|
||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||
|
|
A few details about the remastering of the three songs
Schlaf, Neuland and Anomasil have been digitally remastered using the Linux audio mastering application Jamin running on top of the JACK audio server, together with additional tools for playing and recording. All these applications are free and licensed under the GPL.
The goal of remastering has been to recover sound quality of the original recording as well as to correct mistakes that have been introduced in the original mix. The remastering was not simply applied in order to increase the recordings' level to the maximum (as remastering is defined elsewhere), but remastering here additionally implies that the original mix and its mastering needs to be corrected to some extent and original production mistakes are now to be compensated using an equalizer / multiband-compressor / limiter combination.
The original recordings before remastering was applied can be found here. The Jamin configuration file stores each song's settings as one different "scene".
The final configuration settings used for Jamin have been worked out in many iterative attempts, including lots of test-recordings, comparisons, dumping the current settings and trying a completely new approach, etc. One self-chosen limitation was to look for one static parameter-setting for each song, and not to make use of the ability to change between different "scenes" of settings while a song plays. Still, the process of remastering took weeks, as the author has been completely unexperienced with remastering before. If you have some ideas for how to get better remastering results, please let me know.
Schlaf
The main goal was to reduce the differences in volume-level between verses and choruses, while making sure that the vocals sound as good as possible and constantly appear 'above' the mix. Reducing the differences in volume level has been solved by quite high compression ratios in the low and high bands, together with strong use of the limiter by using a relatively high amplification before feeding the signal into the limiter. The vocals are supported by the compression, in combination with two parametric-equalizer "valleys" in the mid-band and the high-band section, which, in combination with the compressors, make the vocals clearer. It appears a good strategy to reduce unimportant frequency areas a bit and compress the corresponding frequency bands, in order to actually raise the perceived volume of the wanted frequency areas. This seems to be better than instead raising the wanted frequency areas with the equalizer. The reason might be that using a compressor actually mirrors the equalizer's effect: Those frequencies that are emphasized by the equalizer will in turn cause the compressor to react stronger (because the input level rises), and thus will lower the overall frequency band in total, also reducing the volume again of those frequencies originally emphasized by the equalizer. It seems this highly interdependent excite/inhibit-relationship between equalizer and compressor is one of the key issues to be balanced out carefully when mastering with an equalizer/compressor/limiter-combination like Jamin. The high-frequency cut-off is used for noise-reduction.
Neuland
Here the main goal was to compress the drums' dynamics to become a more compact and stable rhythm accompaniment, and to ensure that the vocals are well-understandable throughout the whole song. The vocals have mostly been taken care of by the settings of the mid-band compressor, and additionally by the small high-band amplification in the equalizer configuration. The drums are compressed through the use of very short attack times in the low-band and high-band compressor, plus the short release time of the limiter. The frequency boost in the lower mid-band area of the equalizer amplifies the keyboard section of the mix, which give a bit more rhythmic orientation during the verses, and generally more "body" to the overall frequency shape.
Anomasil
The original recording of this song provides low demo quality only, so remastering this song was the most difficult task, compared to the other two.Ensuring the presence of both the instrumental 'dong-dong-dingding-dong'-theme and the sampled vocal-hook "Anomasil" have been the main goals in remastering this song. The 'dong-dong-dingding-dong' is amplified by a 'shouldered mountain' drawn in the equalizer's mid-band settings (The lower 'dong' note is amplified noticeably stronger than the upper 'ding'-note). The mid-band and the high-band compressors in combination especially needed to correct extreme level peaks in mix the original "Anomasil"-sample.
Some elements of the guitar and drums samples tend to disturb the rhythmic patterns of the song, so a huge notch to remove some disturbing noise has been set with the equalizer in ther upper mid-band section.
The overall frequency shape has been corrected by a strong reduction of the high-band frequency, followed by an 'artificial' makeup of the high-frequency band via the high-band compressor's 'makeup' setting. Also, Jamin's 'boost'-setting has been used to explicitly give the result more "body".
Missing harmonic supplement in the instuments section has been compensated by keeping a relatively strong bass layer, thus by not exceeding the low-band compressor's ratio too much and by using a relatively slow attack time for the low-band compressor in order preserve some bass dynamics.
After this 'musical' remastering, Anomasil had been 'technically' remastered for a second time. The overall frequency shape had been corrected and a conservative multi-band compressor setting had been applied.
In order to feed the original audio recording into Jamin, the original non-remastered sound files have been played using ecasound by invoking
ecasound -ea:25 -o jack_auto,jamin -i <input-file>.wav
(Note that the signal is softened to 25% original level (by -ea 25), this is because in the first stages of remastering XMMS had been used for playing the orignal recordings into Jamin, and this program by default sets its volume to 25% when used with the JACK-output plugin.)
For recording Jamin's output into a .wav-file,
jackrec -B 100000 -f ./<output-file>.wav -d <number-of-seconds> jamin:out_L jamin:out_R
is invoked in parallel to ecasound on another console.
For 'recording' the final .wav-files, JACK has been used with dummy-devices without actual audio output, in order to keep timing problems as unlikely as possible.
The resulting connections displayed in qjackctl are:
The ready-remastered waveforms of Neuland and Anomasil have now been manually edited as the very final processing step. In Neuland, an introductory instrumental-only part has been cut out in order to make the first verse start earlier in the song. Also, a few disturbing crackles have been cut out from the beginning. Anomasil has been manually edited to remove strong crackles from the very end.
Before burning to CD and creating mp3s and oggs, Schlaf and Neuland have been amplified by +0.5db to reach a total signal level of the maximum possible 0.0db (note that the level had been limited to -0.5db in Jamin for each song). Anomasil stays at a maximum peak level of -0.5db, which makes its perceived loudness fit better in the row of all three songs.
Jens Gulden, 2006.