Three weeks ago I received from a friend a 43 yrs old stereo master tape, from a radio show my band played in, recorded at Sveriges Radio in 1977.
The music style was instrumental in the vein of Osibisa-Santana-Weather Report-jazz rock whatever. The instruments were drums and percussion, electric bass, electric guitar (me) hard left and tenor saxophone hard right. The other guys were 25 and I was 17.
A friend baked the tape and digitized it.
It got rinsed from wows & flutters in Celemony Capstan.
I got the 24 bit stereo file and started to try to ”remaster” it. There was quite an imbalance in the stereo field, with the left channel sounding much stronger than the right. Easy to fix in WaveLab 10. But the sound all in all was weak and anemic with weak drums and and an obviously far too close miked guitar with unpleasant details in the upper register.
Upgraded to SL7 a week ago.
Performed the ”Unmix” process and beefed up the resulting drums/percussion stem with VST 3 plugins (Pro-Q3 and some compressor/maximizer).
The bass stem was further decomposed into it’s three components (tone, noise, transients), which were eq-ed and compressed separately.
There I got a tight rhythm section with a more heavy and modern sound, nice!
The guitar and sax was panned very hard left & right in the resulting ”Other” stem. Now, if I could separate them into two mono files, or a split stereo stem, it would have been great.
I haven’t found a function for this in SL7, so I duplicated the layer and applied to each a VST-plugin that could pan each layer left and right respectively,
Then I turned the phase for one of these two layers (to clean out possible remnants from the other layer), and from there I could EQ them separately. I could also erase a very embarassing error on the guitar At last, after 43 years!
Panning the instruments back, not so hard though.
I then merged them together and applied a little reverb with a VST-plugin.
Voilá, a completely (almost, drums and percussion not separated from each other) new and fresh remix of the tape that was recorded when I was 17 in 1977. Feels good, the result was stunning!
One remark: since SL7 can’t unmix the guitar from the sax, it would have been of great help if there had been a pan control for the individual layers, e.g. next to the volume slider.
Of course I could have exported all stems to WaveLab or Nuendo but I chose to do it all in SpectraLayers.
Thanks for an awesome program!