Cleaning up guitar parts

[abbrenner]

Hey all, back again, this time with editing questions.

We have multiple guitar tracks on our file. It's basically 2 tracks that are doubled and a unique track per guitar player (6 tracks all together). This particular question, I am asking about a section which only one guitarist is playing (3 guitar tracks, 2 identical). On the 2 identical tracks, for some reason, some of the eighths are swung. I did a little fixing on the unique track and it's sounding great. When you play all 3 together, it's muddy as all get out (some notes are swung and some are straight).

On top of this, when I go to polyphonic->warp, only very few of the notes are reading as attacks (or whatever it's called where you get the line). Maybe 1 per measure. I've been trying to guess where all the notes are, but it's really hard, and I'm not getting it after a few hours of messing with this 30s section. Is there a better way to do this? Re-recording isn't an option, unfortunately.

Edit:
The notes should be straight eighths throughout the section, it's roughly 210 bpm.

[EGS]

Originally Posted by abbrenner

...When you play all 3 together, it's muddy as all get out (some notes are swung and some are straight)...

Delete the part that is causing the conflict/mud. If that now diminishes the layering too much, copy a chunk from the good track and paste to the bad track, and then shift in time a bit and/or pan differently. Hope this helps!!!

[amagras]

Nothing replace a good performance to start with but if you have no other choice then elastic audio should be the last thing to try on guitars, as @EGS said copy and replace from a segment with better performance, and as a last resource, analysis mode of elastic audio offers the option to write down or move the markers to the correct spot I'm the waveform, try grabbing the markers with the mouse to move them or press home+click on an empty space to create new ones / alt+click to remove

[simon.a.billington]

Of course, if you a desperate enough and have seemed to have exhausted all your options there are other engineering tricks you can try, even if you just automate them over the muddy areas in question

Thins like subtractive eq of the lower mids, a multiband compressor to tame those mids, enhancers, transient shapers to put some definition back in. Things like that.

C6 is often my favourite tool for jobs like this, but there are others out there.

It sucks, but many times it is what it is and you can't do much about it except try to patch it as best you can. We live in a real world where nothing is rarely ever ideal. There's always something that needs fixing or enhancing. That's why the tools exist in the first place.

No one invents a tool first and then tried to find an application for it. It just doesn't work that way.

[Andy Gone]

Originally Posted by abbrenner

Hey all, back again, this time with editing questions.

We have multiple guitar tracks on our file. It's basically 2 tracks that are doubled and a unique track per guitar player (6 tracks all together). This particular question, I am asking about a section which only one guitarist is playing (3 guitar tracks, 2 identical). On the 2 identical tracks, for some reason, some of the eighths are swung. I did a little fixing on the unique track and it's sounding great. When you play all 3 together, it's muddy as all get out (some notes are swung and some are straight).

On top of this, when I go to polyphonic->warp, only very few of the notes are reading as attacks (or whatever it's called where you get the line). Maybe 1 per measure. I've been trying to guess where all the notes are, but it's really hard, and I'm not getting it after a few hours of messing with this 30s section. Is there a better way to do this? Re-recording isn't an option, unfortunately.

Edit:
The notes should be straight eighths throughout the section, it's roughly 210 bpm.

Are there any repeating parts that are ok? It seems plugins won't help here. Usually in such cases I cut everything bad and replace with good from different repetition. When you have double tracks, you have more material, so it is easier.

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by simon.a.billington

C6 is often my favourite tool for jobs like this

Yes, this is my favourite as well. Any other dynamic EQ might do the job, but with this one it is a whole lot easier (which means faster).

[zedhed]

For future reference;

Use 'Loop Record', and do a few passes so you have material to create a composite track/s or fix bad spots. Also record a 'Dry' track for each guitar so you can Re-Amp the track/s.

There is a setting in Preferences to create new clip (or words to that effect) for each recorded pass in Loop mode.

[JFreak]

While that (loop record) is effective in getting many parts recorded in little time, what I would suggest instead is manually creating playlists for each take and take the time it takes for each pass -- guaranteed better results, and later on easier to comp best parts from different takes.