About Re-Mastering (by Harvey Reid)

About Re-Mastering by Harvey Reid

Harvey Reid has played and taught guitar for 40 years, was a former national Fingerpicking Guitar Champion, and has released 22 highly-acclaimed solo recordings of original, traditional, and contemporary acoustic music. In 1980 he wrote the first college textbook for folk guitar. He now lives in Southern Maine.

The Beatles catalog was remastered in 2009, and since I have been remastering a number of titles from my old back catalog I thought it might be a good idea to explain a little bit of what it means. It is extremely important, yet subtle, and very few people understand what is going on.

[NOTE- before I get started... ]The other word that applies to cleaning up and "modernizing" old recordings is "remixing," which unfortunately has been hijacked by the hip-hop music people and generally is seen to refer to incorporating all or part of an old recording in a dance-mix digital collage. Most recording since the 1960's has been done with multi-track machines, and the word "mixing" refers to adjusting the relative volumes, tone and stereo positioning of each of the tracks. In analog days this used to be done by very alert engineers who moved the knobs while the song was playing to do things like make the harmony vocal go up and down or to boost the saxophone during its solo. "Automated mixing" consoles showed up in the 1980's that allowed users to do this and save the changes so that they could then modify and fine-tune the mix and do very minute and precise things. For nearly a decade now the majority of mixing has been done digitally, so that physical moving of knobs by engineers as the song rolls has largely disappeared. The mixing process allows each of the tracks to be placed anywhere in the left to right stereo spectrum (or even to move around in some cases) and each of the tracks can be adjusted for tone (usually called EQ) and volume (sometimes called GAIN.) True re-mixing can only happen when you have access to the multi-track raw recordings, and can thus run each of them through a channel in the mixing board, and make a new set of adjustments to them. Some of the processes associated with mastering and re-mastering are also involved in mixing and re-mixing, such as EQ and reverb. In mastering, the changes can only be applied to the mixed track, whole song or whole album. In mixing, you can change things on one particular track within a multi-track recording.

Mastering is a vital but little-understood process that happens after each of the songs is mixed, to prepare the finished album for duplication. It involves putting the songs in order, adjusting the fades at the end of songs, the length of the spaces between them, and the very-important issue of absolute volume and relative volumes of the songs. EQ adjustments are often made during mastering, and sometimes reverb and other effects are added. A properly mastered album flows nicely from song to song, and when listened to in various situations: high or low volumes, in a car, in a resonant room or a "dead" room, on big or small speakers or headphones-- needs to sound the best it can, and you don't want the listener constantly reaching for the volume knob to turn parts of it up or down. (In an ideal world, you might master an album for small speakers or big speakers, but this is not an ideal world.) If a song is too quiet, during a background-level listening, it can disappear entirely, and likewise a song that is too loud compared to the others can "jump" out and be annoying. Trying to listen to a symphony at dinner is an example of this. The quiet movements are inaudible and the loud movements drown out dinner conversations. Different instruments, because of their tonal properties have a different "presence" at high or low volumes. My guitar can sound really loud in a nice studio, but practically disappear on a car speaker on the road. My autoharp, though, does not sound that loud in the studio, yet it cuts really well and jumps out of the tiny speakers in a gift shop. A melody played on low end of the guitar might vanish in the same setting. When I record with Joyce Andersen, her voice and fiddle behave very differently in different listening environments than do my voice and guitar, and the mixing and mastering processes try to find an optimized sound that addresses all these concerns.

An odd thing has happened in the world of recorded music, and over the last 20 years, though the ability of recording gear to capture all the nuances of sound has increased, this increase has not showed up in the finished recordings. For years, in analog recording, there was a delicate balance involved, where you would set the mike levels carefully so that the loud parts of the music would not "pin the needles" and cause distortion from being too loud. Likewise, if the music was very quiet in parts, you would hear the hiss of the tape. When digital recorders showed up in the mid 1980's they seemed to offer a quantum level better "signal-to-noise" performance, and for the first time, it was possible to capture a dramatically wider spectrum of dynamic range in recorded music. Classical and jazz music fans applauded, and it looked as though recordings were going to be able to sound more like "real life" than ever, and allow the musicians to play and sing dynamically and expressively into the mikes and be captured. I got into this realm myself, and my early digital recordings, starting with "Of Wind & Water" (#104) were done "direct to digital" and thus captured the dynamic reality of my music better than previous technologies. And with CD players not adding their own "surface noise" it seemed that music recording had indeed gone to a new level. However, another more powerful and essentially opposite force entered the arena: compression and limiting. (I wrote a whole essay about compression that covers a lot of this same turf.)

Compression refers to a "squeezing" of the dynamic range of the music by lowering the loud parts and also boosting the quiet sections, and "limiting" refers to only chopping off the peaks of the loud parts, though quite often limiting is referred to as compression. People figured out quickly that if you could lower the volume of the loudest notes in a recording (the so-called "spikes" because of the shape of their sound waves) a few decibels (db's as they are called in audio) then you could raise the overall level of the song that much higher. The more you remove the peaks of the music, the louder the whole song can be. Engineers had always done a little "spot compression" or modest limiting to make music more manageable and "civilized" but once a lot of records started being released that were heavily compressed, they overwhelmed all the uncompressed music out there by being significantly louder. This is why various CD's are various volumes when you put them on shuffle in a multi-disc changer, and artists like me who had thought that people might like to hear the music as "life-like" as possible found that their CD's were not being heard, especially in places like restaurants where the music was playing at background levels. (It became sort of like nuclear deterrent logic, or the sport of wrestling, where you had to starve yourself down to a much lower weight class simply because everyone else was doing it. If you did not, you would face a much larger opponent who would mop the mat with you.)

Digital technology has allowed compression to become smarter and faster and less noticeable, and the compressed music has now completely taken over in all forms of recording, as well as in many stage performances. Modern pop music is generally so compressed now that whispering and shouting are the same volume. When a singer belts out a huge note it is no longer louder than the rest of the song. Like most things, compression has advantages and disadvantages, and though a lot of the "life" and excitement is being systematically squeezed out of music, it also allows the music to be more "user friendly" in situations like listening in a car or at a dinner party. And it is very sinister-- heavily compressed music really jumps out and is very "up front" and "present" and initially seems to be more noticeable, but after extended periods of listening it can become very tedious and one-dimensional. In truth, the music has had one of its dimensions (dynamics) removed, and the puzzle is that at first it can sound really great. When you listen to something like "pop" flavored acoustic music like Alison Krauss or Mark Knopfler (which are both heavily compressed) along side a more "traditional" folk or bluegrass CD, the compressed music is much louder, and you can hear the individual elements quite clearly. It seems like it is easier to listen to, since the lead vocals seem to be right in your ear, and the harmony vocals and solos are also audible. But something critical has been removed! It's a trade-off-- and by removing the spikes and the ability of the music to startle or annoy you with its "punch" the mastering engineers have also removed a vital part of the music's ability to move us emotionally. It is a "de-clawing" and "civilizing" process, and it unfortunately removes a vital element of the music's ability to affect us, and at the same time it becomes louder and more noticeable than music that has not been "de-fanged."

Uncompressed music in a car, where there is a constant drone of background noise, can be almost annoying, since loud parts jump out and quiet parts disappear altogether. A friend of mine played in the Les Miserables orchestra for more than 10 years on tour, and I went to see the show one night. I noticed immediately how great the music and the singers were, but mentioned to him that if they had turned off the compressors I would have enjoyed it a lot more. He said "I remember to the day when they first insisted on introducing the compression in the live show. From that day on the audience stopped leaping to their feet instantly at the end for a standing ovation." The audience had no idea what was being done to them, but they were less moved by the compressed music, but the show producers had controlled and "tamed" the singers and the band.

The most unfortunate thing about this near-takover of the music by compression is that ultimately, it should be an end-user decision. We should all have a compressor knob on our listening equipment, and we should decide how much to squash the music we listen to. It can be useful and it's not all bad. But we don't get to make that decision, and we don't get to choose to buy the uncompressed version of the CD of we want-- they only offer one, and there is no way to uncompress it at the user-end of the music.

Uncompressed music is best when you are sitting in front of the speakers or listening on headphones, and trying to feel and enjoy the emotion in the music. When the guitarist slams a chord really hard, you can feel it, as opposed to a heavily compressed recording where it sounds like all the other chords. The issues are very subtle and somewhat sinister, and compressed music can be very seductive, and at other times can be extremely boring, since so much of the impact of music involves use of dynamics. It's sort of a paradox to a musician who is recording, because as soon as you really sing a loud note or bash a powerful chord, you now understand that that will have to be removed electronically in order that the song won't end up too low in level to be heard in the world at large.

So why did I re-master my recordings? A number of reasons, the primary ones are that they sound a lot better and they are no longer quieter than anybody else's. When I started doing digital recording, it was sort of a sealed box, and it was not easy for anyone to tinker with the waveforms, and the tools were few and clumsy. We sort of take it for granted that digital means you can zoom in and tinker with it, but in the early days its appeal was the cheap tape cost, low noise level, and the fact that there was no quality loss when it was copied or duplicated. In the last 20 years the field of digital editing has exploded, and now there is a huge pile of amazing digital audio tools in the toolbox. With very subtle tweaking of the tone, spatial positioning, and even the phase of the stereo waveforms, they can be made to sound much more musical. There isn't a formula that is applied, but when you put each song under the "microscope," in most cases there is something that can be done to improve it considerably, almost like focusing a pair of binoculars. I have been pleasantly surprised to find that even my minimalist, 2-track recordings have been yielding many surprises, and now sound much more life-like and "present." The re-mastered recordings sound like a piece of cloth has been taken off my ears, and they fill the room better and are easier to listen to. I thought that some of the songs I had been hearing for 20 years would sound wrong to me once I re-mastered them, but it has been quite the opposite. I can't believe how much better some of them sound, and though this is pretty technical stuff, I am really excited about being able to make these decisions myself, and to improve them another quantum level. I succeeded in my goal of capturing a lot of real performances on tape, when I was playing really well and in tune, and though I do some things better than I did 20 years ago, I can't play with as much energy and sizzle as I did back then. Some of the hot guitar pieces I am working on in this current re-mastering sound as good to me as I ever played

I did not do anything dramatic with compression, and the compression I use is to my ears actually helpful because I often play too dynamically after years of street music and trying to get people's attention in noisy environments. The end result is that my remastered CD's are about 7-8 decibels louder than the old ones, and do not "vanish" in multi-disc changers. I intended to compress them a modest amount to make them "in line" with other acoustic music being recorded today, and also to clean up some small noises and glitches. Since my old recordings were uncompressed and dynamic, they sound embarrassingly quiet by modern standards. I am actually much happier with the re-mastered sound, and I will admit that it is nice to "civilize" the music a little bit, so that the "spikes" are less jarring and the overall recording is to my ears easier and more pleasant to listen to.

The other advantage of remastering older recordings, especially for a guy like me, is that the noise-removal software is dramatically better than it used to be. I have always done my recordings live, and there have always been a number of chair squeaks, bone cracks and other extraneous sounds that can pretty easily be identified and cleaned out. I know some people think they are "charming" but a click in the middle of a long fading guitar chord at the end of a thoughtful song does not help, and I have taken the liberty of removing a few of them on older recordings. There are still plenty of breaths and rustling clothing sounds you can hear if you listen closely, so those of you who like that stuff will not be disappointed.

I saved a couple boxes of my old uncompressed CD's, and there are thousands of them out there, so if any of you are audio freaks and want to hear the music more the way it originally was, with no compression and all the original noises, feel free to buy one from me for no extra charge. There are not many CD's out there that are any more "purist" than my early digital CD's. They just aren't very loud and they don't work as well for background music as my newer ones, or as most recorded music today.