Need Help With Remastering

**Radiation** · 08-02-2011, 07:17 AM

Could someone please help me with remastering my music? I am new to this industry and i would really appreciate if someone could help me remaster my stuff. I can send you the audio files via email. The tracks are all mixed and recorded and just need to be remastered. Please note that i'm only 16 years old and take classes on sound engineering and am going to college to be a sound engineer. My band really needs to have our songs remastered cause I have not learned he proper techniques yet. Thank you for your help I really appreciate it.

**RemyRAD** · 08-02-2011, 11:53 PM

Well I would love to hear what you have come up with? Are you generally happy with your mixing? Where do you feel that you have failed? If you are 16 years old, how are you in college unless your IQ is over +200? Or is this a dream? You can certainly try to e-mail me some MP3 files or wave files? It may be easier for you to post your files on one of those filesharing Internet sites? But most of this will be with compressed MP3 files. They can get a little gritty if one is trying to EQ/compress/limit these highly compressed files. And just how many tracks are your recordings? So you just want remastering of the stereo masters? Or do you need help with the mixing? This'll be on a test in the morning.

Pass or fail?
Mx. Remy Ann David

**Radiation** · 08-03-2011, 07:05 AM

I am very happy with my mixing I just need them to be remastered. I'm not in college I said i will be going to be in college one day for this type of stuff haha. The mixes are great the only problem is that I over compress them during the mastering stage and would be wondering if someone could help me out with the limiting and compression issues I have. You probably wont think that the songs won't sound good because I am so young, but I am up day and night recording and mixing these to my best ability to try to make them sound the best that they can be. This is my dream and I would greatly appreciate if you could help me with remastering these tracks so I can finally release my bands album. If you are willing to help me remaster them I will upload them via sendspace where you can download them. All the mixing is done i just need the final tracks remastered.

One of the questions I have is that during the mixing I put a vintage warmer on the stereo output bus to add more warmth on my songs. Before I email these songs to you would it be a good idea if I give these tracks to you without the vintage warmer applied cause it adds a tiny amount of compression. Your help will be greatly appreciated and I really look forward to the final outcome.

Sorry if my first post was confusing. I meant to say i take online classes on mixing and one day I will be going to college to be a sound engineer

**JoeH** · 08-03-2011, 08:21 PM

I'd like to hear these too. Would you be open to letting a few of us old geezers give your tracks a listen (with or without the compression/DSP) and give you some feedback? (REMY will set you straight, for sure. I'm just curious as well.)

**Radiation** · 08-03-2011, 08:25 PM

Sure, I would love for you guys to listen to them! I would be very thankful. I will email you some of the tracks.

**RemyRAD** · 08-03-2011, 11:27 PM

Well Radiation, we are ready. And just because you're 16, I don't expect any less from you. I was already a mighty fine engineer myself at your age. So I already know what you may be capable of. Your passion and your heart are definitely in the right place. And if you would like to supply us with both of your versions, with/without comp/warmer, feel free. I'm looking forward to hearing your stuff. When I was your age, I had to do everything on a Sony TC650, Revox G36, Presto 900. My mixer was a Western Electric 23 C, from 1943. Electro-Voice 636 Omni. Homemade reverb from a pair of Hammond/Fender springs. Akai 8 inch full range monitor speakers. We are talking rudimentary here. So knowing what you already have, I am waiting in anticipation. My e-mail address is info@CROWmobile.com. If the files are too large for the e-mail client, we may have to do this through one of those filesharing sites? I would suggest, if possible that you utilize uncompressed .wav files but this could still become problematic due to size?

While my specialty is not as a Professional Mastering Engineer, I have mastered plenty. When re-mastering projects, I don't always stay ITB. I frequently combine both analog & digital componentry. It's a hybrid process. And I frequently utilizes certain kinds of parallel processing. Will it be louder than loud? Probably not. But it will be big and full of life with an organic flair. You do understand that if you have already maxed out everything, there will be no place to take it to. So I would like to hear both of your versions very much.

Looking forward to it
Mx. Remy Ann David

**Radiation** · 08-04-2011, 06:51 AM

Thank you very much! Your help will be greatly appreciated. I am so thankful that someone is willing to help me out and give me the help that I need. I will email you the songs without limiting or compression on the master bus. I look forward to hearing from you soon. Thank you.

**JoeH** · 08-04-2011, 06:59 AM

All good advice from Remy. You can use something like SendSpace or YouSendit or Dropbox. They're all pretty good, depending on what you're looking to do.

Start with your best/most representative track, and if you can, create two versions of it: with and without all the DSP and extra goodies. You may also want to provide stems; drums-only, instruments-only and vocal only, again; with and without the bells and whistles.

I will caution you, though....you've been using the term re-mastering, and I'm a little concerned as to what you're expecting. "Re-mastering" is usually used when describing what it done to material from the past (usually analog-only masters) and prepping them for digital use, like CDs, MP3s and downloads. Sometimes it's a soundtrack to a movie, or an older, out-of-print LP or master tape that needs re-visiting to be set up for the modern world. Sometimes it even involves remixing the original source materials. I don't think that's what you're looking for here; rather, you're looking for the mastering process itself - prepping it for CD/general release.

Like Remy, I'm old-school in much of my approach. Also, I believe in getting mixing right in the FIRST place, not relying too much on after-the-fact mastering. (No offense to all the great mastering guys out there doing some wonderful stuff). I may be radical in this thinking, but it's one thing if you have no other choice than to polish up something that can't be fixed further upstream. It's quite another if you have contact with the original mixing engineer (as we do with you here) and can suggest changes and re-do's further back up in the mix process.

I know it's a radical thought for some, but sometimes "mastering" is nothing more than a little gentle EQ, some taming of rogue peaks and transients here and there, and a little gain-normalizing to make each track consistent with each other. Then it's time-out the breaks in between, add the track IDs, text info (for CDDB, etc) and make the production master. If it gets any deeper than that, I try to get in touch with the mixing engineer and see what can be done upstream, before I have to mess with it too much.

All that said, I'm interested in hearing what you've accomplished so far.