I normally keep the wind screen on my SM7B mic when not in use, mostly to protect it from dust. Ordinarily I'm good about taking it off when I record because (IMO) it just murders the high end in vocals. Okay for radio and podcasting maybe. Not great for music. Well I left it on by accident in my most recent session, and now the highs sound muffled to me. Does anyone know of a good method for rectifying this?

I've tried a number of different high shelf, bell curve, tilt shelf, multiband saturation, etc. variations and combos. Mostly they come out pretty brittle sounding with all that processing exaggerating any existing resonances and imperfections. I've had a little bit of luck with some Satin presets, but not as much as I'd like.

I'm open to any methods, plugins, presets, or anything else. Otherwise I might end up re-recording like 1.5 hours worth of work.

 

I know it sucks but i think re-recording is the best outcome, its hard to replace missing frequencies like that. Otherwise you are trying to enhance something in the mix that isnt even there. Considering its only 1.5h, imo thats considerably shorter then spending like 10h to halfway fix it in the mixdown.

 

Yeah. Frankly I'm prepared to re-record it today. I was wishful that someone would offer up some secret miracle cure but I knew it was unlikely

Thanks for the input my man

 

Have you tried an aural exciter (jokes generated here, I expect) like Aphex?

 

Bounce your vocal to/or duplicate it on another track. Temporarily raise the track fader by 1dB. High pass filter to meet the upper freq range that is diminished in the original. It should sound more natural at this point for you to process this isolated portion so it layers/merges well. Your chances are better this way because you can EQ and even further process this piece however you want and it won't tilt the spectral shape the same way as just going to town with an EQ on the main vocal.

 

Last edited: Jan 21, 2017

Air-band boost and then into exciter (top end)?

 

You mentioned pretty much in order what I would have tried to do to rectify the problem. The issue seems to be the fundamental character of the signal captured. You know what they say, "You can polish a turd, but a turd is a turd is but still a turd". This reminds me of a story I read as a child, about a King who accidently put salt in his coffee. He gathered the intellectia of his kingdom; the sorcerers, the chemists and the greatest chefs in all the land, and still, nobody, how they tried, could transform that saliferous brown liquid into the normally sweet cup that the King at this point now furiously demanded...until the King's third chef's second assistent's eight year old daughter suggested brewing a new cup.

 

Yeah the exciter and/or high shelf/exciter combo was the first thing I tried. Rather than a dedicated (Aphex, etc) exciter plug I'll use something like Saturn or the exciter module on one of the Izotope plugins. Usually I am a decent hand at using tape style saturation to try and boost the HF while keeping things a bit smoother than if it were just EQ. Thus far I haven't found a good way to boost it as much as I need without accentuating unpleasant resonances or just making it sound generally brittle.

The parallel filtering idea might be worth a shot.

Thanks for taking the time to help, everyone.

 

Acustica D361 sounds perfect for this type of thing given how it works. Our possibly the Signal To Noise enhancer preset in Nebula. I've used either to pull some hi end back into vocals I used an MXL ribbon mic to capture, and they sounded really natural and smooth.
I'm also wondering if this is a good place for a dynamic eq.

 

That secret miracle excists, it's called Zynaptiq Unfilter. Great at de-muffling audio, used it a lot!

 

Try something similar to what dbmuzik suggested...........HP filter the section thats causing you problems, hit that section of the audio quite hard with what you feel you're missing, as in exagerate the effect you want and then blend it in to taste. You might find you don't need so much to get the desired sound.

 

and def try kush clariphonic before you do stuff with exiters and such
be very carefull!!! and then general eq after with abbey road emi eq (i like the old ones)
if there are harsher freq, insert hofa iqeq inbetween and massage! the problem areas

importantly dont overdo it
your main focus is to "Normalize" the vocals. bring them to a proper sound.
after this go into
Desk Modeling. i used stuff like Tritone Digitals ColorTone (back when i had bad mics and amps ;)

results may vary but this way bad freq get toned down
"Desk" stuf can (or parralel or eq over sends) "silk "out high Freq.

of course this only works in per tune contex not if its in a couple of tracks

 

With most ribbon mics the high end is naturally sweet though attenuated by the normal bandwidth of the microphones of this type. When adding decibels of high frequency with an eq, the sweetness is appended within the confine of the bandwidth chosen. The muffled scratchy recording of Cav's SM7 funneled through and filtered by the wind screen is not a pleasant sound, and making it louder only showcases the mistake of not removing it.

 

Thanks for clarifying. I had assumed it was a similar problem, attenuated top end. Your explanation makes sense though, the top end has been mangled, not attenuated.

 

There is a Plug-in in Samplitude called Brilliance Enhancer. Try the preset "Refresh Gramophon" and put Overlap on Very High; put max freq. on 24 KH or over and play with Strength. May help you. Try preset "Refresh Tape" or find some settings that you set. This might help You.

 

yeah this is what I'm hearing a lot of. Usually I can do something like simultaneously boost and smooth it out with some tape saturation, or boost and then flatten out the resonances with a de esser or dynamic EQ, but so far I haven't been able to do anything that doesn't just accentuate its shortcomings. I'm gonna re-record it today.

 

as much of a pain as it is... probably better to start over with the quality of source material that you wanted..

but totally understand not wanting to chuck over an hour's work

have you considered substituting another mic for the SM7B ? as it's well known for the
"beefy" sound you get from it...this could happen again in future..

 

Last edited by a moderator: Jan 22, 2017

I think that's for the best!

 

Much can be said about the enthusiasm of the moment when an idea is newly birthed and the spirit of creation is freshly issued forth from the womb of imagination. I however have no doubt that your second pass will bring to you new insights and perhaps bring a deeper understanding of your lyric, enabling you to make a more mature assessment of your delivery, and so of your performance.

 

Yeah tbh usually the second pass is better anyway, normally I'm recording stuff right after I write it, which means reading off a sheet if it's anything longer than 12 or 16 bars. The better it's committed to memory, the more potent a performance I can give.