“For Good”

Editing/Recording

Main Session Window

In this window, the original vocal recording track and headphone click track are hidden. For the vocals, I spliced out the silence in between lines to take out some of the breathing and background noise. From there, I faded the sections that stood out to make cleaner transitions. The vocals are panned slightly to the right since the left channel came in a bit hotter than the right and the two guitar tracks are panned right and left to give space for the vocals. Both the guitar and the vocals are given two levels of compression to amplify the sound. The stereo out also has a compressor used with a limiter to avoid clipping.

Mixer

For the main edit, I sent the two guitar tracks to Bus 1 where I applied two levels of compression. to boost the presence. The exact specifications can be seen further down. Since doing this created a bit too much noise, I added a gate to both tracks separately to cut down on the ambient noise. They are also sent to Bus 2 where I applied a small amount of reverb to add depth.

In the vocal track, I did the same technique of double compression with adjustments to fit the voice. I wanted to maintain the grit and inflections of the voice while also adding a mellow “country” tone to it and softening the pitch and attack. To do this, I added a small amount of Auto-Tune Pro. It was important to maintain as much original voice as possible so I used this with caution so as not to create too much of an “electronic” sound. The exact adjustments are also below. After the tune was adjusted, the voice was still very present so I experimented with different reverbs. Since my laptop is limited to space designer, I combined it with the chorus to simulate a new reverb within Bus 4, and then eventually decided to leave it with a small amount of chorus. The final addition was the Phat FX plug-in. I used this to simulate a “radio” sound that both softened the presence while maintaining a bit of distortion and grit used in a rock genre. This was done through a small band filter and different frequency resonance. Finally, in Channel EQ, I added low cut off filter to take out some of the extra noise.

During the actual recording, the guitar was recorded first. Originally we used a click track but decided against it since it took away some of the humanness of the playing. The best track of the guitar was then sent put in a track that was sent out to headphones so the performer could hear it and sing the vocal track underneath. Since the room particularly resonated bass frequencies, a low shelf filter was applied to the stereo out. The full list of tracks are seen here.

Vocals Auto-Tune Pro

The main changes I made to the vocals was adding a small amount of auto-tune. The most important factor for this song was to make sure the vocals still sounded natural so I added a decent bit of humanizer and limited the retune speed and flex-tune. Since the key of the piece is Ab Major, I set the input settings to the proper key and applied them to an alto/tenor voice.

Guitar Compression

For the compression I set the threshold to around 30db and the ratio to a bit below 2:1. The makeup gain I raised to 3db and put on the limiter to avoid clipping since this same compression was done twice. The vocals had a similar layout with only a slightly lower threshold and ratio.