Reducing Harshness of Booming Vocals

[monkeywisdom]

If I had taken that pantyhose to a cashier instead of the Star Trek lane, I probably would have told them it's for the dog. I'm definitely bookmarking this page. Lots of good info. I'll post a whole track tonight or tomorrow.

[monkeywisdom]

OK. Here's track 2 of the course per Koz's request. The only thing missing is course title and track title just to protect the privacy of the company I'm partnering with just in case. They'll be giving the course away with purchases of their product. This one is with the -.2 threshold and the 5:1 ratio. Instead of Mediafire, I uploaded it to my site. Sounds pro to my ears, but the pros may beg to differ. Here it is: http://www.deepermeditation.net/forum-sample.mp3

[trimit2]

EQ - Sound Frequencies
The Very Bottom End
20-40hz is generally out of instrument range*. Nothing desirable can come from a boost in this range, unless you want the rumble of an earthquake, thunder or anything else earth shaking. Most sound systems don’t even go this low and all you will do is soak up valuable headroom. It is best to filter out this area completely and avoid wasted power due to low frequency rubbish.
* (OK before some wiseguy points it out, the fundamental of a grand piano (A0) is 27.5Hz but believe, in real world situations, me nobody really hears the actual fundamental).
The Bass
40-200Hz
Fundamentals of rhythm section. EQ can change musical balance making it fat or thin. Too much makes music boomy.
40hz to 80hz
The 1st octave is the sub-bass of the “feel” of the bass, gives a sense of power, felt more than heard.. An important range for hip-hop, dance or electronic music.
Deep bass requres a lot of energy to produce, these frequencies are for sub woofers or large speakers. Small sound systems and stage monitor frequency response rolls off in this region and there can be a danger of boosting the bass to overcompensate for poor bass response.
Using a bell shaped response rather than shelving is often preferable if a boost is required, centred around 60-80Hz this will add the weight without introducing too much low frequency mush.
It usually is enough to boost just the bassline or bass drum or both to get some nice tight powerful bass, boost on many tracks in this area can easily over power the everything else. Other instruments are often completely filtered out in this range.
100hz - A boost around can often add fullness and punch to a thin sound, but it is also known as the the boom frequency. Often guitars or other instruments will sound boomy and a cut at around 100hz will remove that quality. It is here that bass and guitar tend to blur together, cutting the guitar here helps separate the two.
The Low Midrange.
200Hz-600Hz
The borderlands between bass and mid: The muddiness region or 'mudrange'.
200Hz-250Hz - can add fullness to vocals but also muddy things up so it's a good place to cut on muddy vocals. Keep to small reductions or boosts in this range to much can easily become too drastic.
Mud and fullness of other acoustic instruments hang out around here also. Slight boosts in this range to fill out a thin sounding acoustic guitar is common.
250Hz-600Hz - Gives fullness to some vocals and percussion, snares in particular. The gong sound of cymbals can be found here.
250Hz to 400Hz - A cut around here can cure a cardboard box sound in the kick drum or other low register percussion. This is also a good area to get space between the bassline and kik drum.
The Midrange.
600Hz-4kHz
Subtlety is required here, sound can really get mushy in this range so it can take some work to get everything to fit, and it is also easy to induce ear fatigue in this range.
This the range in which edgey and aggressive sounds come from, but even if you are making aggressive music it is an extremely fine line .
500-1KHz - is the region where tube and horn-like effects lie.
800Hz is the area most often reduced to remove that cheap sound in some instruments. An excess here is notable in terms like cheap, plastic, tinny, toy sounding, unmusical, It can be the area to boost or reduce the punchiness of a bass guitar though.
1-2kHz - Tinny sounds, too much here creates listening fatigue.
2kHz-4kHz - The attack of some instruments can be accentuated or diminished here and in particular, the attack of the beater hitting a percussion instrument. This is also a very important area for speech recognition.
3KHz - Too much here creates listening fatigue, to little little can lead to lisping quality, "m:, "v", "b" become indistinguishable.
The Presence Region
4kHz-6kHz
The range usually refered to as presence.
This area affects how close the sound seems and can help separate a sound from the rest of the mix. Defines much of the clarity and definition of voices and instruments. Where you boost to make vocals or instrument solos seem “up front. The region of the presence knob on a guitar amp.
Adding 6dB at 5KHz can make the entire mix seem 3dB louder, but too much level here on anything can easily become grating and induces listening fatigue very quickly.
The High End
6KHz-16kHz
Brilliance and clarity of sounds. Sibilance, harshness on vocals.
7k-8kHz is where the brightness of cymbals and other high register percussion is, often referred to as the shimmer or sizzle. It can add some bite to some other instruments, but too much boost in this area can produce a metallic sound.
7kHz is the nasty realm of sibilance, the “s” sound area of the frequency spectrum. This is where the unpleasant and sometimes overpowering “s” sounds in vocals are to be found.
8kHz and above : The range of “air” or “brilliance”, and it is here a sound brightened up and sparkle added. This is where you boost or cut the breath sound. and also where the brittle,'ice pick' sound can be tamed.
10k is a good starting point to look at adding some brilliance.
15k and above is more the area referred as “air.”

www.lajm-shqip.com

[Trebor]

... Here it is: http://www.deepermeditation.net/forum-sample.mp3

Your forum-sample.mp3 track looks like stereo but isn’t : it’s two tracks but they are identical, aka "dual-mono".
Unless you want to add stereo effects to your voice you might as well delete one of the tracks, ("Split Stereo to Mono") , the sound of a mono mp3 will be just as good but the file size will be smaller and consequently quicker to download/stream.

[kozikowski]

I have one negative performance comment. You have fluffs and word mistakes in that clip. There are instances where you pause at the wrong place while you search for a word or phrase or duplicate a phrase. The whole object of editing is so the mistakes never ever make it to the client.

I hate the word "So" at the beginning of a sentence in a performance of this type, but I don't know who wrote the script, so that one may be out of our hands.

Koz

[monkeywisdom]

Good advice. I'll edit that out. Normally I cut out those things. For some reason, I thought I'd keep most of it in that one track.

[kozikowski]

You're note being compulsive enough. This is a segment around :38, before and after a fluff correction. Koz

[kozikowski]

I noticed as I was ripping down through the piece that if I tightened up the pauses and gaps, you have at least one sentence that goes on with a single thought for about 45 minutes without taking a breath. It's not that bad, you get what I mean. Since I'm following along in my head, I started wanting to gasp for air.

This could be interesting to fix because you like to speak in long thoughts with choppy presentation.

There's no Audacity filter for that. You have to get the script right. I can't find the example cut, I'll see if I can recreate it between jobs at work.

Koz

[monkeywisdom]

That's true. My other audios are not like this. In those, I put myself in the listeners' shoes just so that they would process the info optimally. Maybe I'll redo it. I got the sudden case of the snots and was going blank the whole time which is not normal. The blanks created a lot of stuttering and such. The lack of space between ideas seemed a bit tonight to me, too. Part of that was editing out the mouth sounds. The other part was just cutting it too tight. The background seems dead silent, so perhaps "add silence" could do the trick. Otherwise, it won't hurt to re-record and re-edit. All these suggestions are helpful because they confirm my inner dialog topics that occur during playback, some of which run in the background.

[kozikowski]

You're not working from a script are you?

There's a Hollywood thing about repeatability. Anybody can blow up a car. The good pyro people can make it land where you want after it blows up. The Hollywood people can blow it up again seven more times, exactly the same way.

We need you to change one word about two minutes in.......

Koz