Master - Remaster Process

[UltraFast69]

I am now diverting more focus to how music is originally recorded and then remastered, especially as my system became more resolving.

It’s amazing how the same piece of music sounded good before on a separate system and now not so much. I have been caught a few times buying the umpteenth version cause it was remastered by such and such.

I wonder to what extent the musician had influence in the original mastering process? Hendrix created his own recording studio, “Electric Lady” and often was a part of the engineering process, I guess if your making it, why wouldn’t you want to participate in that level of control?

Then comes remastering. Who really has the say in the remastering process, especially if the original artist has took the Stairway to Heaven; the record company, the other band mates or both?

Then who really has the original masters, especially the older releases, after many series have been released and muddied over time to achieve better dynamics or updating tracks, both has to be a process in itself.

Then comes the goal of the process, a better sound. Whose to say what. What’s going to be decided to make things sound better?

Seems like some of this is a can of worms to a degree; marketing for revenue driven over audiophile quality results.

I just want to sit down and turn on some music and relax. I don’t recall dealing with this back in a time where things may have been simpler or at least felt like they did.

Maybe a Sunday confusing ramble, perhaps a little foggy after Cinco de Mayo, comment at will.










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[astrotoy]

I can give you a perspective from classical music, particularly Decca Records in the UK in the analogue era. All the mixing of microphone feeds were done in real time - usually preset before the recording session began and fed into the mixing board by the recording engineer(s) and fed into the two channels of the tape recorder. There was normally no mixing in the studio days after the recording as was typically done in non classical recordings (any many classical recordings) where multitrack tape recorders were used and mixed down to two tracks in post production. So the job of the mastering engineer at Decca was to get as much of the sound of the two tracks of the tape recorder onto the lacquers for stamping the records. The conductor and or soloists would listen to the playback of various takes during the recording session, but those were for errors or interpretation, or sometimes for balance issues - the brass too loud in one section, etc.

I've had a little experience with mastering engineers during the past few years. When I wrote my Decca book for First Impression Music, Winston Ma (FIM's owner) released 4 CDs with the book, all recordings done by Decca in the '50's through early 80's. The various selections were all remastered by Michael Bishop and Robert Friedrich of Five Four Productions (who had previously worked for Telarc and won more than 20 Grammys between them). They did work on the sound quality under the guidance of Winston - who was a stickler for sound quality, even if it meant many iterations of subtle adjustments to the sound. I was fortunate to receive different iterations of various pieces as the process continued. No artists or original recording engineers were consulted. Almost all of them had died or at least were long retired.

In the case of work that mastering engineer Paul Stubblebine has done for Tape Project, I know that for all but a few of the albums he has remastered, the original artists and recording engineers are no longer around and he uses his artistic judgement. For the Reference Recordings vinyl reissues he has done, he does have Keith Johnson, the original recording engineer as a touch point - also as the person who hired Paul to do the remastering. Almost of these were originally digital recordings done at 176/24, unlike the Tape Project which are from the original analogue tapes.

Larry

 

[Mordante]

It depends I guess. Some artists don't care much. I think I read in an interview a rather famous rock band (cant remember the name) that they don't care about the mastering. In the interview they said they just handed the recording to the studio and let them sort it out. They just like to record and do concerts.

Also many bands do not have any say in the mastering or remastering since they don't own the copyright.