processing music to sound like it's coming out of an interior cars stereo?

[Chris Sweet]

Anyone done this in post or have any suggestions? Got the levels changing according to distance and when the door opens/closes, but if there's a way to give it a tinny feel to it, like it's coming thru low consumer grade car speakers that be awesome.

Any suggestions would be appreciated huge!

thanks

[Dan Brockett]

Hi Chris:

After a few years of running an audio post business, we found that for soundtrack ambience issues like this, nothing beats the real deal. Grab your portable audio recorder, a mic and or your camera, make a CD of the music and play it out a real car stereo and record it. The best you are going to do in post is with EQs and perhaps levels and compression. It will never sound as good as the real thing.

This is what they do on features, they generally wouldn't try to fake this in post unless a fake sound was accpeptable. Sci-fi futuristic scene, probably okay to fake it. Real scene that is supposed to sound real, I would field Foley it. I've done the same when recording music that is "supposed to be heard from the other room", really doing it works best.

Dan

[Jon Fairhurst]

Of course, the real deal isn't always what you want. One example is recording dialog in a bathroom. Yes, it might be the way it really sounds, but sometimes the audience wants "better than real".

That said, a car stereo sound (without critical dialog) should work well. If there's critical dialog among other sounds, I'd consider mixing it on top of the real thing.

[Dan Brockett]

Good observation Jon. I am working on a show right now with a lot of gun sounds. Those are a good example, real guns, recorded on a typical HD camera, sound terrible, not real at all, we are dubbing about half of the gun sounds from my sound library. This is the kind of call where a good sound editor is worth their weight in gold, a lot of the time with sound design, it just comes down to taste. I love using totally unrelated sounds, manipulated and treated, to substitute for imaginary sounds like monsters, dinosaurs, etc.

I agree, real is good for ambient sound, usually, but only when the ambient environment sounds good. Jon's example, dialog in a tile bathroom would sound terrible. In the music recording business, this technique has evolved into re-miking, recording a musical passage dry, then playing it back through speakers or in a virtual environment to pickup the characteristics of a room or environment.

Dan

[Chris Sweet]

lol, thanks Dan. I was really thinking 'Portuguese' on this one. (the long route)
went into my garage and did it. (about 10% of the time it would have taken me to find 'car stereo vst' or filter it, eq it) etc.. haha