Tuesday, 11 December 2012

A Love Song Sound

At home I have my own Rode NT-1 mic but it isn't in a studio environment, having learned that LCA had their own recording and editing booth I immediately booked my self an induction so we could record our song and any other ADR sounds needed.  The program in the booth is Logic Pro and having taken Music Tech in A level I was already accustomed. For the song, we used an acoustic guitar, a vocal track and small amount of synth. I took them in to logic adjusted the stereo spread, reverb, added compression and EQ to create a simple mix. It's quite hard to spread and balance only a couple of tracks. You really want to fill the space rather than have everything centered; usually double tracking instruments and panning each left and right is a great way to achieve this.

One of the biggest problems I noticed straight away in our exterior footage was the sound of the road and traffic, any raw audio I wanted to use was overlaid with constant high frequency noise. I attempted to use a noise reduction effect, but it wasn't as useful as I had hoped, I worked with what I could. I suspected that on our external camera mic the 'high-pass filter' was not turned on which should have been checked, this unfortunately let all the high pitch frequencies bleed in to the capture.

So how was I going to around this problem, the simplest way to level out noise on your audio is mixing it with other sounds e.g. background music or sound effects. Usually a catchy background song can totally eliminate a viewers awareness of noise levels combined with sound effects there is almost no worry unless someone is purposely listening for it. After placing these in the right places, I found that the video seemed much more professional and audio wasn't really an issue anymore.

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