The Beginning

Well, I guess I should have started this a long time ago, unfortunately, I'm a late bloomer in that respect, but here I am now, typing this blog at 1am trying to figure out where to go with it.

What do I usually do first? Well, a lot of times I get a track that someone want's cleaned up, that's usually pretty easy. First you have to listen to the entire recording, and take notes on anything out of the ordinary (things you don't like or shouldn't be there). In my case, a typical notepad would look like this:

@0:36 Large Volume Spike - Recommend EQ/Normalizing
@1:05 Dust and crackle - Recommend Noise Reduction

I do this three times throughout the whole song, each time looking away from my notes and closing my eyes. You hear a lot better if you do this, trust me. Anyways, here is the back story to this whole thing. A lot of my peers (I'm 25 next month by the way) are not big listeners to oldies from the 1940's - 1970's, fortunately, I am.

Another thing to remember is the older you get, the less high frequencies you can hear, meaning the older guys who usually do the remastering think they are doing a great job, unfortunately, the work they usually do sounds like crap half the time. The human ear can nominally hear sounds in the range 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz (20 kHz). This upper limit tends to decrease with age, most adults being unable to hear above 16 kHz. The ear itself does not respond to frequencies below 20 Hz, but these can be perceived via the body's sense of touch. Think of the bass in your car stereo! I used to have a car with a lot of bass back in 2000, those speakers hit LOW frequencies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoacoustics

I had a job in the U.S. Navy where I would have to listen to foreign enemy signals and record them, a lot of times my supervisor would say, "I don't hear anything, what did you record?" I started thinking that this is the reason that so many oldies CDs don't sound that good, perhaps these guys heard great 40 years ago, now, you take them in for a hearing test and they miss the mark over a dozen times, meaning their hearing of upper frequencies like those above 15 khz is nothing. I feel that young people want to appreciate oldies, but have a hard time listening to a poorly mastered or remastered record.

Too many times, albums come out with the "NEWLY REMASTERED" tag, but in reality what did they do? Made the album louder by messing with the equalizer and turning the volume up, then normalizing the sound, don't believe me? Fine, it's true because that's what they do. What I do with a lot of the remastering is play the track at half speed (thanks MFSL) that way I can hear any distortion, also, if you are remastering, playing back at half speed will increase the quality of your finished product. Wonder why high-speed dubbing doesn't always work? Too much interference, try half-speed dubbing if you can.

I posted a ton of my remastered songs at this link
http://www.4shared.com/dir/1799872/782b9a27/Music.html
I get a lot of feedback from people of all ages, which is great because it helps me to fine-tune my work. The best mix I have gotten feedback from is my stereo version of The Beatles She Loves You. Everyone likes my versions over the originals because of the separation. That took a while to do, but was worth the effort.

There will be more added to this blog in the future, if you need some work done, please feel free to send me an email at djgiammarino@gmail.com Cheers