Mastering?

[lester]

Got a buddy that has some songs on a cassette from around '83.
He's copied it onto CD but aint cutting it.
Is there anyone here that could help?
The mastering I guess you can call it, this is a just running through like a TC Finalizer or similar, maybe some kind of program on your computer or laptop.
Spruce it up you know. Tighten the bass, clarify the guitars and vocals make it sound great, make it sound... I don't know, modern?
Just a bit of attention it seems, put that on a CD.
And I'll pay you for it. It's only like eight to 10 or 11 songs.

 

[midnightlaundry]

A crap mix is like a picture of an ugly beast.. You can photoshop in some lipstick, or a hat. But ugly is always ugly..
The most you can really do is EQ. Most people automatically compress it which from a cassette source is already compressed. Other things can be done but you're stuck with the mix.
Now if you had individual tracks for a remix, you can do a ton.

 

[311boogieman]

If A.I. can make entire songs out of thin air, maybe could run it through one of those dealios

 

[sytharnia1560]

A crap mix is like a picture of an ugly beast.. You can photoshop in some lipstick, or a hat. But ugly is always ugly..
The most you can really do is EQ. Most people automatically compress it which from a cassette source is already compressed. Other things can be done but you're stuck with the mix.
Now if you had individual tracks for a remix, you can do a ton.

AI can turn a stereo track into Stems for remixing

 

[DanTravis62]

Unless you have the masters youre not going to be able to really do anything you mentioned.

As syntharnia said, best bet maybe to use AI to separate the tracks?

 

[lester]

Interesting. Thanks.

 

[DanTravis62]

Interesting. Thanks.

Yeah sorry for the bad news. Mastering is generally very surgical EQ on the whole audio track, making it louder, sometimes some light effects, but its a very subtle process.

What it sounds like you want is the album remixed which is an entirely different thing, NOT subtle, not easy, and is a very involved and expensive process. If you had like, master tapes or data CDs or a usb or literally anything with the separate tracks on it, I would be willing to do this for pretty cheap - unfortunately, if all you have is an actual CD/tape/LP of the recording itself there is no way to do that.

That's why @sytharnia1560 mentioned AI - that might be the only way to do this in any sort of economic way. If it's a big deal for you to get this done, I could look into it for you, but that's a lot of time investment. If you can find someone to use AI to get separate tracks, I would be willing to do a remix/remaster for you for not stupid expensive.

Edit: Actually, @lester youre a long time member here, I might be willing to do a trade or partial trade for gear to make it more feasible if you are light on cash - I don't know if you are aware of how involved or expensive something like this would be, but i've actually done remixes/remasters before of bands records that were never finished, or never released, etc.

 

[lester]

That's pretty cool.
I think though he really just wants some EQing and the transferred to a CD. Maybe I could do something for him I have a Yamaha AW4418 maybe I could load it up in there it has the waves and stuff maybe, maybe that would work I don't know.
Problem being I don't have a cassette deck even so there's that.

 

[Devin]

This is (or at least was) a free service for stem separation:

https://www.stemroller.com/

 

[midnightlaundry]

If you are doing it AI, just tell it to make it sound like metallica.. No mix or mastering needed..

 

[Rackman]

Yeah mastering can't fix mix issues. It should really be thought of as what it used to be called, transfer engineering - the process of transferring a mixed track from one media to another - historically often 2-track tape from mixdown to vinyl. The biggest part is just getting levels, dynamic range, and global EQ reasonable.

If you would like to send me one track I'll see what's going on and take a shot at it. Realize that coming off cassette tape there's going to be noise and bandwidth issues that cannot be addressed, but there may be some things that can be done. If you like what you hear we can talk about the rest.