Restoring audo from old cassettes
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Posted on Nov 25, 2008 03:45 pm
TallChap
Answer:On a good day, lipstick.
Member Since: Jun 24, 2004
Hello all:
I've been helping out a buddy who has a fansite on Myspace for a band I worked for 25+ years ago (I'm still friends with the bass player).
I'm converting old audio-cassettes to digital, and I have a few issues to deal with:
1. These are third generation tapes, so along the way there have been some dubious tensions on machines. Some stretching is evident in the audio. Plus speeds are kinda weird.
2. It's recorded HOT. I mean super HOT...three bars in the red. Not too bad for a cassette, but tough to convert digitally.
3. The singer (Phil Lewis - ex-Girl, Tormé, LA Guns etc.) has a rather thin voice in the recordings. With the tapes being old, and stacked with 'verb, it's tough to notch the vocal to get any punch (which, in real-life he does have). Tweaking the mids gets me somewhere, but then the guitar is boosted and the toms all sound like cannons. I'm really going very narrow on the notching to offset that, but the frequency range is almost identical.
I do like the tape compression effect, but it's such a hot signal I'm having difficulty in getting the mud out unless it's blaringly loud (and we all hate that!). This was a full-tilt rock band, so loud is okay-ish so long as I can get the frequencies clearer.
Any tips, hints, and suggestions?
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Nov 25, 2008 03:50 pm That's a tough restore job. I have done some tough ones, but certain things are hard to remedy. The tape speed/stretching issue is tough...if you can pinpoint it, you can adjust it by shrinking the wave file in that area, making it "faster", but it won't remove the garble, just the slowness of the audio. That is much easier on spoken word than it is in music recordings tho...
The levels, well, you may simply have to run the tape thru a preamp/level fader before bringing it in to the computer.
The voice mixing in, man, that's a TOUGH one...
TallChapAnswer:On a good day, lipstick.Member
Since: Jun 24, 2004
Nov 25, 2008 06:17 pm The stretch I can, theoretically, bypass by missing the initial part of the intro (who'll know after 25 years?), so it's not a complete loss. It's just one song that has that to a big degree, and it's annoying as heck.
I'm running the tape deck into my BR532 as a pre-amp and a A/D converter and running optical cable into my soundcard. As clean as I can get it. I'm trying not to do too much rewinding/forwarding on the tape itself to try to preserve tension/speed etc. (wow, who'd a thunk it that we'd ever think of cassettes as "precious"?).
The closest thing yet for the vocals is using a VST call VocPro-C - which is a cool VST for recording just a vocal - and running the whole stereo signal through there. The problem there is that the mids are either a little too prominent, or they fall off the cliff. It's close, and I smoke cigars, but it's not "as it should be".
The "Mastering" part - where they all get the royal treatment and onto the CD - is going to be wild! The songs all come from different demo sessions, and, as mentioned above, they can be 'dripping' with reverb. The levels are all over the place. I want to get it sounding somewhat consistent.
The things we do for love, eh?
i.e. I ain't getting paid...LOL
I'll post a link when they go up on the Myspace page. I think you'd actually dig some of this stuff, dB-Wan.
Noize2uCzar of MidiAdministrator
Since: Apr 04, 2002
Nov 25, 2008 10:28 pm TC, I feel your pain. Having done way too many of those types of cassette jobs I know exactly what you are going through. I've tried several techniques and none really work any better then the other.
I use two different decks depending on the shape the tape is in. One is an 80's Technic's Pro series deck and the other is a Denon, again from their Pro series of gear. The older tapes seem to prefer the Technic's for playback and that deck works well with some of the stretched tapes.
For outboard gear I will sometimes use either and older BBE 422A or an 822A going straight from the deck to the BBE and then the Pre and into the interface.
I ran a series of tapes for a client several years ago were I actually ran it through my digital EQ an Ultra Curve 8024. But that was a load of work to get it sounding good and the tapes had huge tone loss and were very quiet.
But your approach with the parametric is the only real way to go about it so your on the right track.
I've gone as far as setting up two separate parametric EQ's and using one to boost and the other to cut and the curves actually overlap to help compensate for that over boosted thing you are getting on the guitars and toms.
It is a hit or miss thing though as it does not always work perfectly.
But you may honestly only get close and that will have to be it.
I've had several clients listen to a first draft I though to be awful and they found it just fine. So I suggest giving a fresh set of ears a chance to hear it and you might find they like it. I know for me I am far to picky when it comes to this kind of thing.
