5.1/7.1 remixes from 1/2 inch masters

[ndiamone]

We might have some budding engineers here.
We need em.

This is for them.

Too many of us are getting too old, too deaf and too fat to fit behind the music desk anymore.
Yours truly included (325 on 6-foot and in upper 40's)
and like any audio engineer wear my pants under
my belly purely for comfort and ease in reaching
for things that drop on the floor.
(like beating the dog to the fallen pizza bits).

As probably a lot of you know, a lot of the labels are trying to remix
for 5.1 or 7.1 from half-inch tape recorded in the 50's and 60's.

The main reason this is possible is that a lot of the time, the
production was spread over 3 or more reels.

Usually though in those days it was, just one tape,
you did 4 songs in 3 hours for 4 days to record the 12 songs
for your album plus a couple singles and some `safety' numbers
to use later, mix over the weekend and have audition mixdowns
for your record company brass on Monday.

But on the productions you got lucky on, the first reel of half inch
3 track was for orchestra. Mix that to mono and lay it on a 2nd reel.
Lay in 2 tracks of background singers or supplemental players on top.

Mix those to mono and lay that onto a 3rd tape with the 2nd gen mono
orchestra and 1st generation mono supplemental players and use the
third track on the third reel for lead vocal or featured player.

So if you do like me and work for a firm that reassembles all those
original stems to remix for 5.1 etc, all three reels with no timecode
all have to sync in order to remix.

Fortunately all tape has a constant frequency bias recorded along
with the music. So you can extract the 3 original stereo orchestra
tracks from the first reel, the 2 original tracks of background singers
or added sidemen from the 2nd reel (useful in making surround mixes)
and the original track with the leadman or vocalist from the 3rd reel.

We record each reel in real time into a Power Mac for Media
at say 13.75 MHz video rate in order to give enough samples
of the bias frequency to work off of. We then and send the
files to Jaime Www.plangentprocesses.com to get
Plangentized i e have the original bias frequency resolved out
and all the tape flutter and wow removed as a result.

This returns all production reels of the same production to very
close to sync status, however this only works with session tapes
which have at least one originally-recorded track. Meaning there's
too many generations of duplication in commercially-recorded tape
to do you any good at home.

Jaime can lock all that up in sync with itself and it's almost like having
one 1-inch 8-track master with all the tracks lined up instead of how it is:
3 reels of half inch not synched up.

Yes it's many thousands of dollars an hour for Jaime's time and sync artistry.

But if you've ever tried to sync up Sie Liebt Dich with She Loves You in the
computer by yourself to try and get stereo She Loves You as a result, or if
you ever tried to remix your own quadraphonic Pet Sounds by yourself off
production elements in the Beach Boys Box Set then you know what I mean.

When your engineer gets 300.00 an hour for digital audio workstation processing
and it takes weeks and weeks for him to line it all up by hand, it's worth it.

If anybody's curious and wants to practice and see if they can do a better job than
Jaime without resolving bias out, I have several standard non Plangentized transfers
of interesting examples of multi-reel productions that I can email or cut onto DVD for
whoever is bored and wants to make their own quad in Diamond Cut Pro or Adobe
Audition or whatever.

Yes all the rights thereto have long since expired due to publishing companies going
out of business rather than being acquired by anybody. But they are still nice 50's
and 60's oldies that beginning digital music production students can practice on.

Hope this is informative.

 

[Q-Eight]

I'd rather play with something that's sync'd but what have you got?

I've come up with some very groovy quad mixes from the multitracks that have been floating around the internet.

I would love to get into mixing/production and I think I have the basic skills down. I have been told though that it's a very tough industry to get into.

 

[ndiamone]

I'd rather play with something that's sync'd but what have you got?

Various publishing demos from the 50's and 60's. However, rather than the individual vocal and piano tracks normally found on publishing demos, these are full productions with band and everything.

I have my 44.1 transfers here on my drive, but if you want the High Definition, that I have to wait til the next time I go home for the holidays, as they are in storage in Pennsylvania.

I've come up with some very groovy quad mixes from the multitracks that have been floating around the internet.


I would love to get into mixing/production and I think I have the basic skills down. I have been told though that it's a very tough industry to get into.

For the old-school guys like most of us, no matter whether you're 20 or 50 weigh 125 or 550, the archive part of the sound industry has always been the easiest door to open.

However, it's also the fastest door to close in your face.

That's because a lot of archive engineers that run the restoration studios are these epitomes of the audiovisual-nerd stereotypes: old fat terminally single grizzly bears with the personality of sandpaper who don't take showers, stay up all night in dark holes known as the mastering suites who refuse to retire or tolerate much of anybody or anything else.

That's pretty much who I got trained by in the 70's and 80's and it's pretty much still like that. So if you have talent and a thick skin and a taste for small enclosed spaces that smell like a football team locker room and are fond of caveman food at 3:AM or you have a piece of rare gear the engineer needs for his transfer, it could just be your Jojo Dancer Life Callling.

 

[ndiamone]

Hi there.

Do you personally do the 5.1 mixes?

I have, on occasion done remixes from 1 inch 8 track and 2 inch 16 track. However I like better re-timing half-inch 3-track and half-inch 4-track production stems spread out over a few reels. Most of those selections you can almost guarantee have never been heard in true discrete stereo nevermind surround sound.

The closest they get is some cheesey `mix the band track in the center, the lead vocal on the left and the backup vocals on the right' type affair.

Or sometimes they do like I said in the other post: make a front mix of just the lead vocal and the band track, make a `B-Mix' of the band track and the backup vocals for the rear and there you have it: 2 channel quad (front mono and surround mono).

what software program do you personally use once you have all the original mono multitracks?

I started out with the Cool-Edit-Pro (before it became Adobe Audition) and then migrated
over to Diamond Cut Pro before sailing off into deep Pro-Tools waters.

John

Have fun

 

[ndiamone]

Reason I'm asking is cuz I would like to try doing 5.1 mixes from the multitracks.

OK, but I think you might want to start and get your feet wet with something smaller than a big 1-inch or 2-inch with a million effects and processes needed to make it sound good.

What pro tools would you recommend?

For you I wouldn't even start off with Protools of any capacity. It's complicated, it's expensive, it's got like the steepest learning curve, tech support is ridiculous, etc. Definitely not for the feint of heart.

Start off simpler with some of the Adobe Audition type programs and some half-inch 4-track tape and players you can pick up at the swapmeets, church, school or other civics organizations.

If you DO go all-digital to start, you live in Toronto, so there won't be any problem finding someplace to send in for 4-track half-inch transfers. Hell, Richard Hess is right there in Toronto, he can restore and transfer anything.

Any advantages over going all PC?

As everybody knows, the Mac is the be all and end all for music and video. Yes there are some fairly decent PC-based programs you can find, reviews of which can be found here or in dozens of other sound and video forums across the Net.

Meaning if you have a PC now and do not yet wish to go Mac during the learning curve, then split the difference. Choose one or more programs to audition in your own home that were written originally for the Mac, but which have PC versions as well. Again, check the reviews on the various recording forums throughout the Web to see which is best for your learning and operational style.

What about doing the remixing on a hardware based solution instead?

Absolutely. You can find a nice half-inch semi-pro 4-track on the various electronic swapmeet-type places for not much money. The good ones come with a quarter-inch 4-track headstack and guides as well in case you run across some quarter-inch 4-track music stems.

Original music production stems however are quite different from the 4-track quadraphonic quarter-inch reels you all have. The best way to tell between 4-track quadraphonic and 4-track music stems is the quadraphonic (or 5.1 mixes) all the channels have something in common.

In music stems however, the 4 tracks merely consist of 4 sets of semi-isolated sections of the band and/or soloists and vocals. Depending on how the stems were recorded, the cross-channel microphone leakage can either be a help or a hinderance, so be aware and try not to get too frustrated.

As far as a mixing board, from your 4-track half inch you can find a nice used Harris Broadcast or other modest yet hardy radio production console, again for not much money off the various swapmeet-type places.

As long as it has a greater-than-six-channel mixing bus to it you should be fine.

Of course, you won't be able to do 5.1 trans-channel panning such as that used for airplane flyovers or explosions in movies, but if the board has an A-Mix and a B-Mix you should be able to mix a discrete two-channel front mix and a discrete two-channel rear mix at the same time and then simply lay those two mixes simultaneously back to a different 4-track reel to reel. The 5.1 part of the mix will be retrieved when the matrix program lifts the center and the subwoofer channel out of the center channel mix you've made.

If you don't have a 4-channel amp and speaker setup through which you can monitor the two different front and rear feeds from A-Mix and B-Mix on the console, you'll have to do like they used to do in the early days of quad when staff engineers were mixing quad in a stereo studio: keep swapping the monitor feed back and forth between the A (front) mix and the B (rear) mix.

Of course if you later layback into a multitrack computer soundcard, you can save your center and subwoofer channel as a separate audio file and mix in the computer.

But yes I think you should try hardware mixing first from a reel to reel deck and a small console to get a feel for the art part of the craft. You may also want to draft yourself as a soundman-trainee for when local bands play the circuits. By the time you've done that awhile, you'll have picked up the basic knowledge and gear you need to record bands who don't have the money for a real studio, but who at the same time do not want to make a record off their PA feed one night when they play.

So you'll be getting experience and they'll be grateful for anything better than their PA feed on a record.

Enjoy.