I recorded my band’s live show on my 1-track Zoom H2 in 128kb mp3 mode.
(Yea, yea, not lossless. I’m just going for “good enough” here)
Quality and mix is ok, but I know it could be vastly improved.
Passing this MP3 through an EQ app to fatten up the sound may do wonders? (Compress? EQ? The standard bag of tricks?)
Last time, Trebor and kozikowski helped me do this in 2013.
Not sure if those guys are still around ?
Can you PM me and I will post a link to the file?
I’d like to make sense of the principles and rationale behind the steps you took.
The EQ graph you used looks like it removes extreme bass, and adds some treble (to bring back cymbals and reduce “muffle”)
Compression/limiter makes sure there is no clipping? Tries to smooth out the extremes in high and low decibels?
I didn’t understand the stero/mono step. You’re just “double tracking” the song with additional copies of mono? What end result does this accomplish?
I did notice that when I combined the original raw and Koz’s final, it sounded better with both of them. I think the original provided some extra bottom end that was lacking in Koz’s final. Is that the idea?
Chorus to add some echo and fill in some dry spots? I get chorus, just didn’t know it can be applied to an entire track. I guess it helps “bring out” the entire track (or whatever word phrase use)
Compression again. Same logic as #2?
Envelope to modify final volume. Is this similar to the Amplify effect? It makes sense to do this step last.
To create stereo effects you first have to make a dual-mono* track from the original mono track,
then apply stereo effects to that dual-mono version.
(* The dual-mono version sounds exactly the same as the single-channel mono original, before effects are applied)
One super easy way to make your recordings sound better: Stop using MP3. You can’t edit an MP3 and end up with the same quality value you started with. One edit, filter or correction and that’s the end of the 128 quality. By the third edit you will start to hear the bubbly compression distortion and once that happens, that’s the end of the performance, doesn’t matter how many filters and compressors you use.
In re-reading the first message thread, you misunderstood me when I complained about that. If you count the different edits and corrections, my guess is you were down to 80 MP3 quality. Not that you made 80 edits. The limit for barely passable stereo is 60. So you were not only fighting the studio sound issues, but the MP3 distortion, too.
In contrast, the quality value for 44100, 16-bit Stereo WAV is 1411 and it stays that high through multiple edits. You can make an MP3 for posting on-line or playing in your personal music player later, after you get the show to sound good.
Follow the instructions for making WAV instead of MP3 and “Exchanging Files with a Computer” in the manual. The H2n will have no trouble creating the high quality WAV files.
Your memory and space will go away a lot faster. WAV files are bigger because they don’t throw away parts of your sound. MP3 tiny files are not “free.”