Working with a clean, dry voice recording is a luxury that the mixer doesn’t always have. Whether on dialogue or vocals in a music mix, it’s possible to salvage soupy voices when you have the right tool.
Noise And Reverberation
It’s easy to take being able to record the human voice for granted. The gear available to the engineer is now so good that we needn’t even worry about setting the recording level in some cases. Certainly, the gear is not the weakest link in ninety-nine percent of cases, and operational error aside, most problems regarding noise or unwanted ambience are entirely environmental. Less than ideal surroundings for the musician can invite fan noise or poor acoustics onto the recording, while location voices can suffer similar problems often dictated by factors outside of the recordist’s control.
Closer Makes Better
Whether it’s noise or over-ambient pickup that’s spoiling the party, there is one single low tech solution that still triumphs over anything else; working distance. It stands to reason that working closer will dry up a recording, but what newer engineers and recordists may not realise is that the benefits increase exponentially the closer the working distance is. Conversely, being able to get a bit closer when working generally further away will probably make less of a noticeable difference. There are various factors at play here, but understanding the critical distance at which reverberation takes over in a given environment will help a lot.
Mix Fixes
Addressing these problems in the mix is far from ideal using conventional techniques, as anyone who has tried to use an expander to ‘fix’ reverb will tell you. The musician has the luxury of re-taking their vocal when noise strikes, or spending time optimising mic position, but this isn’t possible for everyone working in less than ideal conditions. Replacing dialogue for film and TV mixes is the time-honoured technique of improving quality, but increasingly mixers working in any industry find themselves with an ever-expanding arsenal of smart drying-up tools to bring us closer to the action.
Zynaptiq UNVEIL
German developers Zynaptiq describe UNVEIL as a de-reverberation and signal focussing tool. This makes it invaluable for mixers who need to dry up over-ambience in a recording, be that an individual track or whole mix. The plugin works in real time, and can also be used to modify the characteristics of the ambience as well as reduce it overall. Zynaptiq add that: “UNVEIL is designed to leave discrete echoes untouched. Feedback delay is often a relevant part of a composition, and should thus be considered as part of the signal rather than as reverb.” Uses cases for UNVEIL include:
Audio engineers can attenuate reverb in recordings
Film mixers and dialog editors can remove reverb from dialog and location sound
Music producers can turn vintage drum-loops rich in reverb into dry recordings, and vice-versa
Foley artists can remove ambience from sub-optimally captured sounds
Mix and mastering engineers can bring key mix elements into focus by attenuating components commonly referred to as "mud"
In our video below you can hear UNVEIL for yourself on dialogue that would have been unusable without.
A New Way
Being able to manipulate ambience used to be science-fiction. Using a powerful, smart, de-reverberation tool really can salvage or manipulate the reverberation characteristics in a meaningful way leaving many mixers wondering how they ever managed without them.