Logic Pro 9 Aligning Acoustic Guitar Tracks

[Andre Favreau]

Hi everyone,

I recorded my Acoustic Guitar using 3 mic and a DI on four different tracks. Each track has about 8 takes. If I want to adjust the phase once recorded by aligning my four tracks, which technic would you recommend?

Should I only align my comp folder to the nearest tick?
Or is it possible (or even worth it) to align them to the sample?

Thanks for your help

 

[Andre Favreau]

Any help would be appreciated...

 

[bambony]

Firstly simply time aligning to compensate for phase incoherency is not a perfect solution. Check first (if indeed there are issues) by inverting the phase (this is more correctly called changing/inverting polarity) and comparing 2 tracks at time. Find the best relationship between the 4 tracks. Hopefully this is all you will need to do with careful balancing.

I would actually be inclined to find the best sounding mic and work with this and see which other of the tracks actually improves the sound. You might find that fewer tracks actually sounds better than all 4 if they are working against each other.

Then I would look at time aligning. The DI would certainly be the track that would need most delay and this might well work well once time aligned. The best way to do this is to invert the state of phase of 2 tracks and align until it sounds the worst (i.e with most cancellation) and then revert the phase to its previous state.

This is all pretty confusing stuff and takes a lot of understanding so make sure you work on a back up of the original file to get your head round the options...

If everything fails just use the best sounding mic....

In the future my view is that you should try to work on the sound in the first instance and get the phase as optimal as possible by mic positioning.

HTH

Tony

 

[bayswater]

I agree that the best sounding of the four is likely to sound as good or better than a mix of the four. But if you need to phase align these tracks there are a lot of plugins that do it, some automatically. Google can find them. Or you can do it by brute force with a simple delay plugin like AUDelay, and zoom into the wave forms and adjust accordingly.

 

[madelefant]

Are you mixing takes? If you are working with one take of all mics then it is useful but if hou mix takes almost impossible. Were the mics in the exact same positions for each take? if so you can do calculations and work out phase adjustments by the distance from the source and each other.