A Wild Mastering Story

[Anderton]

I've mentioned this elsewhere, but figured y'all would get a kick out of it.

 

Since Martha Davis can't tour, she's releasing a new song every month. The problem is that these are songs from a long time ago, and they were never released because they had some kind of issue...so my job as a mastering engineer is to fix them.

 

The craziest one so far was a mix where the electronic kick drum was just incredibly loud, as in, louder than the vocal. Apparently the guy doing the mix (I won't mention any names) had fallen in love with his Wendell drum machine, and particularly with the kick.

 

I tried every EQ remember known to humanity, without any success. But then it hit me...

 

I found an isolated kick drum sound in the intro, which otherwise was totally lame so I was going to get rid of it. I'm glad I didn't, because I cut the kick, created a separate track, and dragged the kick sample in every time there was a kick in the two-track mix. This meant zooming waaaaaay in to line them up, with as near sample accuracy as possible.

 

Then, I flipped the phase on the kick track. Eureka! The kick cancelled!! At that point all I needed to do was adjust the level of the out-of-phase kick drum until the kick level was just right.

 

And some people think mastering is just slapping an EQ and maximizer on the master bus...

[Mike Rivers]

Hooray for science, and for a clever idea that worked because of it.

 

I've heard of this technique being used, but this is the first time I've read of a success. And very importantly, you didn't leave out the two critical steps - first to get the too-loud and fixer-upper hits aligned as closely as possible, and second to adjust the level between them to get the right amount of cancellation.

 

Did you do just one level adjustment for the whole fixer-upper track? Or did you tweak some individual hits? Or every one? (hope she pays well)

[Anderton]

You'll be happy to know, as was I, that the kick drum was recorded at one level (i.e., way too loud!!) throughout. So I needed to do only one level adjustment for the fixer-upper track.

 

I believe this the phase-shift equivalent of dodging a bullet

[Greg Mein]

Phase cancellation is usually considered a bad thing, that's mighty clever!

[harmonizer]

I would call this most than mastering, but re-mixing. That is very impressive. Could you provide a link to the Martha Davis song if it becomes available somewhere for us to listen either fee or free?

 

A track containing the kick sound is unique in that a mic sitting right in front of the kick drum gets almost no bleed into it from the rest of the band. This is true even when I record our 7-person covers band live. So it is possible to do extreme measures such as what you describe, if you have "sisu" (look it up!). Certainly you have sisu.

 

I have done something similar in the positive sense to add the kick sound into a mix for one of my band's youtube videos, for a situation where the pickup from the kick mic did not work. I could hear exactly when our drummer hit the kick because there was enough of it in the condenser overhead mics to place its timing. But it was mostly lost in the mix. And I could tell our drummer had done a really nice job with syncopated kicks, so I could not bear the thought of his kick playing not being noticeable in the final mix. It is here:

[Anderton]

I would call this most than mastering, but re-mixing. That is very impressive. Could you provide a link to the Martha Davis song if it becomes available somewhere for us to listen either fee or free?

 

I checked to see if it's posted yet...stay tuned.

 

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That's pretty cool, interesting that in a post about phase flipping a kick to subtract it, you post about adding a kick to boost it Music...right?

[The Real MC]

Phase cancellation can be your friend. Clever application.

 

An old trick with modular synths is mixing a low pass filter output with unprocessed signal with the phase flipped, and viola you have a high pass response. Some modern synths use this technique, as it saves a bundle of components.

 

I'm OTB; with your situation I would had reach for my UREI LA-22. It is a compressor with frequency selective compression. I successfully used it on a guitar player using a talkbox that squealed when he wasn't up on the mic (it was a live show recording). The frequency selection is done via parametric EQ, and boy is that EQ surgical for that purpose. You can monitor the EQ output to help dial in the frequency settings. With the right threshold setting, the squeal would trigger the compression which clamped it way down; normal guitar playing was not affected.

[Anderton]

I'm OTB; with your situation I would had reach for my UREI LA-22. It is a compressor with frequency selective compression. I successfully used it on a guitar player using a talkbox that squealed when he wasn't up on the mic (it was a live show recording). The frequency selection is done via parametric EQ, and boy is that EQ surgical for that purpose. You can monitor the EQ output to help dial in the frequency settings. With the right threshold setting, the squeal would trigger the compression which clamped it way down; normal guitar playing was not affected.

 

There's always a workaround, isn't there?

[Chip McDonald]

You could also install the Spleeter a.i./ML plugin (or now I guess the new version of Ozone?) and stem out the track, phase cancel the kick with itself and then replace it, mix it back together....

 

I suspect this will become a "secret" SOP thing very soon, once people realize it can be done.

[David Emm]

Good call, Craig! Its another instance of being ABLE to micro-edit now, which flings opens the chest of options. I have used many left-field solutions for cockeyed problems, back in the Cretaceous period of tape & hideous adaptors. (Welcome to ground loop-ettes that hum like tiny bees.) I'm rebuilding an old piece now because I saved the bleeping .mid data file. "Old" being 5 years, in Logic 8, on my previous Mac, because I save stuff. I'm amused by the dusty skills that have reappeared in the process. Your solution sounds like it employs one of my favorite modules: Sleep On It. Its one of the Top 3 ways to reach an AHA! moment.

[KenElevenShadows]

Very clever kick drum adjustment!

[Anderton]

The cool thing about this approach, compared to using something like zynaptiq's or iZotope's "deconstructing" plug-ins, is that there are zero artifacts (or artifictions, for that matter).

[Mike Rivers]

The cool thing about this approach, compared to using something like zynaptiq's or iZotope's "deconstructing" plug-ins, is that there are zero artifacts (or artifictions, for that matter).

 

You can create all sorts of havoc if the two sources are out of time alignment. But that's something that you can control.

 

I've been wondering, based on some comments here, if I got your process right. You were working with a mix, not individual tracks, right? And the kick sound that you used to cancel the kick throughout the song was one that was isolated, or reasonably so?

[Anderton]

You were working with a mix, not individual tracks, right? And the kick sound that you used to cancel the kick throughout the song was one that was isolated, or reasonably so?

 

Correct. The kick was completely isolated, because the intro just had a kick/snare figure. That made life soooo much easier.