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Restoring old recordings of lost friend

Marco
Samplitude
Submitted by pcrecord on

Hi gang,



I shared my sadness for the lost of my friend Richard a few days ago..

I've been digging up my archives and found 3 songs I'm going to be restoring.

This is going to be the first one.

I recorded the drums and bass from scrach and using RX to remove some iss and hums here and there.

All the guitar and vocal tracks stayed original and were performed by Richard..

What's odd about this is I wasn't even pretending to have a studio back then..

Those tracks were recorded with a cheap Peavy mixer and a Soundblaster live using a hole in the wall of a bedroom in 2001. . .

Please help me detect if I overdone something or there is a defect you can hear about the balance, frequencies etc...

Here's the song and the original version so you can have an idea from where I started.



http://recording.or…



http://recording.or…

Attached files

I was wrong 2001.mp3 (8.1 MB)  I was wrong.mp3 (8.1 MB) 

Comments

Profile picture for user Smashh
Smashh

Sounds great Marco , That brassy sounding starting on the vocal makes me think of a saxophone line.

On my speakers , I would've liked to hear the lead vocals take a little more real-estate , around the bottom of the voice .

Then I listened on my ear buds and it sounded spot on ( my earbuds have an exaggerated 200 hz ).

btw I saw the rx plug in on special after your suggestion , so I bought it . loving how it cleans stuff up without much effort .Thanks , Ash

Fri, 11/30/2018 - 20:30 Permalink
Profile picture for user Smashh
Smashh

Hi Marco , The lead vocals sound better on the low area now

After listening to the song a few times I have a couple of thoughts , derived from my earbuds listening.



The vocal on the verses sound nice and intimate , when he's not pushing as hard .

Then on the chorus , bridge and outro, something gets fatiguing in the vocal / a loss of

low tone , and a build up further up when pushing and maybe changed throat shape .

You could EQ those bits separately .



The voices doing the oohs through the song could be prominent and have a liberal dash of reverb

and some sort of modulation. It would work nicely with the lead guitar at the end too.

Thats my 5 cents , hope its helpful :)

Sun, 12/02/2018 - 09:22 Permalink
Marco
Samplitude
pcrecord

kmetal, post: 459894, member: 37533 wrote: Hey man sounds good overall. If i had one comment it would be to sonehow tone down the reverbs tail. I know it might not be possible given the 2trk, but just figured id mention it. I think the verb has appropriate depth and wet/dry mix, its just the tail that im talking about.

Thanks K... are you talking about the drums or the vocals.. The vocal track was printed with the reverb so it's hard to work with..

Also this was also recorded with a soundblaster live back in 2001.. Not so easy to make it sound actual.. ;)

Sat, 12/08/2018 - 13:23 Permalink
Profile picture for user kmetal
kmetal

pcrecord, post: 459895, member: 46460 wrote: Thanks K... are you talking about the drums or the vocals.. The vocal track was printed with the reverb so it's hard to work with..

Also this was also recorded with a soundblaster live back in 2001.. Not so easy to make it sound actual.. ;)



Totally understood, i was also using a soundblaster in that time period to capture from my tascam portastudio. How happy was i to able to do 4 tracks simultaneously into my 566mhz celeron HP pavillion!!!



I was speaking about the vocaks as far as tbe verb. I wonder if dynamic eq or some sort of gating/de-essing would work. Either way the track is good especially for the vintage its rooted in. Just more curious about de-verbing from an academic standpoint. I think rhere may be a pluggin called de-verb for that purpose, however im not sure if its meant for a singke track or entire mix. Lol not to be confused with the terrible Dverb pluggin from digidesign/avid which could be the worst sounding reverb ever, despite being widely used on big records out of convienince. Cheers bud.

Sun, 12/09/2018 - 13:19 Permalink
Marco
Samplitude
pcrecord

kmetal, post: 459898, member: 37533 wrote: Totally understood, i was also using a soundblaster in that time period to capture from my tascam portastudio. How happy was i to able to do 4 tracks simultaneously into my 566mhz celeron HP pavillion!!!



I was speaking about the vocaks as far as tbe verb. I wonder if dynamic eq or some sort of gating/de-essing would work. Either way the track is good especially for the vintage its rooted in. Just more curious about de-verbing from an academic standpoint. I think rhere may be a pluggin called de-verb for that purpose, however im not sure if its meant for a singke track or entire mix. Lol not to be confused with the terrible Dverb pluggin from digidesign/avid which could be the worst sounding reverb ever, despite being widely used on big records out of convienince. Cheers bud.

I tried RX De-verb and it was chopping too much of the voice goodness for my taste.. For dialog, it does a great job.. but this vocal done in 2001 was too wet for being manipulated with success.

Thanks for the suggestion K. The worst thing is I can't even remember why I did burned the verb in all tracks in the first place... Guess I wasn't RO member back then ! Ah ah ;)

Sun, 12/09/2018 - 18:35 Permalink
Dave Hawk
dvdhawk

I'm finally listening with good headphones, and I wouldn't worry about the reverb either. It sounds very good to me. I'm not a fan of overly wet vocals and I don't think it's excessive at all. Your description had me prepared for a ton of reverb and it doesn't sound like that at all to me.



It's completely unnecessary, but just for fun, I might experiment with adding a touch more reverb to some of the instruments to see if they could be put in the same environment. The guitars sound very dry in comparison to me and contrast is good - but I still wonder what it would sound like with everything in a more uniform space.



Well done, Marco!

Fri, 01/25/2019 - 14:33 Permalink