Some of you might be interested in this.
First experiment at recording direct from tone match, back to lap top at a gig.
I filmed it on my compact camera and mixed in some of the crowd audio with the tonematch track to add ambience Also restored the backing track to stereo…
Great way to capture a high quality live vocal or performance, that can then be matched to video taken on phones or cameras. Bruno Mars Cover
Could you tell me please ,how to do it? Thank you
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Hi.
I will try and explain the set up.
We were using VLC player to play the backing tracks via USB from the lap top to track 3&4 of the Tonematch and hence into the L1 and out to the audience. (you set this in the USB FROM PC menu in the Tonematch menus)
Tracks 3&4 were then being re- recorded back into the lap top (in mono) on the right channel.
The live vocal from track 1 being recorded on to the same track on the left channel.
We used the free Audacity recording software for the recording part of the experiment.
You must set Audacity to record at 48kz so you can record in stereo. There is a detailed article on using Audacity on the forum, if you perform a search for it.
Remember to set Audacity NOT to use the Bose speakers for playback and not to play back other tracks while recording new ones too.
You can go into the settings and turn off playback and set recording options. You are only using Audacity to record. You don’t really need it playing back through the lap top speakers either.
We did a quick test recording indoors before recording at the gig, just to make sure everything was working properly. We set up and saved a scene on the Tonematch called USB recording.
What we did, was go into the menu and set the Tonematch USB to PC to record track 1 (vocal) to USB to PC left and tracks 3&4 (backing track )to USB to PC right
I think the default record options for Tonematch to PC is master out right and left after effects.
You can also choose pre or post effects on the track you are sending to the USB to PC.
We chose pre-effects and fader, as we wanted the dry vocal with no effects on it and the full level without it being affected by fader movements.
Having set it up, we just let it run for the whole gig and recorded 32 songs 17 songs in the first half and 15 in the second.
We stopped Audacity recording during the break, so what we ended up with was two stereo tracks in Audacity, one 18 songs long and one 15 songs long.
During the gig, I videoed a couple of songs on my compact camera, which obviously has a poor quality mic, so that I could try my audio matching experiment.
The next step is to match the video to the Tonematch recordings.
In Audacity I split the stereo track into left and right separate tracks. You will find, when you have done this that when you listen the recordings back that the vocal is still over on the left of the split track and the music way over on the right.
You fix this by using the drop down menu on the Audacity track to change the tracks from left and right to mono.
This will set the vocal bang in the middle and do the same for the music.
I then highlighted and selected the song and tracks I wanted (music and vocal now on separate mono tracks) and exported them as separate mono wav files.
The next step, is to use the music to match in the timing for the video footage taken on the compact camera.
I opened my video footage in my movie editing program. I use Serif MoviePlus. But I suppose most of them will do what you need.
I then exported just the mono audio from the footage (combined music and vocal) as a wav file also.
This I called camera audio and because it was taken from out amongst the audience it had a lot of the crowd and room ambience on it. The lap top Tonematch recording, would only have a slight amount of this, that might have bled through from the microphone.
Luckily enough my compact camera also captures audio at 48 kz, so it matched with the Tonematch recording, also at 48 kz.
Now I have three tracks
1. The mono camera audio which is matched to the video footage and has the room and audio ambience on it.
2.The dry seperate vocal from the tonematch.
3.The mono backing track from the tonematch which is matched to the dry vocal.
I then open these three tracks in my DAW (I use Samplitude Music Studio) and picking a noticeable beat or start point I align the three tracks together so they match. (you can zoom into the wave file to do this) Do not alter the start point of the camera audio while you do this, you need that to match with the video, when you put the final audio together.
When you have matched the tracks together accurately, you can then mute the track containing the Tonematch backing track and the dry vocal should then line up perfectly with the camera audio.
The dry vocal will sound great, the audio from your phone or compact camera won’t.
Now you can restore the backing track to stereo.
The backing track on the laptop was originally in stereo. Recording it through the Tonematch automatically reduces it to mono, because of how the Bose works.
I had a bit if trouble here, because my backing tracks were put on to the laptop at 320kbps, so I had to resample them on import to my DAW, so that they would match the 48kz files everything else was at. This seemed to work quite well but it is something you have to look out for when trying to match audio in different formats, even if they are of the same thing.
You then align the stereo backing track with the camera audio and it should hopefully still match with the video when you return to your movie program.
Now in my DAW I have 4 tracks
1. The dry vocal from the Tonematch
2. The mono audio backing track from the Tonematch
3. The combined audio and vocal from the camera containing crowd ambience
4. The original stereo backing track.
Now you can experiment with these any way you like to make your final mix.
For this example here. I muted track 2 and didn’t use it at all.
Added some reverb and compression to track 1 the dry vocal (a bit too much I think) but trying to be similar to what we use on the Tonematch anyhow
Mixed that to match with Track 4.
Finally I mixed in a bit of track 3 to lift the audience and room noise a bit.
I then exported my mix as a final track, opened up my movie program, which still had the video and mono audio of the camera in place.
I put the final mix on its own audio track and made sure it lined up OK with the video.
I then muted the original camera audio leaving only the mixed down track in place and exported the movie.
This is not the best job you could do with this idea. This was just my first experiment but I think it came out quite well and I didn’t spend much of time on it.
It is probably the nearest I’ve got so far to the actual sound of the L1 model 11 live through headphones, even though it is in stereo.
That sound dispersal and bass response of the Bose live, is really difficult to capture.
There are probably a few ways you could shorten or cut out a couple of the steps I took but hopefully it will help you in your own experiments.
Hi Andycamb,
Thank you for documenting this for us!
No problem ST
People using more live instruments could use this technique too, though they would have to have to have say guitar and vocal on say the left track and anything else on the right, as far as I know there is no way to separate all the tracks coming from the Tonematch on to it’s own individual tracks.
Those with multi tonematch and L1 setups could probably be a little more sophisticated…
It does give you a very high quality live vocal though.
I will post a couple more tracks when I have done them. Some don’t have any video to accompany them, so I will either just post a lyric video or make something up LOL
Hopefully it will be helpful to anyone else who wants to try this.
Here is another live vocal recording made with the Tonemtch via USB similar to the Bruno Mars cover above but this time I had no camera footage, so only had to restore the stereo.
Superb quality I thought…
Hi Andycamb: not seeing a link to your audio.
Cheers!
Brian
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Whoops forgot the link…
edit - fixed link
Last example I will put here. I will probably put a couple more on my You Tube channel in a Tonematch recording playlist when I get round to it.
This one is more of an acoustic sound than the other examples and shows I think what a superb quality vocal you capture from the Tonematch.
Again I didn’t video this, so made a lyric video to demonstrate it.
Hope you enjoy…
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