How does one go about remastering a song? Is it the case that some skilled musicians will attempt to replicate the original instrumental lines, while leaving the vocals alone? I’m thinking particularly of artists like Bob Dylan or Led Zeppelin where the sound is so distinctive but the older recordings can be poor quality. How do you keep that same feel in the music albeit with a better quality recording? And do artists tend to remaster their own songs or is it done by independent parties?
In: Technology
* There are three main things that happen to produce a record:
* A song is recorded
* The song is mixed
* The song is mastered
* Mastering is the process of taking the mixed recording and preparing it for the medium that is being released.
* Back in the day that was vinyl records.
* Then it became cassette tapes
* then compact discs (CDs)
* then digital audio streams.
* Mastering doesn’t really do anything to change the feel of the song, it just makes small tweaks to the levels and frequencies to make sure it sounds right.
* Re-masters are essentially the same thing.
Oh right I think I get you, thanks
Remastering implies that you keep the original recordings and just change the mix. A lot of times the studio will have the original recordings that were used in the first master. These are usually in much higher quality then what was released as they used high quality analog tapes for studios compared to the lower quality tapes that were sold to end consumers. It is also possible to go through these recordings with new technology and fix them up so they sound better. The remastering process involves taking these original recordings and mixing them together to make a new master copy.
Sometimes they might not have all the original recordings for various reasons. In these cases they might have to try to seperate the different instruments from the original master. This takes a lot more resources to do properly but it is possible.
A “master” is the original high-quality recording. With analog media, every time you use it degrades a little, so masters were usually only copied a few times then put into a vault.
Remastering means opening up that vault and making a new copy, presumably with improved technology. That copy will have separate tracks that might be reprocessed, and modern audio processing techniques might be used to improve the sound. But mostly it is just a new copy from the original.
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