Originally Posted by eddie1261
I think EVERY band has songs that didn't quite make the cut, no what level of "long forgotten" band they are. The difference would be who cares about an old demo by some one hit wonder band and who doesn't. I mean, if the song wasn't good enough to be on an album THEN, the song itself didn't get better with age, right?
That's my thought as well. I remember the complaint when Beatles albums were being released with additional material was that's exactly why the material wasn't released in the first place. There was the concern that releasing sub-standard material would diminish the existing output.

But sentiment is a strong driver.

The great thing is that this sort of technology is available to right now for us to apply to our own productions.

For example, over a decade ago I was in a church choir. There was a change in pastors, and for reasons we were being shown the door after 15 years.

I recorded the last two rehearsals, and decided to create a collection of "finished" songs, as we'd never really recorded ourselves before.

There were obvious problems I encountered. First, was that I only had mono tracks of the choir. The vocals weren't balanced, people were off-key, and there were flubs. This was, after all, a rehearsal.

Second, the tracks weren't done to a consistent beat, which meant tracks didn't align.

An third, what the piano and guitar played on one version of the song didn't always match with a different take, and would sometimes clash when layered.

I used BiaB to create the backing tracks, and time stretching the rehearsal tracks to fit. The results were... almost passable. It was a recording of a rehearsal, after all. But it was nice to have something to give to the choir.

I also re-recorded one song at the choir director's house, trying to fill in missing parts. But those were also not done to a click track, and each track had a piano on it, which made layering impossible.

Back in June, I was cleaning up my hard drive, and the tracks again. I used Spleeter to remove the piano so I had bare vocal stems and built a full track from all the parts.

The result wasn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it was nice to finally be able to use those tracks as intended. If Melodyne was capable of pitch-correcting vocals, it would have been a lot nicer.

rayc posted a song the other week. The vocals had been recorded with a huge amount of hiss on them. I was able to use Waves Clarity VX and was able to completely de-noise the vocal.

It's really amazing technology, even if only to clean up some poorly recorded songs that no one but us wants to hear. wink

-- David Cuny

My virtual singer development blog
Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?

BiaB 2025 | Windows 11 | Reaper | Way too many VSTis.