Let me de-master your music for free!

All the talk about cassettes and things sounding too clean in the studio pics thread made me think it would be fun to mess with this stuff on other people's music.  I have more free time than usual over the next couple weeks, so if you've got something that sounds too clean I'd love to make it sound worse.

TOP OF THE LINE PRO GEAR:

-Omnisonix 801 Omnisonic Imager

-BBE 462 Sonic Maximizer

-Vidicraft SYN-190 Stereo Synthesizer

-Pioneer SR-202w Reverberation Amplifier

-Tascam 424 Mk 1 Portastudio

-Various pairs of mid-grade 60s audio transformers, mostly DuKane

-An old 70s Quantum 8x4 mixer that's sitting in the back of my closet because it needs to be recapped, I forget exactly what model but it was actually pretty decent 35 years ago

-Gakken SX-150

-Solo Sound Arkon infrared wireless audio transmitter/reciever set

-Ibanez HD1000 (8 bit digital pitch shifter from the early 80s)

-Akai MFC42 filter bank (actually quite nice and underrated but capable of making things sound pretty ugly too)

-DBX 117 stereo compressor/expander with the infinite gain reduction mod

-Two Fender Starcaster chorus pedals

-JVC SR-S365u Hi-Fi VCR

-Alesis Nanocompressor

-Supermind Brainwave Synchronizer

-Homemade stereo mic preamp from the 80s I got cheap on eBay that doesn't work exactly right

-Sony MZ-R55 MiniDisc Digital Walkman with Digital Megabass

-An old Marantz professional three head cassette recorder with a broken idler that might still work

-Actually really nice sounding BLA Signature Mod Digi002 interface, to capture the shittiness in pristine fidelity.

I guarantee your track will sound at least 200% worse or you pay nothing*!

I don't want to spend all of my potential recording time on this but I definitely have time to mess with maybe half a dozen tracks over the next month, so post links (it'll be more fun if people get to hear the before and after) if you want to and I'll get to stuff as I have time.

*you pay nothing regardless.

I'd be interested to hear what you think my stuff needs or whatever.

Would you like stems or just full tracks?

Stereo 24/96 mixes are best for me.  I've only manually tuned latency compensation for my interface at 96kHz, so I'm going to be resampling anything you send to that anyhow.

I'll probably end up with a few different variations of any particular track.  If nothing else, if I'm sending stuff out through different gear in multiple passes I'll definitely send the in-between files.

For extra low fidelity, I'm monitoring on 45 year old hi-fi speakers with questionable crossover capacitors in an untreated bedroom (I'll probably check stuff on good headphones too, though).

Oh, the Arkon infrared transmitter might be out of service for now, I forgot that it needs an 18vdc power supply and I don't think I have one.

I've got one that came to mind as soon as I read your description. It's long (8 minutes) but the bulk of it is ambient-ish anyway so I don't think it's like 8 minutes that require detail and precision or changing dynamics really. It's composed of pretty lo-fi sounds but they were all put through Ableton to get the effects and movement happening...I tried to lo-fi it myself in Ableton to no avail, and always meant to try something else but never have. Would be cool to hear you give it a go  If so lemme know and I'll upload it somewhere and PM you

  On 9/25/2016 at 11:31 PM, RSP said:

For extra low fidelity, I'm monitoring on 45 year old hi-fi speakers with questionable crossover capacitors in an untreated bedroom (I'll probably check stuff on good headphones too, though).

lol I love the idea of this, will send some single stems over soonish

  On 9/26/2016 at 12:18 AM, auxien said:

I've got one that came to mind as soon as I read your description. It's long (8 minutes) but the bulk of it is ambient-ish anyway so I don't think it's like 8 minutes that require detail and precision or changing dynamics really. It's composed of pretty lo-fi sounds but they were all put through Ableton to get the effects and movement happening...I tried to lo-fi it myself in Ableton to no avail, and always meant to try something else but never have. Would be cool to hear you give it a go  If so lemme know and I'll upload it somewhere and PM you

By all means send it over!  It's a good thing it doesn't require detail and precision or changing dynamics because that's not really what I'm going for here this is going to be more of a "let's patch it through a bunch of cheap stuff and see what we can get" thing.

EDIT: don't take that to mean I'm going to half-ass this though, I'm going to do all I can to make these things sound shitty in the right ways, or at least the ways that sound interesting to me.

Oh, add Radio Shack Electronic Reverb to the gear list, I forgot about that one.

You know, stems would actually be a lot of fun too now that I think about it.  Whichever.

So this might be a stupid question, but when you record something to tape doesn't it automatically get compressed a bit?

  On 9/26/2016 at 8:18 PM, Squee said:

So this might be a stupid question, but when you record something to tape doesn't it automatically get compressed a bit?

Yeah. With Dolby or other noise reduction units used, yes for sure. Otherwise there are a few other things going on - tape saturation if you hit red (and analog distortion when you go too heavy on it) high frequencies are rolled off to varying degrees depending on the tape and deck quality and mids are usually bumped a bit and rounded off overall. 

So I suppose so yes. I don't know enough about compression in general to say whether the general qualities of tape - i.e. the 'analog warmth' it can provide = "tape compression" 

  On 9/26/2016 at 8:31 PM, joshuatx said:

 

  On 9/26/2016 at 8:18 PM, Squee said:

So this might be a stupid question, but when you record something to tape doesn't it automatically get compressed a bit?

 

Yeah. With Dolby or other noise reduction units used, yes for sure. Otherwise there are a few other things going on - tape saturation if you hit red (and analog distortion when you go too heavy on it) high frequencies are rolled off to varying degrees depending on the tape and deck quality and mids are usually bumped a bit and rounded off overall. 

 

So I suppose so yes. I don't know enough about compression in general to say whether the general qualities of tape - i.e. the 'analog warmth' it can provide = "tape compression" 

 

Theoreticaly with noise reduction it's compressed when you recrd and then expanded with the same ratio when you play back, so IN THEORY nosie reduction actually keeps it from compressing because it limits how hot the signa that actually reaches the tape can get (but in practice it doesn't work perfectly).  Tape itself does compress though, and it typically compresses more if you don't use noise reduction.

One down!

Sure why not. I'll PM you.

Oh and RSP did a classy job on the track I sent him, I recommend his remastering skills to all. :)

https://soundcloud.com/tsrono/lolita-demaster-1

Thanks!

"Remaster" maybe be overstating it!