Looking for Help

[shade2001]

Hi I was wondering if some one can tell me the best way to go about altering music and vocals that have been recorded on a 4 track and then recorded onto hdd and I want to then burn it onto cd, but would like to do a little altering first if it is possible.

Thanks

[Blue Bear Sound]

...What exactly do you mean by altering????????

[shade2001]

Yes Sorry I am new to all this so not real sure of a lot of things, but basically what I mean is in some tracks I want to bring the vocals out a bit more, also the recording has far too much bass in it in some parts so want to drop that down, and maybe add some effects in places.

[Blue Bear Sound]

Shade.... buddy... welcome aboard - this place is a very good resource for people to learn a lot.....

BUT........... you're going to have to spell it out...

What are your tracks? (guitar?, bass?, drums?, digeridoo??) What gear do you have? What effects do you have? What are you mixing to? What are you monitoring with? What kind of room are you monitoring in?

Asking simply "how do I make my mix better?" is impossible to answer without knowing what you've got to work with!

Bruce

[MONTE]

Is the stuff still 4 tracks, or have you already mixed it down to 2? Without knowing much of what your doing...possibly you need a software mastering editor like Soundforge to do a little tweeking?

[shade2001]

Oh wow, sounds like there is a lot I need to learn isnt there, as I said before I am way out of my depth here and really have no idea what I am talking about, but I am willing to learn. And this looks like the place to do such. Exactly what it is I am trying to do is a bit of tweaking I would say, I have several computer software packages such as Cooledit, and Cakewalk and a few free ones I have sourced. I have been given an audio tape by a friend that asked me to burn a cd from it. However the original recording is a bit gggrrr in places, and I thought with these programs I may be able to fix it so to speak. The main tracks are guitar and vocals, it doesnt appear to have any other prominent instruments. He originally recorded the tape using a four track and then mixed it to get the end result, also he sings back up vocals on the whole thing as well, so I pressume these were mixed in at some stage too. Thanks for your help guys, sorry I dont know too much about it all.

[MONTE]

In simplest form:
1) record the tracks in to your computer through the sound
card inputs.
2) eq, compress, normalize, or whatever you think is
necessary and save to a .wav file.
3) burn the .wav files to CD.

[MONTE]

I forgot to mention that with cool edit or cakewalk you should already have the editing capability you need.