While it's not ideal to have to polish a turd as an audio engineer, knowing how can help save a recording and make the clients LOVE you! Case in point...
A band brought in a recording and asked me to try to give it a better mix. They recorded it in a church, the soundman for the church did the tracking, and there were sonic issues all over the place. The lead guitar was a stereo D/I out of a distortion pedal, yet the rhythm guitar was single tracked in mono. The bass was full of mess-ups through the whole song, and they were so bad that they literally were no longer following the song at one point. It turns out that the band rehearsed the song all of two times before recording it. Even the drums sounded like complete garbage, especially the kick. The drummer has a soft hit with his left foot, so when the left foot struck the bass drum on the double bass pedal, that hit would get lost and there would often not even be a transient (making drum replacement pretty difficult). The vocals were off key something fierce, and the entire mix sounded like one of my very first home recordings from over a decade ago.
So let's address the issues I was presented with one at a time. First, the vocals. They were pretty pitchy, but that's nothing that some light use of Melodyne can't fix. Of course, if automatic pitch correction isn't an option, then the audiosuite pitch correction plugin that comes with Pro Tools can do the job one note at a time. While not ideal, I've done some great things using that plug in.
So now that the vocals are in tune, let's look at the drums. They were poorly mic'd, so I opted to just replace everything other than the cymbals. The cymbals were mono mic'd with a single overhead near the center. Not a bad approach, I've done it before. But it would appear that they mic wasn't placed properly, as some of the cymbals just sounded bad. Nothing I can do about that though, so let's address the individual drums.
The kick drum was the first to be addressed. I used the Tab-To-Transient feature in Pro Tools to find the transients and trigger Steven Slate Drums at the transient. The problem is the way the drummer plays, considering that his left foot hit's very lightly. Since we're talking about metal music here, that is a problem. It's an even bigger problem that he hit the drum so lightly with his left that the transients would disappear in the huge transient created by the right foot hitting the same drum during the fast double bass parts. So this made tab-to-transient drum replacement a problem, and damn near impossible. I had to listen to the drum track in slow motion to determine where to trigger the samples.
The entire drum kit was sample replaced. There was just no easy way to save those tracks. But now that the drums had been sample replaced and the vocals had been tuned, it was time to move on to bass.
This was tough. I had to anticipate what the bassist was trying to do and recreate it using those same notes as they had been played earlier in the song. But the song wasn't recorded to a click track, so this meant I had to employ heavy use of elastic audio to get the bass to fit correctly. Once I was done with the bass, I had essentially reconstructed the entire track.
I did the same to the rhythm guitar, as I wanted a big full metal guitar sound in the mix, but only had a mono single guitar track! So I did some voodoo to reconstruct a new guitar track from the ground up that would act as a double. This included more elastic audio. I basically took the guitar track and cloned it in the DAW. Then I copied the second chorus over the first and the first chorus over the second. This gave me two distinct performances of the chorus on guitar and enabled me to double the chorus even though it was single tracked! I followed suit with the verses and the other parts of the song until I had reconstructed the entire song on guitar from the ground up!
Last was the lead solo, which was recorded through dual outputs of a distortion pedal onto two channels. I tossed one of the channels, as they were both identical and both sounded like garbage as is. Then I re-amped the remaining take to give the lead solo some real amp tone, and cranked the bejesus out of the amp in the live room. IT WORKED! The guitar solo sounded really good as opposed to nasty and digital!
Once it was mixed, and I delivered the mix, the band was ecstatic at how big of a difference I had made! It was also a fun project to help me test my boundaries and problem solving skills. But in all honesty, it's better to get it right to begin with. Surgery on this song took HOURS, and retracking the song correctly would've honestly taken less time than reconstructing it from the ground up. But the band wanted me to save what they brought me, so that's what I did. But the moral of the story is, and should be, to find a way to make it work. You may have to put some time in, but solutions are out there to get it done!
(Brandon S. Hire is the head engineer at Skyline Sound Studios in Grove City, Ohio. Visit skylinesoundstudios.com for more information!)
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