I am rather new to SpectraLayers 12 Pro and have a song I used the Unmix Song module on. I have exported the Guitar layer in stereo and imported it into Pro Tools. Overall the sound is distinctly guitars but it is pumping.
Can anyone guide me on what I should be doing to reduce or eliminate this?
were there drums in the original music before the unmix song procedure?
or whatever else was separated?
as I always say, SL unmix modules are a starting point; if it is possible to cleanly separate out a stem from whatever source, just running an umix module might get users half way to said users’ expectation. Just running a module is the gateway to many, many hours of manual editing in SL…and even after all those hours put in, will user arrive at their expectation? There are a lot of posts on this forum about this.
As @Phil_Pendlebury says in his SL videos, (at this stage in SL development) users “can achieve more of a “re-balancing” using SL unmix modules”; full separation for stems isn’t really there yet; at least not in my attempts.
Most likely the pumping is due to the guitars intentionally ducking other elements in the mix to reduce masking ie it’s a function of the original mix.
What is your goasl with the guitar part ie why have you unmixed it? If you just want to slightly change the volume or tone, you shouldnt need to do anything to the pumping.
If you unmixed the guitar because you dont like the pumping in the original mix, that’s a different problem. You could replicate the ducking then invert it to a boost instead of duck, then incorporate it back into the original mix. Fiddly for sure, but possible.
Video? Who said anything about a video?
I thought that having him record the screen might allow us to identify the cause within his actions. Is there any problem with that?
All,
My process is to take the original 2-Track I was given then run an “Unmix Song” and Export out each layer as Stereo Stems. I then run an “Unmix Drums” and do the same for each drum; export in Stereo. From there I Reformat the project to Mono and repeat everything again. I don’t need a stereo Hi-Hat as an example. All of this exports now give me options to import into Pro Tools where I process 80% with Analog Hardware.
The source files came to me as .m4a at 44.1k and when I import into Pro Tools I up-convert them to 96k.
Thanks for your help. Please let me know what else I can do?
I can attach a short audio clip. You’ll hear that it sounds like it is pumping or as if a Gate is opening and closing
Hi and thanks for the response. I’m still trying to get up to speed on SL and it was suggested to Unmix the Song then Unmix the Drums; Reformat for Mono. For the most part it works extremely well. I have half of an album done for a client. The pumping wasn’t noticeable on the original 2-track but as it was overly compressed and a bad mix this was my reason for getting SL
Did you do the original mix?
Unmixing doesnt automagically restore lost dynamics.
You must also use techniques as I described above to “undo” the pumping on affected stems, either with an inverted ducker or an expander (whichever best suits your needs)
You may get a better result by using an expander before unmixing - if the original compression is affecting eveything, other stems will also “pump” ie not only the guitar will be affected.
If you did the original mix, why cant you simply remix the song?
no problem at all…it’s just, op never wrote he screen recorded (afaiaa); so essentially you are asking him to screen record and jump thru the hoops to upload and share a link?
Hi,
No, I didn’t mix this at all. A client asked me to work on ten songs from the same sessions and he doesn’t have access to the original files anymore. I have been playing around with expanding but after the unmix function.
OK. For best results, you need to figure out if the pumping guitar was due to compression over the mix, over the over the guitar or ducking.
Ducking will affect the guitar part when another part (such as the vocal) needs the limeLlght. If it’s to benefit the vocal, the ducker is triggered by a side chain from the vocal, compressing the guitar when the vocal is above the ducking threshold.
So the pumping from ducking will sound different (and typically occur less often) to compression applied to the entire mix or the entire guitar track.
Can you visually spot the over-compressed segments by looking at the (zoomed in) waveform for the exported guitar? If you time align the exported guitar stem with the mixed track, you should be able to tell if the guitar is ducking by listening for the dominant element in the mix during the visually observed downward pumps.
The fix is pretty much the same for either scenario (variations of upwards or downwards expander), but the application of the fix is different due to the side chain in the detector when ducking. If ducking was used, the artifacts you want to correct will be in different places than unwanted artifacts from compression over the entire mix (or the entire guitar part).
Of course, it’s possible you are dealing with both, where the guitar was ducked, but was also over-compressed in the mix.
so wouldn’t it make the most sense to compress the loud parts to as close to quieter parts to attempt to find some evening out of that pumping?…this could take a fair bit of trial and error…I would have thought expanding would be more difficult to set
and obviously after the guitar was unmixed
certainly there will be bass and other instruments which didn’t get sidechained and might really stand out if expanding…I mean, those remnants would be the tricky thing to fix
I’m wondering if this is a side-effect of my sample rate of 96k?
only if additional compression of the guitar is your objective. If you want to restore the guitar to the state it was in before mixing, you’ll need to selectively expand.
Without hearing a sample of the mix and/or extracted guitar, it’s hard to diagnose, but almost certainly unrelated to sample rate. The underlying stem model likely runs at 22kHz, with SL upsampling/downsampling where necessary.