ghosts in the machine

[Oldrottenhead]

 the following song https://songcrafters.org/community/index.php?topic=19860.0 (and this is not a shameless bump) has sounds on it that i never played. i had my old £10 guitar tuned to dadgad and was playing two fingered chords, so there was always 4 open strings being strummed.

at the parts where i sing and where we'll go nobody knows etc, it sounds like there is a violin or viola or cello playing in the background.

i am delighted at this but a bit perplexed as i have no idea how it occurred or how to reproduce it. i recorded the guitar through my micro br's onboard mono mic. to two tracks panned full left and right using the fornylon setting with noise suppression and tap delay turned on to give it a faux stereo sound. i think i might have ramped up the reverb too.

could anyone enlighten me.

[AndyR]

It's weird - I get this sort of thing happening all the time (hearing stuff that I didn't put on there), but I couldn't actually hear these violins you can when you mentioned it before...

Makes me wonder whether, when I hear "extra stuff" in mine, that I'm possibly worrying about it too much

Anyway, recording's all about creating the impression of something. Recordings aren't "real", if that makes sense... we use reverbs and EQ to create impressions of distance and size, you can sometimes make an instrument sound a bit like another. We do stuff like that deliberately all the time.

And then occasionally, the sounds we have on there can combine to suggest something else that isn't really there. I think it's related to something called "masking", where the other sounds in the mix conspire to conceal something you have recorded but can't hear... I think it's also used to describe the situation when you can hear something that isn't actually recorded.

Most of the time, when I get it happening, I'm trying to isolate it and get rid of it! This is because I've noticed it as something distracting - I'll hear a drum hit that isn't there, mebbe, and it eventually turns out it's a combination of one of the backing vox and a guitar part interacting to create a percussive sound very like the snare sound I'm using. That sort of thing. If I spot it before I've finished the mix, usually a tiny tweak in EQ, volume, or panning will get rid of it. One of my songs (I think it's Baby Has A Good Time Anyway), has a drum hit that I could never isolate and get rid of (and there's no drums on the thing in the first place), so I gave up and left it in... I think I even experimented with exaggerating it to make it sound like it was intentional - I was never happy with it though...

But when it creates harmonic stuff like what you're getting here, I tend not to worry so much (unless I'm after a specific "I want it to sound like X, not Y!!!"), if it sounds cute, I tend to accept it as a freebie and go with it...

If you're wondering "hey that's cool! How do I do it again?!?" - I'm not sure it's worth chasing. This is just my attitude towards it, but they seem to be artifacts that just appear sometimes but won't be easily repeatable... So, if you want the impression of strings next time, it'll be easier to stick a string pad on real low beside the guitars!

As to why it happened here... when you mentioned it before, I went back to listen again, and couldn't really hear what you were describing as violin... what I could hear was the resonance of the strings in the open tuning. Possibly the "beats" caused by the notes ringing (notes not quite in tune with each other cause something called "beats", a pulsing sort of effect), possibly these beats are suggesting vibrato to you and your brain puts "violins" there, and you can hear actual separate notes played on bowed instruments?

However it's happened, and whatever each of us is "thinking" when we hear it, it's a cool sound!

[64Guitars]

Do you hear the same "violins" when you listen to your tracks on the Micro BR as you do when you listen to the MP3? If you do, then it's probably what Andy said above. If not, then it's probably an artifact of MP3 encoding. These artifacts are a result of lossy data compression and typically show up as ringing, pre-echo, "birdie artifacts", drop-outs, rattling, warbling, metallic ringing, an underwater feeling, hissing, or "graininess". I suspect that you may be interpreting one or more of these artifacts as violins. The higher the data compression, the more noticeable the artifacts will be. That's one of the reasons why you should never MP3-encode the same file more than once. Each time you encode the file, more lossy data compression takes place. To avoid this, you should always export your song from the BR in WAV format and do all of your editing and post-processing in WAV format. Only after the song is completely done, should you encode it to MP3 format for posting, using the highest bitrate possible that results in the desired file size.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_artifact#Audio

[Oldrottenhead]

does no one else hear the violins?

[Hilary]

I heard more of a cello sound - like a constant drone of the low E string. Resonance can do some funny things - in my daughter's bedroom, with me singing a certain range, I can make her radiator ring a high note. I used to sing 4-part harmony and we used to try and lock the vocals (if we got it right) it would ring another harmonic note.

[Oldrottenhead]

that's it cellos!!

[Hilary]

I definitely heard it Jim, your sanity is safe . . . 

[Oldrottenhead]

phew!!

[IanR]

I heard it too but I think it is the normal sound of an acoustic.  Especially when you have open strings droning and mixing themselves with the notes from the strings you are "fretting".  The sound gets mixed up in the body of the guitar and creates all sorts of nice resonances.  You may have got yourself a bargain with your 10 quid!

I have a similar thing happen when  I play an open Am on my acoustic.  It sounds like a guitar orchestra has kicked in to accompany me just for that chord.

I'll try to remember to record this as an example.  It may not come through in a recording - but let's see!

Ian

[AndyR]

I definitely heard it Jim, your sanity is safe . . . 

Nah! Doubt yer sanity, we do!!

I could hear something, I wouldn't have called it violins or cellos myself, so I wasn't completely sure what I could hear was what you were pointing out.... but I'm fairly certain now.

IanR is describing quite well what I could hear and what I thought it was when I first listened - the sound of an open-tuned guitar with some open strings ringing, and the effects that can cause.

It definitely felt like a pleasant sound to me... but I could be deafer than I realise!