Reply To: Binaural tracks and blending into stereo mix

March 29, 2023 at 8:57 pm #5613
Tom Powers
Participant

    Well Bob, here’s what I’ve found.

    If you apply that EQ graph above to a binaural recording, you can play it through loudspeakers and it sounds like a regular track, but as I feared, you lose the binaural effect when on headphones.

    What I’ve found so far is that if you have a stereo mix and you’ve delayed, EQ’d, and panned  duplicate tracks with precedence effect in mind, then when you add the binaural “reamp” track that I explained above, that the stereo mix gets real bright and brittle. When you listen on headphones, it sounds great.

    So I experimented….dealing with 2 guitar parts, one on the left and one on the right (and the binaural re-amped tracks of them)

    First I took the regular stereo mix guitar tracks out and left the binaural tracks in the mix. Result:  The headphones sounded great, but the stereo mix was thin and brittle

    I verified that if I put the EQ setting on the Binaural re-amp tracks, that the headphone effect pretty much dies off but the stereo mix was fine.

    So then I tried to balance the binaural tracks (without the EQ setting) with the stereo tracks and blend them, and that sort of worked? The Binaural effect wasn’t as prominent, but it was there….just not to the effect I wanted, and the stereo loudspeaker listening was good because the brightness was removed.

    So … the last, and most promising result, was based on this premise:

    The binaural reamped tracks , when blended with the stereo tracks were all being sent to the same guitar bus ( one for each guitar). As previously stated, the stereo track was too bright but the headphones sounded great.

    I then decided that if I left the binaural tracks alone, and used the above EQ settings on the Stereo tracks…the end result is a good sounding stereo mix on the speakers (because the mid-high frequencies were cut on 2 of the 4 guitar tracks going to the guitar bus)…but to my surprise, the binaural effect was still very prominent in the headphones and “leftover” frequencies after the EQ settings on the stereo tracks, really didn’t bother the headphone mix.

    More to come as I and to try a few other things…like what does it sound like if I record the Binaural “reamped” tracks lower than ear level, and then blend that it…will it sound like the guitar is physically higher ?  What would it sound like if I made one reamp track below the speakers and one above and blend them into the stereo tracks…will I get a “wall of sound?”

    Of course, much of this experimentation results in trash, but some of this is actually working out…so more to come.

    I’ll definitely check out the process by Andrew Mayo…thanks!