I’ve been remastering some of the old songs that I wrote and recorded in the early ‘80’s. They were recorded on a Tascam 4 track cassette, and there was a lot of combining or “bouncing” of tracks in order to come up with songs that had from 6 to 10 tracks on them.

The songs are all stereo wma or wave files, so I can’t do any mixing on them, I can only do some mastering.

This is one of those songs. This has 2 acoustic guitars, electric bass and vocals. One acoustic guitar is in standard tuning, ......... the other is in dropped "D" tuning.

I was asked a question a few days ago by a fellow PG’er, that was a very good question indeed. It was, “Why don’t you record these songs over using BIAB, RealTracks and/or RealBand?”

At first, I took offense to this question. But contrary to my usual reactions, I paused and gave it some thought. At least 25 or 30 perfectly legitimate answers came to mind. (Okay, …………… maybe only 15 or 20!).

Fortunately for all of us, I’m only going to post two. The second is the most important.

1. For me, BIAB and the associated tools are for practice and/or backup. They’re easily the best tools I’ve came across in 40 years or so of playing, …… for any musician, regardless of style. And they keep getting better. I recommend them to every musician I have the opportunity to. But it’s not what I would use to record, at least for the instruments I play. I would rather record these instruments myself because that’s part of what makes the song “mine”. Also, a lot of these songs would be pretty hard to find a suitable style for. This is one of those songs.

2. Considering that I have a “backlog” of 40 or 50 songs I’ve written since then that I’d like to record, most of these old songs would be pretty far down the list of ones I’d work on whenever I do start recording again. I’m just trying to clean these up for “posterity” while I’m motivated to do so and I thought I’d post a few.

I’m not sure what to call this style, but here is “Village Dream”. Comments are welcome.

http://soundcloud.com/bobcflatpicke/village-dream

Sounds good, considering it was taken from cassette overdubs and digitized.

And you Mastered it yourself.

As for the performance, Strong Performance.

Sounds like a CSN&Y tune, back in the day, they might have bought it.


--Mac

Bob, sounds pretty good. Did you do a band-reject filter down in the 200 Hz region? It somewhat sounds like it compared to the original - the vocals aren't as 'thick' as the original. The guitar solo at 1:30 cuts through pretty nicely.

-Scott

Scott,

Quote:

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Did you do a band-reject filter down in the 200 Hz region?

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I can't "reject" the band! Shucks, I am the band!

On a more serious note, I only used Sonar 4 PE. I started out with Cakewalk Fx 8 band EQ and tried a few presets. I didn't like those, so I created a "custom" preset and then tweaked it from there.

Then I added the Sonitus Compressor and settled on a Vintage dbx165 preset.

I then went back to the EQ and tweaked it some more. I used the "volume trim" to try to get it around -6db overall, and kept trimming until nothing peaked above -1.5db.

I experimented with some reverb, and finally decided not to add any, since I used a hardware reverb in the original mix.

I know that you had the original wma, and I appreciate you leaving some feedback because you heard the "before" and "after".

Overall, I'm pleased with the outcome considering what I had to work with. If you have any more tips, I'd be pleased to hear them.


Mac,

Thank you for the feedback. Our conversation on the phone was invaluable in helping me understand the difference between mixing and mastering. Especially the parts about the levels and letting my ears guide me on using the effects.

Add in the tips you gave about not rushing it, .......... listening at a lower volume, and giving each "mastering" a night to "sleep" on it before finalizing it to a master copy.

These old songs mean a lot to me because they represent a time period, style of music, and a thought process that will never occur again. For you to use CSN&Y as a comparison was a real compliment, because they were a big influence on me when I started playing.

This definitely isn’t my writing style now, but I want to get these old recordings “cleaned up” because I’ll never do most of these old songs again. Not even on request from friends or family.

So thanks to both of you. And Merry Christmas!