Non-Mastering Mastering

[Illsidgus]

To begin let me give you all an idea of where I am coming from. I have been a musician since I was seven years old and started taking piano lessons. I'll just say that I have been a musician for over 50 years and leave it at that. I started playing in bands around 1968/69. I am sure some of you remember those years when a typical band had an organ player, a bass, guitar, drums and at least one vocalist and we all played/sang through two amps if we were lucky enough to have two amps. Any recording we did was either on one of those small portable reel to reel recorders that would use either 3" or 5" reel or one of those newfangled cassette recorders.

Back in 1984 or 85, I don't remember which, I entered the big leagues and purchased a Tascam 244 which I still use today. To mix down to I have an old Akia 1722W reel to reel which I know is not a mastering deck in any sense of the word, but that's what I have. I put all that away for years and have just recently pulled it back out. I am getting old and it is time that I put the music that I love to write on tape as a legacy, as a way of leaving something of my love of music behind when I die.

Now to the mastering/non mastering. Considering the two pieces of recording equipment that I have, are there any tips, trick, techniques that I can use to come as close to a mastered recording as possible without any mastering hardware? Oh, I also have the free version of Audacity on my computer. Does Audacity have any mastering capabilities? I don't want to leave behind a bunch of crap, I want my recorded musical vision to be of a good enough quality that it will be a pleasant listening experience to whomever may hear it in the future. I wish that I could afford to buy a compressor and a reverb unit and all those other components that refine what has been recorded but I can't. The first five pieces that I am going to record should be fairly easy to deal with as they are short, moderately easy guitar ensemble pieces for three guitars that I wrote back in 2005. After that I intend to record some of the older pop era stuff that I wrote as far back as 1971 as well as some new songs. So any help would be very greatly appreciated.

I am sorry this was such a long ramble but I thought that if you all had a small insight into my mind and life that you could better understand the kind of help that I need.

"I don't need music to live, but without it why would I want to?"

 

[Dags]

Hi there.
Are you thinking of 'mastering' from the original 4 track tapes/cassette onto the Akai reel to reel analogue tape?
If yes, then you have no choice but to get a whole lot of expensive outboard gear.

But if I may offer a pearl of wisdom from my own experience with cassette, magnetic tape deteriorates (which I'm sure you're already aware of ) so maybe getting the songs digitised first should be the priority.
Then you have the ability to utilise either hardware or software to clean up the tracks and get them mastered.
At the very least, you'll have preserved the songs as they are before the tapes deteriorate any further, so you can take your time investigating options.

Audacity will permit you to have 16 multiple tracks during playback [anyone know how many tracks can be simultaneously recorded?] but unless the tascam has 4 individual analogue outs (which you can feed into a 4 channel A/D converter connected to your computer) you'll have to record one or two channels at a time and try to sync them up once you have them recorded.
I am uncertain of the range of plugins available with Audacity or if third party VST or AU plugins work within Audacity. Tape hiss is going to be a problem, so unless Audacity can handle VST/AU plugins (or has its own noise reduction plugin) maybe look at getting Cubase, Reaper or Logic (if you're on a Mac) all which can handle multi-track recording and playback and will allow you to use a range of plugins to help clean up your songs.

Also by digitising each track of each song as a separate audio file, you have the ability to clean up/EQ each of the 4 tracks separately, instead of trying to deal with whatever noise is across the entire song were you to try to master to 2 track tape on the fly.

Anyway, just my 0.02, but I hope it has given you something to consider before investing in outboard processing gear [nothing wrong with mastering hardware, BTW, but I don't think it is going to be the best option for you, IMO]

Regards,
Dags

 

[Illsidgus]

Thank you for the advice Dags. What I am wanting to try is to mix down to the akia reel to reel then dump the stereo mix into audacity to work on. At least that is what I want to do with the guitar ensemble pieces. Each piece will only take up three of my four tracks. I intend to plug directly into the 244 as my Ovation Classical guitar has a preamp in it. Then it should be fairly easy to fiddle with the EQ and levels during mix down. I don't know if Audacity has any compression or any kind of anything to give the mix more depth or punch or whatever. I guess that all I can do is give it a try.

As for they other music that I want to record, even though I really love analog, I am considering the Steinberg CI2+ Production Kit. It comes with a USB interface, Cubase AI6 and Wavelab LE 7 and I can pick it up at a local music store for $199.00. But don't know if I can do it. I don't like the thought of sitting at the computer clicking my mouse on imaginary faders and pots. I want to feel those things with my fingers. So I am also considering the Tascam DP 24. It would feel a lot more like my 244 but with 24 tracks and effects and all kinds of other goodies to play with. The down side to the DP 24 is that it costs $700.00 plus.
So I guess that I will deal with the guitar ensemble pieces first, see how they go, and then decide what to do from there. Dags if you have anymore advice from what I have added in this post please let me know.

 

[Dags]

I don't like the thought of sitting at the computer clicking my mouse on imaginary faders and pots. I want to feel those things with my fingers.

Amen to that!
And the RSI that kicks in after 20+ years of mouse-clicking is a b*tch.
Unfortunately I don't have the $$ (or the desk space) to get into purchasing complex hardware interfaces.

I guess the thing to do would be to give mixdown to Akai a try and see how you go without running through any outboard gear first. The cool thing is that as you're running into an analogue 2 track 'master' tape you can push the levels a bit without worrying about nasty digital clipping I believe you should be able to get pretty good results even without any dynamic processing, as the 4-track tape would have already had the levels for each pass 'set' on them and you can alter the overall playback level to avoid too much tape saturation going into the Akai.

Wow - the DP-24 sounds like a nice beast to own if you don't like the idea of going mouse-centric. When these digital multitrack hardware units first came out about 10 years ago (Roland/Boss, Korg and Tascam) they were going for $2,000 - $8,000 AUS so $700 sounds like a great deal to my scrooge-ears I don't know if it will have a full suite of 'mastering' processing on board, but the ability to record with compression (if desired to even out the signal), EQ, add effects and mix the tracks to a near-finished standard before exporting to the dreaded computer environment may be a plus...you may find that you *can* do everything 'in the box' and won't need to go to Audacity.
A guy I know owns two of the original Roland VS-880 units which he synchronised for 16 track recording and as far as I know still uses them to record his albums

Hope it all goes well with your experimenting!

Dags