I’ll walk you through the ins and outs of the remix from within Adobe Audition 3, and talk in-depth about the technical and musical challenges and steps to creating a remix.

You can watch through the embedded player below, or catch the full HD version at Vimeo.  Enjoy!

Timbaland Remix Walkthrough & Breakdown from Blair Trosper on Vimeo.

I’m to the stage where I’m finalizing the vocals and chord progressions, and I thought I would pull back the curtain and explain the process start to finish.  Enjoy the attached MP3 for an unusual take on re-tuning Trent’s vocals.

Okay, so.  Let’s talk about vocals for music.  And a little about vocals in general.  You radio production people (like I am) probably need to hear this.  If you’re one of these people that “hard limits” or otherwise drastically compresses vocals, please stop.  Otherwise, I’m going to have to start hunting you down and showing up at your studio to stop you.

People, I don’t have that kind of time.

When you hard limit or overly compress any audio, you ruin any potential for its dynamic range.  This is especially true of vocals.  A giant “square” peaking at -1 dBu isn’t going to be very expressive.  And it’s going to really piss off anyone who masters your audio.  What’s more, realize that your material — be it radio production or music — is going to be mastered again in the audio chain.  Mastering often purposefully removes dynamic range to maximize the loudness.  Anyone who’s listened to the radio knows what I’m talking about.  TV and CD’s, too.  Realize that when you over do it, your audio’s going to sound like hammered awfulness on the other side.

The key to compressing and processing vocals is in the subtlety.  If they’re not loud enough, bring down everything else in the mix.  Don’t just pump up the vocals.  I realize clipping in the 32-bit real is impossible, but still…dynamic range is your friend.

On the topic of loudness, let’s talk about standing waves.  Ever been somewhere and noticed that the audio had a ground hum?  That’s a standing wave that’s easy to detect, but what about when it’s in your audio you don’t even know it?

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve recorded vocals only to realize later than there’s a sub-audible hum in the audio.  Probably from the damn air conditioner or some outside noise.  Since the human ear can’t usefully determine loudness or direction of extremely low sounds, you may not even notice it’s there.  Similarly, you may not realize how loud it is, and how much of your sonic palette it’s stealing.

If there’s “junk” in your audio, it’s going to hold back how loud you can make the mix…and how clean it’s going to be.  It’s not uncommon to eliminate unnecessary noise, hums, and standing waves and be able to make that element 6 to 9 dBu louder overall.

Not only is this a good habit for details work like garbage, but it’s also a useful philosophy for mixing audio in general.  Does EVERY element in your mix need the FULL sonic range of 20 to 20,000?  Does that bass drum need to be using the high end?  Do your vocals need to be dipping down into the 50 hertz range and messing with your bass line?  Does the violin need to be hitting the subwoofer?

No, no, and no.

Get in the habit of notching, shelving, or equalizing your audio to account for this.  Budget the frequencies in your mix more.

There are number of ways to go about this.  The quickest way to get rid of standing waves in your audio is to use a scientific filter.  You want a “high pass” filter, which means that you designate a frequency (120 hertz in the example to the right), and everything AT or BELOW that threshold is increasingly more quiet as the frequency decreases.  You can change the slope of the shelf by adjusting the “order”.  The higher the order, the more steep the shelf.

For clean vocals in music, this is the exact preset I use.  Unless you’re using a booming voice guy like Lonnie Perkins, Chris Corley, or Don Lafontaine, shelf the crap out of vocals.

If you’re a little more technically savvy, you can play with the parametric equalizer in your DAW.  I’ve displayed a screen shot of Adobe Audition 2.0′s version to the left.  With more time and tweaking, you can make parametric equalization sound much better than a simple shelf.

Retreating into basics is common for beginning audio editors and engineers.  And when I say “basics” I mean “graphic equalizer”.  It’s a lot less cool, but you can still create an effective vocal shelf (shown at right).  On a long term basis, you’re much better off taking the time and learning to use the parametric EQ function in your DAW.  It’s much more precise, and it also forces you to think about your audio in frequency space terms.

If you take anything away from this…let it be to stop over-doing it with vocals.  Let the radio processing or your mastering engineer take care of that.  Preserve as much dynamic range and color in the original as you possibly can.