Working on Clifford Darling now. This was a compilation album called in by Ink records in 1985, which was to collect all the stuff made before Since The Accident. So only a two – four year backtrack, compared to the vast distances travelled now to pillage the past. Even so, we were wary of the lack of progress you get when compiling ye olde shite, and I think it was Garry that collected the famous “Clifford Darling Please Don’t live in the Past” line (although “try think of three guys laying a telephone booth” is better).
So a lot of this was cassette, some was 1/4 track tape – all the Blubberknife and Clean stuff. We compiled onto a Revox B77 and then bounced that out to Betamax Digital. So I have the Betamax of the medley on sides C and D, bounced from tape, which is the best master. Sides A and B I have both bounces from tape and the direct cassette to Betamax dubs. Because I’ve only recently cared about archiving they’re all called xxxx.wav and xxxx2.wav & I don’t yet know for sure which is which. The xxxx2 versions have been topped and tailed, which will probably mean they are not the raw dubs. Hey at least I took the time to back it all up over that crazy media period.
Sides C and D – fuck it, I’m not touching it. It sounds like what it is – cassettes and tapes – and I am not going to try ‘correct it’. That was also the decision long ago when making the CD version.
However the CD version does have maximisation on A and B. I was a bit shocked at what I had done in 2002 – the waveform was nearly flat – until I looked at the cassette transfers – they’re nearly flat as well – because us 80’s guys had blasted the cassette tape to get the highest signal to noise, and a touch of tape compression. When you look at the open reel that went to Ink in 1985, there’s obvious points where a cassette is playing (flat line), then a voice sample leaps out (jumps up 6dB).
This is straight from cassette, and wham!
The CD version isn’t actually wrong, it just moved this flat -9dB line up to -3dB which is a bit loudness wars. But I recall I made some 2000 era treatments to some of the tracks, so delete that. I’ll use the absolute masters and move the baseline to -6dB which leaves heaps of headroom. Then a few tracks need a bit of help.
First problem is woof. The bass sounds spread out and become flatulent on the cassette. That needs a little multi-band compression, put a bit of an envelope back where it should be. It’s mostly untreated 808 so easy to spot the problem.
Second problem is splat – mostly high hats that are now fish frypans. Using a little exciter can make the high hats not quite as splurt splurt – bringing back the overtones can move their frequency centre up to where it should be.Some frequencies are leaping around – probably because a different cassette deck was used to play back the stuff. Multi-band compression used ever so slightly will help.I’m not going to touch any underlying noise. I will have a look at what’s going on at less that 20Hz though, because whatever it is, it’s not a sound recording on cassette!In fact there’ll probably be more changes made in the cutting room than any of what I do. Just fix the obvious bruises, leave the surgery to doctors.
Hope to get this done by mid May,