Man With His Guitar - Paul O'Brien

My Score Here

I've dabbled previously with music recording in Audacity, and composing in MuseScore, but if you're ever going to learn some serious Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) software, then the middle of a pandemic is a good place to start. So when last Christmas my employer, a manufacturer of computerised spectroscopes, found their Chinese order book collapsing, and started applying a LIFO protocol to HR, I found myself in the ideal position finally to scramble up the learning curves of Ableton Live and the Reason Studios (formerly Propellerhead) Reason Rack.

A Man, A Guitar...

Let me introduce you to my school friend Paul O'Brien, aka Man With His Guitar. Paul has been singing as a hobby ever since I've known him, stopping only for meal breaks and milkshakes, over the past 45+ years. Last May he started uploading covers to his own YouTube channel, soon to be followed by an increasing number of his own compositions. The format of these videos is as simple as the channel name implies: Paul and his handsome Fender guitar, sitting in front of his phone, singing a wee song.

Several factors in Paul's setup make him an ideal subject for a case study in learning music production. The most important one is that he can hold a note. I can't hold a note. Paul's talent in this area means there's always something worth preserving, enhancing, bringing out in one of his performances. Not only can he hold notes, he can let them resonate and inflect them with passion, vulnerability, irony, pathos, resignation - an impressive emotional spectrum.

Paul's choice of covers, and more importantly his own compositions, range from steady rockers to soft ballads. This gives the producer a good breadth of material to work with, trying to find the best opportunities to add subtleties in the service of the song, while remaining resolutely in the background.

Challenges?

Of course there must be challenges, else what's to produce? Paul's performance philosophy can be summed up as "one take, warts and all". Which I find must be respected. Vocal talent can be an extremely fragile gift, and whatever gets you into the zone, deserves to be treated as indispensable. So if I was to produce his recordings, my source material each time would be that one video performance recorded on his phone, vocals and guitar coming together simultaneously through effectively one (stereo) microphone.

Siri can be an interfering nuisance. I read last year about one techno DJ who found his recordings unexpectedly blank, because the ghostly AI in his phone had mistaken his music for road works in the street, and helpfully removed it from the conversation. Paul didn't quite disappear from his own videos, but it can't be productive to have such unknown levels of digital processing going on during your recordings. Added to that, Paul's soundtracks often included phone alarm and watch chimes, creaking furniture, a host of extraneous noises. One take, warts and all, indeed. The skill of pasting clips between parts of a song, to cover up a dinner gong, is quickly learned.

Timing

Something Paul adds to his work is an abundance of time variation. This takes many forms. Bars speed up and slow down, acquiring extra beats while a chord is hunted, a note is pecked, or a fingerpick inadvertently adds an extra digit. Emotional content contributes still more wow and flutter. Much of this is artistically valid, and in fact there have been times when I've had to give up trying to achieve any kind of synchronisation with the metronome, and just add instrumental parts playing along in variable tempo as if in live accompaniment. See Forever True below for an example of this.

Normally however, I'll start by warping the performance to first get the bars into a steady tempo, then if necessary, do the same for individual beats, strums or string picks. This makes it so much easier to add accompanying parts, such as drums, bass, guitars, piano, organ, strings, brass, woodwind - there are examples of all of these in the table below. And if necessary, automation can be used in the final stages of production, to re-apply any tempo variations felt artistically valid and vital.

Video

Originally I would rip the audio from the video file, then warp that bar-by-bar to obtain the first track. Both Ableton Live and Reason have excellent warping facilities, at once visual and incredibly easy to use. Once I'd added whatever additional instrument parts it called for, I'd have a candidate audio mix, which seemed to be the destination. Then one day I learned Ableton can work with video clips just as easily, and almost as comprehensively, as audio ones, and started about stitching the original video back on to the newly produced audio. After a few times working like this, I got to that "duh" moment where I realised it's possible to skip the audio rip stage altogether, and work directly with the source video file.

Note: with Ableton Live 10, video import and export was only available in the more expensive Standard and Suite editions. With the recent release of Live 11, it has now been added to the Intro edition too. Good times.

The Songs

Here is a list of the songs I've produced so far. For comparison, the originals are still available on Paul's own YouTube channel and Facebook page. Here I have only provided links to the final produced MP3 (audio) and MP4 (video) versions. Unless otherwise stated, these are Paul's own compositions, and his copyright.

March 2021

MP3 - MP4 - If You Could Read My Mind (Gordon Lightfoot cover)
MP3 - MP4 - You're My Soul Concern
MP3 - MP4 - Go Softly Into the Night
MP3 - MP4 - When I'm Gone
MP3 - MP4 - This Land
MP3 - MP4 - Forever True
MP3 - MP4 - It Has To Be Tonight
MP3 - MP4 - Case Full of Broken Dreams

April 2021

MP3 - MP4 - Forever Young (Bob Dylan cover)
MP3 - MP4 - Too Much To Say
MP3 - MP4 - Tomorrow Belongs to Yesterday 

MP3 - MP4 - Hurt (Trent Reznor / Johnny Cash cover)

MP3 - MP4 - Keep A Light On In Your Heart

MP3 - MP4 - This Road I'm On 

MP3 - MP4 - Wash Away This Pain 

MP3 - MP4 - Union Card 

MP3 - MP4 - Midnight Sky Of Blue

MP3 - MP4 - Stations Of The Cross

In Future

I've literally lost count of the number of times Paul has asked me to boost the vocals, which given the above setup, is of course almost impossible without simultaneously boosting his guitar. Not entirely impossible mind you, some gains can be made with filtering (pun intended), but it's certainly difficult and - at least on my budget - unsatisfactory (there are AI megabuck solutions offering stunning results). I think I might have talked him into giving me a secondary audio source by plugging a condenser mic and his semi-acoustic guitar into the left and right channels of a PC audio interface, and recording these into Audacity at the same time as doing his existing phone camera capture. It's still far from ideal; there will be crosstalk, particularly acoustic guitar pickup in the condenser mic, if not vice-versa; but it should be a great improvement on what we currently have.

Now, this will obviously involve more work, and seems to signal a return to the process of working with ripped audio and re-stitching with the video component at the end. This will be even more significant should I decide to use the phone audio as an additional source for its ambience, since there will be ample opportunity to introduce unwanted phasing and echo effects - the trick will be to stitch so carefully as to keep only the wanted ones. Will report back here as soon as results are available for examination.

Update (5 Apr 2021)

Success! Voice in the left channel, guitar in the centre-right, which is just about as good a separation as I was hoping for, well done us.

Stitching the warped AV components together has indeed turned out to be rather more difficult and time consuming than before, since the software couples to different sets of transients across the audio sources, due to ambience differences, microphone positions, etc. However the results are well worth the extra effort on both our parts, being at times almost as good as a full, two-take double tracking of the vocals, as well as a three-mic guitar setup - acoustic pickup, phone mic, and leakage through the cardioid condenser mic, contributing three distinct audio sources for the guitar. And when it becomes too difficult to match transients, there's always the option of dropping the audio component of the video down to a faint echo, or muting it completely.