Doctoring up an isolated version of Pearl Jam's "Black"

2014-11-20 22:40:59

Because of the band's refusal to release the track as a single and modern mastering standards, the most dynamic version of Pearl Jam's "Black" is from the original "Ten" album. In it, it is significantly intermixed with the preceding track of the album, and that is not very conducive to DJ use. The track comes isolated on a greatest hits album, "Rearviewmirror", but comes remixed in addition to being remastered, and the intro guitar doesn't use the same effects as the original album version.

So I tried to recreate the effects used in the original on the remix, so I can utilize the doctored audio for the original track's overlapped portion. While I've gotten the spectrums pretty close, I'm missing something; it's still off. I know I'm missing reverb, but I'm trying to get the sound right first, obviously.

First few seconds of original
First few seconds of remix
First few seconds of doctor attempt of remix

Any thoughts or suggestions on what I'm missing here?

Doctoring up an isolated version of Pearl Jam's "Black"

Reply #1 – 2014-11-21 13:58:58

You've got the spectrum quite close.

Listen on headphones or earbuds.

The Black2 versions both have the guitar faded pretty hard to the one channel, whereas Black 1 has a sort of centre-panned guitar with spatialized stereo sound with a lot of ambient reflected/delayed signals adding to the sense of the space or room sound - that the sound envelops you. In fact, the spatial effects often make it seem like there's a different, perhaps brighter frequency response because of the 'sparkle' added by the reflected sound.

If you get it to sound about right, I'd suggest slowly mix-fading from one track to the other to prevent any variation in sound from appearing sudden.

Doctoring up an isolated version of Pearl Jam's "Black"

Reply #2 – 2014-11-21 14:41:30

By the way, if you tell us what software you're using we might be able to suggest suitable "Room Modelling" effects (even Cool Edit 96 was quite good for this) or simpler delay-attenuate-invert stereo processes (there are some Nyquist routines for Audacity I've tried and modified casually) or perhaps some VST plugins, that you might be able to play with to adjust the position of the main stereo image and the 'wetness' of the room (relative strength of successive delayed reflections).

That may provide all the reverberation you need at the same time as sorting out the stereo image.

I think you might be as surprised as I was the first time I tried it, how feelings of clarity you might normally associate with high treble boost EQ in the frequency response can appear almost magically when convolving the signal with a series of attenuated stereo bounces repeated every 25-75 ms or so. I've even found that some mono tracks (non music in both) that I converted to stereo and applied such an effect to, just seemed to have a lot more sparkle or 'fizz in the air' and an illusion of higher fidelity and better 'atmosphere' even though the resulting files had essentially identical spectrograms and a frequency response still hard capped at the Nyquist limit. Also, some stereo music cassette transfers had an added sheen of 'atmosphere' and sounded more "produced", especially on headphones, than the plain Dolby B transfers sounded without applying the fairly subtle stereo effect.

I guess it's much like what acousiticians describe as the difference between a "dead" room and a "live" room. A few controlled first-reflections that cause little to no comb filtering make the room sound a lot brighter and livelier. Probably someone like Ethan Winer would be able to comment on this from years of experience.

By the way, it's possible that the guitar sound is in part the result of comb-filtering effects from a particular kind of stereo reverb, though it sounds to me like you got the broad spectrum pretty well matched.

Doctoring up an isolated version of Pearl Jam's "Black"

Reply #3 – 2014-11-29 04:17:22

Thanks for the response; I was subscribed and I didn't see this come in.

Anyways, I was aware of the differences in stereo effects but didn't think that would influence how it was heard, relatively speaking, and thus was going to handle that later in the chain. But based on what you're saying that's what might be what I say I'm missing. So I'll give it a go at some stereo reverb and see what happens.

I am using Audition CS6.