Here is another community tip, this time from Anthony Dominello, aka ‘The Proposal Guy’. You may remember that Anthony proposed to his girlfriend back in Podcast 80 and she said yes. Anyway back to the tip Anthony has sent in….
I had an experience that maybe others have had, but it was the result of a desperation move for me. I recently cleaned and edited an interview for a podcast I do the mixing on. After removing a considerable amount of background noise and ambient reverb from the interviewee’s side, his voice was clean but sounded quite muffled. I spent quite some time playing with various settings to fix this during the cleanup process, but to no avail. I’m not primarily an audio post guy so maybe someone more experienced wouldn’t have had this issue, but I did. After the cleanup EQ wasn’t working to fix the issue since it’s obviously impossible to boost something that isn’t there.
In desperation, I put a harmonic exciter on to upper end of the interviewee’s voice and to my surprise it worked. The interview itself was recorded over Skype at 16kHz sampling rate, so the quality wasn’t fantastic to begin with, but the slight bit of excitement had the same effect it would have had in a song and brought the interviewee’s voice out so it didn’t have to be pushed so hard in the mix to be understandable. I hope this helps someone, and thanks for all your great work and help!
Mike says - Yes that is a trick I had forgotten about, I have used it in the past and it is great for adding top end where there isn’t any because the exciter creates new harmonics based on existing content lower down in the frequency range. As Anthony found EQ doesn’t work because there isn’t anything to boost.