Adele recently shared an informal “laptop recording” of her song “To Be Loved” on her YouTube channel – and it’s great. A raw, authentic “real life” recording with a beautiful performance.
Unfortunately, her voice was simply too powerful for the mic on her laptop and as a result the louder moments of the song are absolutely bathed in distortion, which I think is a real shame.
I shared this comment on Facebook, and despite many people agreeing with me, I also got several comments from people saying they didn’t mind the distortion, they felt it was more real and authentic than a cleaned-up version.
I find it hard to agree with this, and started getting curious – would it even be possible to get a cleaner result from something as heavily distorted as this? So I started experimenting in iZotope RX, and got some quite impressive results. Still not completely clean, or even close – but a big improvement, to me at least.
In this video I show the techniques I used in RX to dramatically reduce the clipping distortion, but also wonder – is it even the right thing to do? More generally, where is the line in mastering between fixing and polishing, and retaining the artistic intent?
For me, the cleaner version of this audio still has all the power, authenticity and vulnerability of the original upload – without being distracted by the extreme distortion. Take a listen, and see which you prefer.
You can Listen to the original video here.
De-clipping Adele – was I wrong? is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice Subscribe to the newsletter for great content from the archives, special offers and a free interview - for more information, click here