(20-03-2016, 08:30 PM)sonicenergystudio Wrote: I downloaded the stems and had a listen. There is way too much bleed on all the tracks to do a good job mixing this so I respectfully pass.Trying to take it out causes way too much damage to the track.
Don"t know where it came from but tis for sure in the tracking and possibly from the cans??
I assume you're referring mostly to the bleed on the vocal track since it's the only one with an unusual amount of bleed; the bleed on all
other tracks here is perfectly normal for a group recording session in a studio environment so I'm not sure what you mean there...?
I don't know if you read the history of this multitrack but it was transferred from an
analog tape recorded in
1975. It wasn't unusual for "imperfections" like that bleed on the vocal track to be present in multitracks of that era for two reasons.
First, "cans" of the era simply didn't have the level of noise isolation modern headphones do so there was
always some bleed into the vocal track; this was
normal at the time.
Second, since analog tape noise is cumulative, you were expected to
mute tracks that weren't "in use" at any point in the mix to cut down on the noise during quieter passages, anyway, so the bleed would be eliminated when the vocal track was muted during times when the singer wasn't singing.
All you have to do to emulate that technique is
edit the tracks in your DAW, cutting out the "silent" portions of each track. You don't have to go nuts, though; don't cut every last little bit of silence between each snare hit on the snare track, for example. You only have to cut out the parts where the instrument isn't playing
at all, just as would have been done at the mixing desk if this was being mixed back when it was recorded in 1975 by muting. Remember, no one's going to hear the bleed in the final mix; the level of the bleed is so much lower than the signal that it'll be buried by the rest of the mix, anyway.
It's funny I should come across your post because I just did a remix of this song. The first time I did it I tried to scrub out all the tape noise. I was satisfied with the mix at the time but after listening to it over the years I realized that the noise reduction process had robbed the recording of its "air" and it sounded dull and lifeless compared to most of my other mixes. Ironically, there was someone in the discussion on my original mix (which is still in this forum) who tried to tell me this but because he presented his advice in an arrogant, know-it-all, passive aggressive way, and since most of
his mixes were overly bright and often wholly disrespectful to the artist's vision (I'd listened to
all of his mixes to form that opinion), I didn't realize he had a genuine point.
After a while, I realized that I shouldn't have tried to scrub out the noise
at all. I've listened to many albums transferred from analog tape to CD in the 1980s. They always had the tape noise, but it never bothered me because it still sounded light years better than any record or cassette. That's when I realized that if I wanted to get the best sound out of these tracks I should mix them the old school way. Leave the noise there and mix them the way I would on an old analog desk. I'm still creating a better quality sound than was possible in 1975 since back then you'd have to record the mixdown onto another tape, which would introduce a generational loss; in digital I can create a mixdown that preserves all of the quality of the original multitrack.
I've attached my remix here.
From your reaction to this track I'm going to take an educated guess that you are significantly younger than me and have probably never dealt with an analog multitrack before. As you can hear from my attached mix a quality mix
can be created from an analog multitrack; there is a plethora of classic music recorded in analog, particularly from the 1970s onward, that can easily stand up to the quality of modern digital recordings. Some of them are
better than modern digital recordings, actually, because engineers of the era, before the insanity of the Loudness Wars, were free to create beautiful, open, dynamic soundscapes without crushing everything for loudness as is often done today (which is why digital recordings often don't sound as good as those old analog ones, not because digital is inferior to analog but because some of the new tools digital brings to the table are being abused).
This one was mixed that old school way, without compressing the hell out of it, mastering it for
sound quality, not for loudness. It might be a little quieter than most commercial recordings today but I guarantee if you turn that volume up a notch or two until it's the loudness you like it you'll find it sounds
way better than most of the music that's been recorded commercially over the past 15 years.
That's my personal mission: to prove the value of dynamic range in music. Which is why I prefer to mix my own music from the multitracks here; most of what I listen to it stuff I mixed myself here. That way, I can be
sure that no unnecessary dynamic compression has been applied to the music; I can take full advantage of the low noise floor and dynamic range of modern digital sound in a way a vast majority of mixes today just don't.
Anyway, let me step down off my soapbox here. Please feel free to let me know what you think of my mix, good or bad and, either way, I encourage you to take your own shot at it, just bearing in mind the limitations of the material. It's a bit of a learning curve having to deal with tape noise if you're not used to it but it's not difficult once you get the hang of it, and there's a certain satisfaction one can get squeezing all the possible sound quality out of an old recording. It's important to preserve musical history, after all.
