In my previous post, I talked about music and "remastering" some of my old music. Where I left off is that I was trying to redo some old keyboard pieces that used the Yamaha SW1000XG. I bought a Yamaha MU80 as a replacement and that didn’t have the same sounds, so I bought an MU100. To my surprise, again, not the same sounds. So while I lick my $400 wounds and decide how I want to go from here, I made progressions on another musical concept.
I had written some guitar tunes a long while back, before I became a more aware and less offensive person. As fortune would have it at that time, my voice could not cope with the style of singing required for the songs, so all I had recorded was the music. There are some guide vocals in some songs, which are cringey to say the least. It’s for the best they stay muted. But anyway, the recording of the instrument parts left a bit to be desired as well, so I set myself to it to clean those up.
The first issue, which is just like the Yamaha issue, is trying to find the effects that I used when recording the tracks. After many failed attempts to match up the guitar effects plugins, I gave up and chose new effect patches for the tracks. They don’t sound the same as the originals, but no one’s heard the originals, so whatever.
The next step was cleanup. In the original recording, there was a major problem with bleedthough in the mixer I owned, so a lot of tracks have a background noise of the click track. Through a lot of clever editing and some aggressive fadeouts, I was able to hide any noticeable clicks. As I made those edits, I determined how to best organize the project for mixdown. This led to a solution of having the midi drum track span the full length of the song, including pre-silence and fadeout. That way I could set the locators (which determine what part to mixdown) to the selected drum track and be good to go.
The step after that was mixing, burning, and testing the tracks in CD players: home and car, plus through computer speakers. I have a spindle of 100 CDRs that I never thought I’d use. I’m going to use them now. As I did my tests, I adjusted track times, in cases where the mix cut off too quickly or in some cases, didn’t leave enough lead space for a CD player to audibly start the track immediately. That was weird: that even if you want a track to start absolutely immediately, you still need a small bit of silence at the beginning otherwise it sort of quickly fades in.
And that was actually a problem, because I had two tracks that segued into one another – I couldn’t have a silent gap between them. This issue was compounded by the software I was using to write the CDs. Coming up with a resolution involved another step and more software. To solve the gapless issue, I had to create a CUE sheet, which would identify the exact placement of the track boundaries on the disc. And instead of burning multiple audio files, you burn one file that contains the whole CD audio. The CUE file points to sections in that one audio file.
So now I have to create a single file of the entire album’s audio. And this forced me to do the proper step of CD mastering. In this step you work with all the mixed tracks together at once and make them sound cohesive. And at the same time, you work out the timing of the tracks and the gaps between them. It was something I was aware of in my listening tests – that some tracks needed volume adjustments – and the mastering process gave me that opportunity to balance everything out. It’s something I expect to do in future projects.
So I’m up to test disc #6 now, which contains the level-matched tracks and also the gapless track changes where needed thanks to the CUE file. When I burnt the CD using a new utility that utilized CUE files, I noticed some mentions of CD-TEXT being written, which allows CD players to pick up and display the track title. I haven’t been able to see that in any players I’ve tried yet, but that’s another target to hit for future test versions.
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