The "remastering" process

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robin watson

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With the recent proliferation of re-released classic albums under Rhino, etc., I got interested in reading up on what the process involved was and after numerous failed attempts to find anything that really touched on the subject.

I'm curious to know what goes on in the cases of both when the original multi-track tapes are available, and when they only have stereo masters to work with.

Cheers to anyone for any links to some interesting articles.
 
witht he original multi track tapes, engineers will ususally not mess with it that much. They know what the original sounded like, and will try to keep it as close to that as they can, but just clean it up basically, make it sound sonically better.

obviously, there is not much you can do with a stereo master track. Aside from adding Noise Reduction and possibly small small small small small ammounts of eq and compression, they tend to leave them alone.
 
It depends a lot of the "importance" of the recording itself (translated: how much money is it worth and/or how much money do they plan on making off of it ;) ), but on some remasters they can do quite a bit more than Brad implies.

First, if they have the original multitracks or stems, the label will often remix them from scratch, letting the mixing engineer have at it rather than just try to duplicate whatthe first mixing engineer did. Then there's the mastering engineer, who now has to make it sound right and good on a digital CD instead of a vinyl pressing. You can be pretty confident that he will have to use entirely different standards than the original ME in that regard.

Second, if the tapes are worth the trouble (based on the definition in the first paragraph) they will use restoration techniques like trying to fix/compensate for tape stretching and oxidation, digital processing to restore lost frequencies (something that can't be done with EQ), etc.

G.
 
Check out this thread. The guy is interning with someone who is doing this process, and posting everything he learns.
 
IronFlippy said:
Check out this thread. The guy is interning with someone who is doing this process, and posting everything he learns.

;) That's me!

Actually I was pretty excited when I read this post because that's exactly what we're doing right now. We're remastering these old records from the '50s and '60s. The record I got to edit the other day was one of these. I'll tell you what they are in case someone has heard of them...it's a series of records called The 50 Guitars of Tommy Garrett. Tommy "Snuff" Garrett was a big time producer from back in the day, and he did a series of records (like 25) of well-known songs with spanish guitar-type arrangements. Stuff like "Guantanamara", "Cielto Lindo", "Girl From Ipanema", "Yellow Rose of Texas"...you get the point. Very well recorded and great players like Tommy Tedesco.

So anyway, we have the original analog master reels. We take the reels, play them back on an Otari MTR-12, process them in analog (if you read the thread that IronFlippy linked you'll see the gear we're using), then edit them digitally and burn them to CD. Most of the analog processing the guy does is just to sort of "update" them. Like I said, most of them are very good mixes so they're not really being changed. The level is definitely being raised so that they're more "competitive". Most of the processing is compression and eq. So the tracks end up being more present, and if a track is dull it gets opened up more, if it's too bright, we tame it down a little, and if the balance is off, we adjust for that. The best analogy I can give is that the "remastered" version sounds like the original but with a heavy blanket lifted off of it. Also, there tends to be a lot of tape hiss and sometimes print-through at the end of these tracks, so we try to fade it so that the hiss is minimal. And then if there are any clicks or pops they get noise reduced.

Hope this helps.
 
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