mastering for a friend

So a buddy of mine is putting his old band back together to play a special event. He knows a family with a little girl who has cancer and he's organizing a local fundraiser with some bands. 

So he was digging through his attic getting ready for a yard sale and found one of his band's original cassette tapes. He digitized the tunes and plans to include them on a CD to help raise more money for this family. 

I was following this on facebook and since I have played in the church band with him for a time, I offered to help him by cleaning up and restoring the music on the tape. We all know that a tape loses it's fidelity with time and plays.  He told me where to get the waves....and so I did.

The original songs were recorded at a local college's recording studio. They have an audio/video course and the guys and gals in that course love to work on projects and it affords local groups and artists the chance to get into a nice studio at a very low price. 

So.... I downloaded the 6 songs and loaded them into X1...  Just to see where my starting point of reference was .... I hit play on one of the songs..... Oh....MY....GOODNESS.....????  Unbelievable! 

The tracks were all "bricked out" compression running wide open..... everything squashed, no dynamic range left in the music ...... the meters on X1 sat there the entire time and looked like they were frozen..... did not budge from the first note to the last. The distortion in the bass and the vocals and the guitar as well as drums.... oh heck...everything was distorted. 

But I did agree to "help" so I plunged in. Listening to the tracks, I really did not know what I could do to make this better in any meaningful way. The tracks were so over the top to start with, what I didn't want to do was make them worse, more compressed, more distorted. 

What I ended up doing in the end was to insert Ozone (in the master bus) and use some of the modules to reshape the EQ a bit and using the mutliband compression to try to put a bit of punch in the kick without compounding the initial problem. The mix itself was pretty bad so that wasn't easy.  I was not very happy with the results but there wasn't a lot of options there to start with. 

I enveloped the hum and count in for a cleaner start to the songs, let O4 do it's thing and smoothed out the levels between tracks. 

I don't have the tracks posted anywhere currently so at this point I can't do a before/after comparison..... maybe later I can.

Still waiting to see what he thinks about the tracks I sent.  It's all for a good cause..... 

good point Mike.... that is possible.... but according to my friend, the time is close upon him to burn the CD's for the event. 

I did pause in the writing of this to PM him about this.... I offered to listen to the tape at his house and convenience to determine if the tape is the problem or the transfer. It would be nice to hear the tape be a cleaner version..... it could be redone easily and correctly and he would have something to be proud of.