First listen
Levels appeared to be OK, but after listening to the material, I discovered a lot of white noise at about -22dB (remember the Data Projector). Luckily, it does not interfere with the music too much, but I will have to gate it out during quiet moments.
The vocalist (Jeni) has a very resonant voice, and when she puts an accent on a note, levels go quite high up. Because she was a bit to the left, one of the microphones was picking up more of her voice, and when she went loud, Marantz (which had a limiter on) limited only one channel for a while. This caused quite funny effect that the vocal is moving around when singing loud - this will have to be eliminated (probably with pan automation)
First corrections
To make the whole record sounding nicer, I put it through my beloved valve EQs and compressors.
Here is what I EQed:
- Low Frequency cut around 90Hz (mainly for noise).
- High Frequency Cut from around 11kHz (noise again).
- Low Shelf raised by a quarter of a knob turn from about 150Hz, to deepen the lute sound and make it sound 'closer'.
- Cut on band EQ at around 500Hz, Q sharpened just a bit - that's for too resonant vocal frequencies.
- High Shelf cut down a bit from 6kHz up, Q flattened slightly - this was to reinforce High Cut a bit.
EQ settings - pic 1
EQ settings - pic 2
I used compressors just to increase overall level. High threshold only allowed compression on really loud moments, and even there the compression ratio was quite low.
Compressor settings
After setting the valves up, I recorded the output into the new track.
Recording output from valves
To be honest, I don't really think that I will need to apply any more processing. I will have a second listen later and if it sounds fine, I will just do minor adjustments, fades and burn a CD.
