Musician not Engineer needs help

[skymuse70]

Hi everyone,

Digi001 ver 5.1 Windoze. No technical issues, this is a mix question.

[img]images/icons/confused.gif[/img]

I just need some help attaining a desired effect. I have a 30's-era song I'm putting together for someone, and I'd like to do the old mono-78-RPM-sound complete with scratches/pops for the first verse, then fade in a la Wizard of Oz with more aural "coloring". Right now I'm playing with a mono Aux insert and channeling everything through that with moderate success, but then I want a full stereo field when the "record" sound goes away and we're in real-time music, and I can't figure out how to get the sends and auxes to cooperate.....plus getting the fade-in right is a B*tch! [img]images/icons/wink.gif[/img]

If someone could please throw me a few clues I'd be very grateful. If preferred I can provide an email address.

Thanks!

BJ Brown
Keyboards, not Soundboards.....

[silence_of_stone]

I am at work right now, but on one of the waves 10 band EQ plugs... correct me if I am wrong... there are some presets, and one is called "telephone" and another AM Radio, and they will get you close to that tinny sound you might be looking for.
That sounds like a neat idea for sure. Best of luck!
Kev

[Chris Cavell]

Okay, you've got some automation to do. So, first things first, read the section of the manual on automation! This will really help quite a bit in actually getting done what I'm about to recommend.

Route all of your outputs to a buss rather than the analog 1/2 outs. Create an Aux track with inputs matching the outputs of the rest of your tracks and set ITS outputs to analog 1/2 (or whatever your monitoring).

For the scratches, you can download sampletank free. Don't bother to run any midi through it, just load it on another stereo aux and look at the output effects section in the plug. It has a crackle and pop record emulator called Phonograph. Turn it on and play with it's knobs to get the right amount of crackle pop and hiss that you want.

So, now you have a record scratch and pop emulator that doesn't use up one of your 32 available voices. To emulate the recording technology and sound of the time, load up just about any eq and use shelf or band pass to chop out some of the lows and a lot of the highs on the entire mix. This will likely give it a bit of old AM radio sound. To make it mono, take the aux track you created at the beginning of my post here and pan the left and right to the middle.

So, now you have somehting like old thirty's "sing into my can" playing back on a victrola and coming to you across AM radio.

(You can choose whether or not to filter out the crackling effect by routing it to the bus or the final out.)

Now, here is basically a list of the automation you want to perform all at the same time:

fade out the sampletank track
pan out the second aux track
automate the EQ (you can learn about this under Plugin Automation) to a flat setting.

Depending upon which eq you use, you can choose to also mute automate the EQ after the transition has been made. To make the effect a little more dramatic, you may want to route all the audio tracks through an additional aux to boost the levels of the audio tracks slightly through the transition.

Have fun!