How do you get a consistence sound from different microphone recordings?

Majestic Mastermind

Majestic Mastermind

Eat, Sleep, Breathe MUSIC
For example, If I have 3 recordings of 3 different people on 3 different microphones...how do I get the 3 recordings to sound like they were recorded in the same room even though they were recording in different environments. I need these 3 recordings to blend seamlessly for video/film.

Is it as simple as applying noise cancellation or reverb on all 3 tracks?

Any help appreciated.
 
Last edited:
If you can hear three distinct rooms across the recordings, then the first step (unless rerecording is an option) would be to use EQ to try to cut out some frequencies that make the differences in the recordings noticeable. That may or may not be all that is necessary to reduce the differences between the recordings. Using reverb can also be helpful, but it likely won't fix the issue by itself. I'm not sure if noise cancellation will be of any help unless you are just trying to remove background noise from the recordings.

If you want, you can send the three recordings to me via private message and I'll either give you some specific suggestions or just do it for you (with an explanation of what I did, of course).
 
Majestic Mastermind said:
For example, If I have 3 recordings of 3 different people on 3 different microphones...how do I get the 3 recordings to sound like they were recorded in the same room even though they were recording in different environments. I need these 3 recordings to blend seamlessly for video/film.

Is it as simple as applying noise cancellation or reverb on all 3 tracks?

Any help appreciated.
Click to expand...

noise cancellation won't work all that well as the noise signature is not what you are trying to remove, you are trying to remove the reverb/room signature which without an impulse for the room is next to impossible

eq to cut out low end rumble and high end flutter would work to a degree but would also colour each recording further

- applying a telephone bandwidth filter extended an octave either side would probably be best
- i.e. instead of 300Hz-3300 Hz use 150Hz-6600Hz as the upper and lower limits of the filter
-- adjust the lower limit upwards a bit if there is still too much rumble, remembering that male voices have a fundamental between about 80Hz and 131Hz and female voices have a fundamental between 160Hz and 262Hz
-- adjust the upper limit up or down depending on the part of the room signature that exists either side of the given the freqs
- roll off at 18db/octave or 24db/octave

after eqing each vocal to get the flattest sound from each,

you might compress each vocal to bring them into the same range - you are trying to get them to be within the same dynamic range not the same level

you might then consider adding just a touch of reverb to put them all into the same space
 
I find that by adding a creative effect over all 3 brings them closer together. It'll be a trade off between changing the sound (which you may or may not like) and matching the sounds but suggest that by layering a smidgen of several effects will give a fairly transparent result eg (for all your audio) hi pass and lo pass the sounds, then eq them, send all to a single reverb buss in parallel and dial in enough reverb on each one to match up, then compress. You could try adding subtple distrortion effects to give them a unified flavour.

A good analogy of the above is that if you have 3 clips in colour which don't match, but convert them to black and white and add a speckled old distrortion effect they will match much better.

Hope that helps

D
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top