StreetNoise- YouAreTheOne

[primeratomarecords]

Saludos gente! , primera subida desde argentina. comentarios , criticas bienvenidas .

Greetings people! , first ascent from argentina. comments, criticisms welcome.

[Pedaling Prince]

Greetings people! , first ascent from argentina. comments, criticisms welcome.

I take it from your choice to use the Macintosh logo that you're a Mac user. So am I. You're new here, I see, so welcome to the Discussion Zone!

So. Thoughts on your mix:

On the plus side, your mix has an excellent stereo arrangement. The positions of the instruments sounds very natural and involving, as if you're watching the performers on a big stage. Reverb on the vocals is appropriate and well balanced, and the texture of the electric guitars is excellent with plenty of detail; that was the best part of the mix. The only problem with the overall arrangement is the vocals sound a tad low to me.

However, it doesn't sound like you did much to address the limitations of the source material. Remember, these multitracks were transferred from an old multitrack tape recorded in 1975 which has deteriorated significantly. Regarding the condition of the raw tracks, I don't know what the story is on the kick drum track; it sounds like a recording taken from a record with the RIAA equalization off and it's full of what sounds like pops and scratches and, fatal for a kick drum, there's very limited low frequency content. There is also a great deal of print-through particularly on the vocal tracks, though it was evident to some extent on all tracks. The high frequency rolloff is fairly dramatic, particularly on the acoustic guitar track which is in abysmal condition; it sounds dull, muffled and has a rather annoying AC hum. From the sound of it I suspect the original recording wasn't all that great to begin with and, coupled with the issues introduced by (I suspect) poor storage conditions, the acoustic guitar track is rendered almost unusable. The congas sound pretty dull, too.

Because of all these problems, it's not wise to treat these tracks the way one would treat modern tracks; they require some fairly aggressive EQ and processing to bring out their full potential. On your mix here the acoustic guitar sounds only marginally better than the raw track, and the congas are still dull and lifeless. I can't even hear the Hammond organ.

Check out my mix of the song, posted in this forum. To get the sound you're hearing required some fairly aggressive EQ. Here are some examples of what I did to address the issues:

Most of the tracks I was able to brighten up by applying hipass filters to remove unnecessary low frequencies, particularly in the drums. On both Hammond tracks I applied a hipass at 300 Hz; on 13_HammondLeslieLo I also applied a lowpass at 1525 Hz. This isolated the Hammond's unique frequencies which actually helped quite a bit with the bleed from the other tracks present on them.

I used a pretty aggressive EQ on the acoustic guitar, a -24 dB cut at 260 Hz, 3.5 dB boost at 3100 Hz and 16 dB boost at 4800 Hz; I also applied a hipass rolled off at 200 Hz. The low cuts helped address the hum and the mud and the high boosts helped bring back some of the sparkle. To sharpen up the congas, I applied an 11 dB boost at 2200 Hz, a 24 dB boost at 5500 Hz, a hipass at 150 Hz and some gentle compression.

I don't normally give such specific advice, but these tracks have some fairly unique limitations that are a bit difficult to address. I'm hoping that telling you how I handled them will either give you solutions you can use or at least point you in the right direction to come up with your own solutions.

Hope my suggestions are helpful!

[primeratomarecords]

First thank you very much for your replay, really thank you! Hope you understand my language, my English is not good.

I still need to learn how much, and your answer helps me a lot. It is my first experience with analog tape recordings (which challenge! Now I admire even more, engineers mix of 70).
I agree with all your observations; sounds very opaque, especially. The basses are as well poor and badly compressed. The low volume and the noise floor was a major difficulty. The mix was made in an afternoon, perhaps has undergone the fatigue of my ears.

It is very useful information that you give me, I'll work on it!

Thank you again !

[Pedaling Prince]

It is my first experience with analog tape recordings (which challenge! Now I admire even more, engineers mix of 70).

Well, bear in mind that recordings done in state-of-the-art studios in the 70s which were properly stored would be much higher quality than these. You made an interesting choice for your first mix here, tackling the song with probably the most extensive technical problems of any multitrack on the site.

That being said, it is true that 70s engineers didn't have access to a lot of the automation we have now, and what automation there was had to be programmed by hand with physical instrumentation; many things we take for granted today, like preprogrammed plug-ins for DAWs simply didn't exist then. So yes, 70s engineers had to be a lot more technically capable than today's engineers.