Is there a simple way to polish rough rehearsal recordings ?

Get that song on tape! Errr... disk?
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Flurko
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Is there a simple way to polish rough rehearsal recordings ?

Post by Flurko » Mon Jan 10, 2022 12:42 pm

My band is starting to look for gigs locally (if they don't disappear completely once again, of course) and I have uploaded what we use as rough recordings of our tracks to bandcamp to have everything neatly in one place.

We play in a small rehearsal room with very basic gear, and the recording setup is the simplest there is : my phone propped up on a spare guitar cab, in the corner farthest from the drums.

The sound is surprisingly usable for what we usually use it for, ie. referencing song parts and remembering them, no instrument is completely drowned in the other's noises, but I'm just wondering if there's a simple trick I can use to make it sound just so slightly better ? I have some basic audio software but I don't really know if anything can be done, I've only trimmed the songs and uploaded them as they came out of the phone.

our demo is here : https://catogan.bandcamp.com , if anybody knows if something can be done it would be greatly appreciated !

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seenoevil II
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Re: Is there a simple way to polish rough rehearsal recordings ?

Post by seenoevil II » Mon Jan 10, 2022 12:59 pm

Take an EQ, make a giant narrow Q boost in the 200-500 range, sweep up and down until the sound gets so muddy it's disgusting, at that frequency turn the boost into a 3-6 dB cut.

That will do a surprising amount. Repeat that same process with even tighter Q up in the 1k-3k range to weed out weird room reflections.

Your phone probably has auto gain microphones, but in your in GarageBand or logic, flip through the presets on the multipressor to squash it a bit.

Finally, put a limiter on with the max gain rolled back -.1 bB to prevent clipping.

Maybe a level meter too and shoot for -3 dB RMS.

It won't be perfect, but it will be a marked improvement.
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marqueemoon
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Re: Is there a simple way to polish rough rehearsal recordings ?

Post by marqueemoon » Mon Jan 10, 2022 3:48 pm

^Good suggestions.

To add to that, with a phone recording I recommended using a recording app that will let you capture your playing at high resolution with adjustable recording level so you can leave a lot of headroom.

I use Voice Record Pro for this. It will do 24/96 and the “share” option will e-mail you a link so you can download and unzip the bigger file.

Basically you don’t want to be having the app you’re using to be doing the squashing for you.

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