Here are some before/after clips from the 10-CD Henry Cow 40th Anniversary Box Set which I remastered. All files here are 16 bit 44.1 wav format. Perhaps one day I'll go into the technical details about "how I did it", before I forget! For the past ten years or so all my recording, mixing, and mastering work is done with Samplitude Professional.

With the Yellow Half-Moon and Blue Star: Of the various versions of this recording I received, this one was, incredibly, overall the "best" sounding. It has a couple of obvious problems: the high level of hiss is one, but even worse is the rumbling bass leftover from whatever had been previously recorded on the same tape and not completely erased. One might think I could remove the unwanted bass by EQing, but that would also effect the sounds we want to keep, making everything sound too thin. As usual it took several stages of very subtle treatments to end up with the final result, I'll explain when I have some time. With the Yellow Half-Moon and Blue Star: Before With the Yellow Half-Moon and Blue Star: After

One Half of the Sky: As with several other tracks, this was the only version available so I had no choice but to see what I could do with it. For starters every single peak is brutally clipped, and there's no dynamic difference between the "louder" and "quieter" parts. This could be due to "loudness war" treatment done by someone somewhere along the way, or by accidental overload of a digital recorder's inputs. Have a look at the waveforms: the top is the original, the bottom the remastered version. Besides being mercilessly clipped, the original is also ridiculously trebly as well as lacking low frequencies. As usual I didn't use any EQ to get the final result, I'll explain how I did it on another page when I get some time. One Half of the Sky: Before One Half of the Sky: after

Did it Again: Somewhere along the way I noticed that the two versions I had of this song were actually two different recordings of the same performance. The one I'll call version 1 sounds like a portable cassette recording from the audience point of view close to the stage. It has a lot of audience reaction, a lot of guitar, thin-sounding drums and bass, and only a faint echo of the vocals. Version 2 sounds like a desk recording and has almost no guitar, but plenty of drums, bass, and vocals. (The sax isn't very present on either.) Once I noticed they were the same performance I thought I could combine them to get the best of both. The tricky thing was that the audience recording runs much faster than the desk recording, and I couldn't simply resample it to the same pitch/speed because it wasn't a consistent difference. You'd immediately hear the flanging effect as the two recordings drifted out of synch. This is always a problem when synching analog recordings so I wasn't surprised, but this was made extra difficult because of the extremely jittery speed of the cassette recording. So I chopped it (version 1) into very short segments of perhaps 1/4 to 1/2 second length, resampling each segment seperately and manually synching them with the desk recording. It took a while, was it worth it...I don't care, I just had to do it! Did it Again: version 1 Did it Again: version 2 Did it Again: Bob's final blend