Adding song in high fidelity keeping audience in

bill-kranz wrote on 7/11/2012, 2:39 PM

At our theatre we sometimes perform to recorded music (from a boombox) and also use our props to help re-enact the song’s lyrics. Plus we have good audience interactions that we vocally play off of also. However we are not in a state of the art music hall while performing so the video playback at 24 bit from a Canon IS20 XS leaves a bit to be desired with the music aspect.
Anyway I was thinking of adding a second audio track that would have the song portion in high fidelity and drop all the live recording sound levels to say 70 percent so that some of the live audience feeling is kept.
Is this a result that someone may have tried and if so what pointers do you have about such a method?
Or, is there way to isolate out the music only and put in it’s place a higher quality studio recording?

Your advice appreciated,
Bill

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 7/13/2012, 7:02 AM

Once the audio is mixed together there's no unmixing it. So if you want to keep the audience sound then you will have some of the performance music too. No way to get around that.

Probably the closest i've come was recording a live performance both with the on camera mic (with all the room ambiance) and a direct feed from the performers' mics (with almost no room ambiance). I was able to sync them together and use about half of each. This reproduced the music clearly while still giving the feeling of being in the hall.

bill-kranz wrote on 7/13/2012, 9:03 AM

Chienworks: Hello and thanks for your reply. I like what you say about getting a direct feed from say my DVD deck which will be easier for me to do with my new Tascam D40 I am integrating into our recording efforts.

I have also read of audio software that can select the kilohertz range that represents the "audience" and can dial that back on the software side of things.

One of the brain waves I had, since I don't have a good audio suite, is to perfectly match up the high def song import right under the song recorded live from the boombox. Then, dial down all volume levels from that audio track song section only so that there would still be some audience responce still present. It's kinda tricky to do, need good ears, but I tried it earlier with a overlay from the Tascam and it seems to work in it's own way.

Will post more later about this result.

Thanks,
Bill

Chienworks wrote on 7/13/2012, 11:37 AM

You already have software that can select the "kilohertz range". It's called Vegas. What you're describing is Graphic EQ which already exists in almost all audio software.

There's problem though. The range of the music being performed is probably from 0.3KHz to 17Khz, and the range of the audience response is probably 0.6KHz to 13KHz. Notice the nearly complete overlap? Reducing the audience range will also drastically reduce and affect the music.

If you have the original music on media that you can play in your DVD deck then there's no need to record it again. Just rip the material from the disc with Vegas and place the audio portion on the timeline.

bill-kranz wrote on 7/14/2012, 10:23 AM

Thanks for letting me know about that. I have not had to explore much with the audio
part of Vegas Pro.

We are trying not to have the song by itself as it will break the live performance feel.

We might do it both ways however for different audiences.

Thanks,
Bill