I think the remastering works a lot better on this one, without the drums getting in the way. Recording live drums is still a pain, and it gets worse the fewer mics you have to work with, so I don't blame them at all.
The steps you mentioned cleaned this up a lot, without harming the sound quality much. There's a tiny amount of hiss in that back that gives it just the right amount of vintage charm. If you want to do more mastering like this, I'd look into finding an exciter plugin that can add stereo width. Obviously it won't be like starting from a full stereo mix, but even with mono, just that tiny bit of width can add a lot on headphones.
--:-- / --:--
Author Comments
Back in the 90's, two of my Uncles had a short-lived Beatles-inspired Pop Rock duo called "The Rinds"
He managed to keep a few of the recordings he had on Tape and converted them digitally to his iTunes.
He sent them to me awhile ago and I used to listen just for fun, but I recently asked one of them if it would be cool to share the project with the world, and he said yes, so I got to work.
When you're working with badly-recorded & mixed 8-track demos, there's not much you can do in the sound department.
Not to mention they weren't converted into WAVs, but m4a's since it was a direct rip to his iTunes at the time.
So here's what I was able to do with what I had:
-Reduce tape hiss
There was an insane amount of tape hiss on these tracks, so I located the specific frequencies where the hiss was the loudest and attempted to EQ it out while still preserving the overall sound of the instruments & vocals.
-De-Clipping / De-Crackling
Analog recording devices don't clip in the same sense that digital clipping sounds like. In fact, with harmonic distortion, clipping can actually sound great when using an analog board.
Unfortunately, this was not recorded with an analog board, but a 90's 8-track. Somewhat luckily, clipping on one of these is more like hitting the track with a harsh limiter. It hits the maximum amount of information it can handle and won't get any louder or record any cleaner. It's a little more complicated than that, but the clipping on these tracks I had to fix wasn't from that, it was from the analog to digital transfer. More than likely it was just recording too hot into the program and clipped. I managed to fix the crackling and clipping so your ears won't shatter on those high notes.
-Spectral De-Noise
Explaining exactly how this works is a little difficult, but the overall process is just getting rid of extra hisses and hums in the recording.
So with that, please enjoy what I've tried my best on remastering and I hope you like these lost gems of the 90's!
You can download the album here (pay what you want)
Tiny Days | The Rinds | Glassheart Records (bandcamp.com)
Click here to stream the album: https://bit.ly/3oORGDb
seatellite responds:
They didn't even have enough microphones to record live drums, so they had to use a drum machine and mix everything down each time they recorded something to access more tracks.
Ironically, The Beatles, which were their biggest influence, used this same method throughout their career to achieve multi-tracking & fake stereo back in the day lol
Also I did experiment with a few exciter plugins as well, but because of the audio quality of the recordings, it was really hard to use them without introducing more clipping.
In the end my objective was just to make the original tracks more listenable while leaving as much as the original as possible.
If I was able to get the original tapes in high-quality and re-record them digitally myself, I could have definitely done a lot more, but it was difficult with what was essentially a chain of tape to a digital 128kbps m4a file.
Thanks for the review and I hope you enjoyed the songwriting itself!
Credits & Info
You might also enjoy…
seatellite 
Licensing Terms
You are free to copy, distribute and transmit this work under the following conditions:
- Attribution:
- You must give credit to the artist.
- Noncommercial:
- You may not use this work for commercial purposes. *
- No Derivative Works:
- You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
*Please contact me if you would like to use this in a commercial project. We can discuss the details.
