Dear Anyone.

I hope you had a great Easter - and I hope this question actually makes sense to you - I'm going to over-explain what I'm asking so you can catch my train of thought and tell me if I've got off at the wrong stop.

OK. In a piece I've just written I've got a clarinet - main tune carrier, sounds like a cat with an oboe up its a**e. Anyway. That aside. When I look at its soundwave, the little lines are jumping pretty high. Much higher than those of the backing. Yet it still sounds too quiet. I've tried compression of all types, including blue whale compression (mine own invention, makes elephant's knee look like a blonde in a miniskirt) and you can see how high the soundwaves are jumping, kangaroo on hot coals. Yet it STILL sounds too quiet - and the signals of the combined backing track aren't any louder.

So according to all the science, that clarinet should be audible two blocks away. It should be HUGE compared to the backing (not that I want it huge compared to the backing, I'm just trying to make it sound audible over the backing without EQing the backing to shreds to achieve this.) Despite compression, despite trying turning it up so it's clipping (I know that's wrong, I ran out of ideas) despite listening to it soloed whilst using incredibly scientific methods like twiddling every knob in sight, it's not sounding any louder. Its soundwave is jumping like a dancer at a punk rock concert but you'd swear the volume hadn't changed.

Now change the word 'louder' for 'clearer' if you want to. I know EQ is what gives instruments holes to sit in but I didn't want to kill the sound of the backing TOO much. And even when I WAS EQing heck out of the backing to see what would happen - that clarinet wasn't sounding any louder. Except for one annoying bit of it. The transients. They were hitting you like Mike Tyson's lovetaps but immediately after the transient had struck home - too quiet again. Yet the soundwave for the soloed clarinet was still solar hot.

Now I hit this problem with monotonous regularity in almost everything I write. There's always a couple of sounds, at least, where the soundwaves LOOK a lot louder than the virtual instruments sound. And I've never worked out why. I've even got a couple of magnificent failures somewheres where you can hardly hear anything - yet the soundwaves for the whole file are bright red stratospheric. No, I can't explain that one at all.

But I'm hoping you can.

What is it that controls AUDIBLE sound differences as opposed to TECHNICAL sound differences? In other words, how come you can have something with a red-hot soundwave that still sounds far too quiet - and something else with a much smaller soundwave that's perfectly audible, clear and right in connection with the piece as a whole? And even if you solo the 'too-quiet' one it doesn't sound any louder, despite the height of its soundwaves?

Yours head-scratchingly

Chris.

Welcome!

It could be worth trying a (much) faster attack time, and a lower ratio combined with lower threshold. Compression is not just about the number of dBs, it is about when those dBs of compression are doing their thing.

Often you have to combine compressors to get the characteristics you're after. If you really want to clamp a sound a single compressor might not get you there. I'll often use one compressor to lift the low-level detail and a second to handle the peaks. A limiter might also be required.

Quite extreme for a clarinet though!

I dare say if you can supply an example for us to hear we can provide more targetted advice.

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An Eagle for an Emperor, A Kestrel for a Knave.

I may be way off as I am a bit of a newbie to all this, but in Logic in the sample editor window under the factory tab there is this thing called audio energiser, may help. Like I say I am new to all this but I just read threads in the hope of learning stuff (which I do) an this just jumped into the canister so thought I would share. When I was trying to achieve the same thing I tried cloning a guitar track in a mix and it did indeed help it kind of compete without just pumping it up

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Strictly an amateur with some nice toys,


Edited by DAGGILARR (26/04/11 01:59 PM)

Quote:

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The transients. They were hitting you like Mike Tyson's lovetaps but immediately after the transient had struck home - too quiet again. Yet the soundwave for the soloed clarinet was still solar hot.

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How loud something is will depend not just on how high the signal goes, but also how long it stays there. In the extreme case, think of digital glitches in recording, where the signal jumps from full-scale to zero for one sample and then jumps right back again - all you get from that is a little "tick".

In addition to the fast compression mentioned by Elf, you might also look at something like SPL's Transient Designer. SPL also have (or had; couldn't find it just now, I'm afraid) a free version which allows you to control the attack and not the decay, but that may be all you need here. And Reaper comes bundled with the Jesusonic Transient Controller which does something very similar.

For another thought... Is this a real clarinet that you've just recorded? It's possible that you've got the mic stuffed right up the bell, and you're getting great big gusts on the mic every time your clarinettist blows his stick. This would especially be an issue with a condensor mic. Backing the clarinet off a bit might give a more natural sound. Clarinets (assuming we're not talking bass clarinet) don't go down below the low-mids so it's also worth filtering out any unwanted low end on general principles, avoiding random gusts of uncontrolled low-frequency wind (a) eating up your range, and (b) blowing out subwoofers.