Audio Restauration

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pablo

New member
I have some tapes and recording I would like to sound beter, one is my mom playing the guitar (how sweat!) in a flok music band she was in before, it's really music typical from my country, but I guess it doesn't change the procedure that much... here's the deal, it's a mono casette and it has a lot a of dynamics problems, hiss and noise...
I was thinking about make it sound stereo somehow, maybe like driving certain frecuencies throuh one speaker and other throug the other...

The other recording I made was a concert from a punk band I was in a few time ago, by the time I did want to get into recording, but I didn't know much about it, so what I did is ask the guy in the console to do a live mixed recording in CD and give it to me, after I learn how to do it, I'll try to fix as much as I can...

I know this is very delicate topic, but If it could be done with John Lenon, it can be done with my mom!! :D
 
Just why do you want it stereo? What's the advantage of turning a mono recording into stereo? :confused: The advantage of a stereo mix is obvious, but since you start from a mono recording, the only result can be a 'broader' sound, but you'll lose clarity in some way...

As for the noise, you could try some EQ. Find out where most of the noise is, and do a cut. There'll probably be enough compression already since it comes from tape, so I wouldn't try that. And then you could try some plugins that are made for that purpose. Don't know any myself... And that's how far my ideas go...

Comming to think of it, does such a thing as a multiband expander exist? Kindof the equivalent of a multiband compressor? And if it exist, what is it's use? Would such a thing fit in here?
 
I thought maybe turning it into stereo would give it some sense of space...
hhhmm... so pluggins for that...
Can I import pluggins with cool edit pro?? that's the program I use for this kind of things...
 
For turning something that's mono into stereo, you can use the stereo plugin by BlueLine. I don't know if I'd do that with an entire recording. It's really meant to aid in stereo positioning of individual tracks. And it does diffuse the attack, like Roel mentioned. If you imagine the stereo field as a three-dimensional space, it basically positions instruments further away in that space, letting other parts come forward more.

But yes, it can widen something that's mono.

If there are a lot of volume changes in the tape, you can always try some light compression or limiting. I've never tried that before...

But I did have a similar project not too long ago. My father played in a progressive rock band in the early and mid '70s, and I had a cassette of one of their performances. It was a dub from an open reel deck (one of my uncles, his brother, was a bit of a recording buff, apparently).

It was a fairly high quality recording, but it had some issues - namely, a lot of hiss, particularly boomy bass frequencies (they were playing in a gymnasium, it sounds like, so whenever they hit the resonant frequency of the room, things got pretty muddy), and dull highs (old tape).

I recorded the entire tape onto my computer as one big .wav. To help fix the boom, I applied just a bit of a highpass filter. Then I imported the .wav into Steinberg's Clean!. From there I added just a bit of high (I think Steinberg calls it "sparkle" or something like that), widened the stereo spectrum just a little bit (it was a stereo recording), and applied some de-noise.

The "remastered" recording, while certainly not as good as what a professional could have done, sounded leaps and bounds better than the original.

Steinberg's noise reduction is the best I personally have ever worked with. But if the noise on your tape is so bad that it covers up the actual signal, then it's not going to work so well. You also have to be careful of applying so much noise reduction that you end up with artifacts. That's no good, either.

But with a tape that doesn't have too terribly much hiss, I've found that Steinberg can pretty much completely get rid of it.
 
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