Good thing / bad thing?

[catsittingstill]

I began working on mixing The King's Lute yesterday.

It's about five minutes long (long for a song, I know, but it tells a lot of story) and is arranged with a countermelody on the octave mandolin.

Now I've been practicing this one for a while, and can play it pretty well.  But five minutes is a long time to play without making a single mistake, at least for me.  And the last time I was recording, It was not possible to splice a guitar track, because the instrument has so much sustain there were no silent spots to cut, and cutting at a spot with noise pretty much can't help but introduce a discontinuity in amplitude (loudness) or (I think) phase (where a wave is in its cycle) that makes an audible bump sound in the spliced track.

I played the counter melody four separate times.  Once, one time, I managed to play it perfectly from start to finish.  (Well, okay, not *perfectly*, but perfectly in the sense of no wrong notes or thumpy notes and nothing much in the way of off rhythm notes or buzzes.)

And, goddamn it, in the middle of that track where I played it perfectly there is a bit of noise.  It almost sounds like me breathing on the mic, but I doubt it can be that, because I'm miking the octave mando from about three feet away (at that point the different frequencies that spray out different sides of the instrument have all mixed together, and small changes in my position don't change the sound much, which is important for consistent takes because to start and stop recording I have to turn around and kneel down to get at the laptop under the table, and when I stand up again it isn't always at exactly the same place and facing exactly the same way.)  And I don't think I *could* breathe on the mic from that far away.  I suppose it's some random noise from the rest of the building.

But playing for twenty minutes is a lot of playing and I was running out of time and focus, so I thought "Reaper is very capable; maybe there is a way to splice now."

And it turns out it can.  You pick "split at prior zero crossing" rather than "split at cursor" for all the splits and it works. 

So I spent two hours first splicing in that same note from one of the other takes, then going after all the "smidge off rhythm" imperfections in that "perfect" track*.  And I'm not finished.

But, hey, you can splice guitar / octave mandolin tracks now!
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* I'm told if you line everything up too perfectly it sounds mechanical.  But I can take 50 milliseconds off and change it to 20 milliseconds off and it sounds fine to me.

Comments

[laughingrat]

That's incredibly cool! It's pretty amazing that it can do that. My little rat brain was trying to solve the problem as I read, you know, "Can she sort of have two tracks going at once and fade one down as she fades the other up?" but of course that, while having a certain logical appeal, is most likely RONG. ;)

Not Wrong--Best Previous Solution

[catsittingstill]

Actually, no, the technique you're talking about is precisely how this sort of thing was handled in the past. I think it's called a crossfade. We used it on one track on one of my old CDs to sleight-of-hand switch a steel string guitar (which my musical partner very much wanted on the track for sentimental reasons) playing in the intro, to a nylon strung guitar (which was better in tune for singing to) on the body of the song.

But it was never quite perfect. This new capability is better.