion) that would make it sound like I was going for an over-the-top type of sound and that his came out a little cleaner than mine did...

I would forget the whole "having Layzie Bone re-cut his vocals" idea altogether... Not to be a downer, but if I am right in assuming that you hired him for a guest spot on your track, it's a safe bet that he's done with it and the only way to get him to do it again would be to re-hire him to do it and at that point you might as well have him do a different song. Again, if he wasn't complaining that it sounded like crap when it played back out of the speakers as he finished it up, I wouldn't worry about it too much, it's the heat of the moment and you have it, and I am sure it's awesome...

Here's hoping I get another 2 months with Bone this year, I am in my kitchen with my first gold record of "Strength and Loyalty" as I write this

Good luck man, don't let the little technical details get you down, it's all about the music after all isn't it... Oh, I forgot, this isn't "music slutz" he he