Audio Surgery for a live track!

[Scardanelli]

Hi all,


I posted this on the Facebook group but forgot to add it here.

I thought this may be of interest to fellow Mixbus 32C users. A couple of weeks ago I played a concert in Italy, and they filmed the show for their Youtube channel. The video looks great, but the sound wasn’t well balanced. The front of house mix was guitar heavy, and whilst there was a ton of reverb on the vocal, the guitar was almost completely dry. I downloaded the video and extracted the audio in Da Vinci Resolve, then used Steinberg SpectraLayers to separate voice and guitar tracks . These were imported into a Mixbus 32C session where I re-balanced, EQ’d and added a little plate reverb to the guitar to bring it closer to the vocal space.

Love to know what you think! I was very happy with the end result so I’ve released it as a single. When I first saw and heard the video I thought, OK, fine for Youtube (well not really...) but what a shame to not have a great recording of this event. Now I have it, thanks to Steinberg and Mixbus 32C.

Of course there's a huge level difference between their uploaded video and my version. But the main thing is the difference in the vocal/guitar balance, and the added ambience of the guitar, compared to the original.

Before video (my performance at 14'25")  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2CLo8lS8-c

After processing: https://youtu.be/o-tSkWJodgw?si=8gCC6QZz5VYtI59r

[PBuryk]

Simply AWESOME!!!

Cheers!
Patrick

[Dingo]

Well done Simon, chalk and cheese... a very good rescue job.... the guitar sound / voice mix is so much better.
I was not aware of any artefacts caused by Spectral Layers.. Nice work Resolving out the 'roadie' who didn't get your mic stand fixed..
Oh and congratulations on winning an award for your composition.

[Jostein]

Much improved sound, but first of all: -What a wonderful voice you have, and what a wonderful melody. I love such a dynamic performance and I'm now checking your YouTube channel. Very well done!

[Dingo]

@Jostein - agreed great voice and dynamics.
Also look at Simon's Bandcamp offerings

[nik5]

Wow, amazing surgery! Beautiful guitar work, vocals and melody.

[sunrat]

Excellent work! Great song and performance and the audio improvement is remarkable.
I tried a similar surgery recently on a full band recording using iZotope RX10 Music Rebalance function and was quite pleased and a little surprised at the quality of results. Split to vocal, bass, percussion, and other instruments then remixed in Mixbus 32C.

[Scardanelli]

Thanks for all the positive feedback!

@Dingo - yes, I was surprised actually by the results from SpectraLayers - I'd got it bundled with my Cubase Pro upgrade (I upgrade just to stay current but might've used it a handful of times in ten years...) and had tried it maybe a year ago and wasn't impressed - everyone was raving about how brilliantly it could remove the vocals from a stereo mix but for me the artefacts were unworkable. Anyway it was only because I really wanted to rescue the video that I just thought why not give it a try? - actually there are artefacts when you solo the voice - especially during the gaps in singing - you can hear a sort of warbling guitar. I never tried soloing the guitar at these exact points to see if they cancelled each other out, because when put together they did! Kind of weird phase or something cancellation, anyway it was lucky for me.