Latest / 52 Cues - A Production Music and Sync Podcast / Indie Acoustic Cue Review

Transcript

Indie Acoustic Cue Review · 52 Cues - A Production Music and Sync Podcast

• 0:32
  Speaker 1: What is happening everybody, this is Dave Kroff, and welcome back to another Q review, where I feature a Q written by a member of the 52 Qs community and I provide feedback, like you might hear, from a music supervisor or a potential library.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: Today we are checking out Miracle Lake, which is an indie acoustic Q written by 52 Qs community member, robert Rady.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: Now, this has already been forwarded along to a potential library, so this is somewhat of a victory lap, but I definitely wanted to feature it, so we are going to take a listen to it and then we'll talk about it on the other side.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: Alright, so that was Miracle Lake from Robert Rady, and I do hope I'm pronouncing your name right.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: Please let me know if I am not.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: But thank you so much, robert, for sending this along.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: This was sent during our week 38 weekly feedback threads.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: We put feedback threads together every week and so, like I said, this was already forwarded.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: I believe this was a taxi listing and so this was already forwarded.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: He had a couple of those forwarded along.
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: So, first of all, huge congratulations, man, and I'm wishing you all the best.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: So this is somewhat of a victory lap, but I did want to give some feedback to you, just potentially to help you either with future Qs or maybe when the library hopefully gets back to you.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: And the first thing that I noticed, first of all, stellar playing layering is fantastic.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: Love the octave layering we have going on, you know, just taking the melody, playing it up the octave, almost like a mandolin vibe.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: And, by the way, as far as the form goes, I really like this, this extra bar you added right in here before we go into this B section, and I wonder if maybe a little bit of a stop down or an edit point, not necessarily to come to a screeching halt, but it's like almost two, four bar or something like that, just to give it a little bit of a pause so that if an editor wanted to kind of fade out there they could.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: And one of my big takeaways here at the top and I brought over insight which gives me kind of a stereo field, and if we look at the stereo field it feels pretty or relatively narrow.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: So it feels pretty narrow in terms of the overall stereo width of the sound before the piano comes in.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: And so I'm imagining you recorded your acoustic guitar in stereo.
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: But I wonder if one of the layers, maybe the octave that you bring in.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: I wonder if we can do so.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: It's a little bit more widening.
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: Something as simple as adding a delay like a 10 or 15 millisecond delay to the right side or to the left side.
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: In logic I would do this with sample delay, but I just want to, I just want to put this on here just to see what this would sound like.
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: This is Logic's sample delay, so I'm going to put let's start with a 10th millisecond delay.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: Let's just see.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: Maybe I might be totally wrong here.
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: Let's see how it sounds.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: Let's try 15.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: We could see the width.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely, probably would put it on the master track, because now we're widening everything, the entire signal.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: But you can see we do get a lot more.
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: You know, if we look at the different meters here, if you're listening to this in the audio feed, hopefully you can kind of hear the difference.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: Again, pretty narrow.
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: Again, I could tell it's recorded in stereo, but it just feels a little narrow.
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: That's with the sample delay.
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: Let's try a 5 millisecond when we have to be really, really careful.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: If we're looking at our meters here.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: We have to be really careful not to overdo it, otherwise we run the risk of phase issues, which we have a little bit of now, phasing issues.
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: When I'm looking at my meters like this, I want to stay kind of above zero up to plus one.
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: Now things are getting so right now it's too wide because it's on the master bus and I probably wouldn't put this on everything like I've done.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: But I think just adding a little bit more widening we do get more stereo width once the piano comes in, which is a welcome addition.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: But that's one thing that I would recommend, especially as we have multiple guitar layers happening.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: I think that could help so everything doesn't kind of jumble there in the middle.
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: And as far as the mix goes, I do feel like it was a little mid-heavy and I think maybe just ducking back around at 500 Hertz or so, and I feel like we're getting a little bit too much of the body of the acoustic.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: So this is so, that's without, so that's without a 500 Hertz, and that's me just ducking back around 500 Hertz by about 4 dB and I wouldn't put it on the master, I would probably put it just on the acoustic and that's just a suggestion for you.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: And once the piano comes in, I feel like we could have gotten a little bit more out of the bottom in basically 50 Hertz and below, not that it needs to be huge, we don't need a big chunky bottom end on our mix, but we really don't have much energy, much really below 80 Hertz or so.
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: We could have used just a little bit more of that, especially here towards the end.
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: Oh, and, by the way, the mix was really really soft.
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: I had to boost this by 5 dB to get it kind of near minus 14 LUFS or so.
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: So everything was pretty soft via the original levels, had it.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: If I were to bump that back down to zero, the original levels, if we go to our loudest spot here, yeah, we're cooking around minus 18, 17 LUFS or so it's pretty quiet.
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: And so I just did a 5 dB boost here in Logic to get it, to get it loud.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: And then the last thing I'll say is oh, there was a squeak Right there.
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: Now this, this is kind of like the pedal noise in In piano samples and that kind of thing.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: I mean this is as real as it gets, but it's kind of step stepping out or popping out a little bit.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: So I'm gonna open this up and I'm gonna open this up in RX here.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: Let me get my face out of the way and let's see if we can't find this there.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: It is right there.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: You kind of see how it pops, pops out of the mix, and so RX and this is not a commercial for RX, I am not sponsored by RX or anything.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: If you're not familiar with it, iza tote makes RX, which is kind of like Photoshop for sound, and I wonder let's, let's look here into the guitar D noise and let's deselect that.
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: So I'm gonna select squeak here and let's just see if we can't get rid of that squeak.
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: So I'm gonna select it, let's render it.
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: Oh, it didn't like that, it's not just not gonna do it here.
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: There we go.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: See, the idea isn't to completely remove it, the idea is just to minimize it.
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: So it doesn't Stand out.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: Because if we look at the, the waveform, we can clearly see that, that, that spike.
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: But let's select this.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna bump up the sensitivity and the reduction here, let's render it, and now, now we go back into logic and we can see the spike is gone.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: So now it sounds like you're, sounds like you're moving your hand, and not necessarily a, not necessarily an error, a recording error, and so it's a real.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: It's a real tough balance that we have to to ride right to real.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: It's a line we have to tread carefully.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: When we're dealing with recorded sounds, how much do you take out?
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: It's like you know, listening to audiobooks or even podcast, you know, do you go in and forensically remove every breath noise?
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: Well, that could sound artificial, but we also Want to kind of minimize things as much as we can.
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: Love the stop down here, or the, the, the retard, dondo or the Rollin condo.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: I like this.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: Personally, I probably wouldn't have hit it so intensely for so long, but again, this was got, this, this was a accepted into the library, so Obviously, or this was a forward along from the taxi screener.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: So something, something was going right here.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: By the way, I like the stereo things that are happening with the organ here.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: And then the last thing, the absolute last thing I will say is I think we have click in the audio tail.
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: I'm boosting it, so that's something to keep keep in mind.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: It probably came through your headphones, I'm imagining, and so if you are not tracking with closed back headphones, then I highly recommend getting some.
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: The the workhorse closed back headphones are going to be the mdr 7506's from Sony.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: This is what I use.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: I have and I've used these for years.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: I've recently, however, switched to the Sony MV1s, the MDR MV1s, which are open back, and I switched to those because they're kind of like the 7506s without the need to run, without the need to run sound ID reference or some kind of bias compensation plugin like that.
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: But thank you so much for sending this along.
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: Like I said, this was sent along during our week 38 weekly feedback threads.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: And again, congratulations, robert.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: I know this was a forward and I am wishing you all the best.
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: If you would like to have your cue featured here on the 52Q's YouTube channel and podcast, then we pick a cue, post it every single week and we'd love to hear from you.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: I think I said week 38, I meant week 39 there earlier and if you would like feedback on your own cues, we provide feedback every single week for our family subscribers during our weekly feedback and critique sessions and we'd love to have you join us.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: Why don't you head over to 52Qscom and see if one of the subscriber plans is right for you?
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: But, as always, thank you so much for your continued support to the family, friends and patrons subscribers.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: But that is going to do it for me this week.
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: Until next time, peace.