working with old cassettes in x1 producer.

hello all,
i've been thinking about a project for quite a while now and i think i might actually give it a go, but i'd like to ask for a few tips and pointers from those who may have done this or something similar before.

a friend of mine has a few cassette tapes of his late father singing some old "crooner" songs like summer wind and some dean martin songs, stuff like that. he was singing at a small gig with someone playing midi files of the backing tracks on a synth. i listened to the tapes briefly and they are not well recorded, but he sings very well.

initially i was just going to bring the audio into sonar and do some eq'ing, compress it a bit, bring it up to level, burn a couple of cd's and call it a day, just as a favor to my friend so that his only copies of his dad singing would at least be on cd.

then i got to thinking, what if ran the audio through audio-snap (sonar's beat-detective) and then went onto the net and downloaded the midi files to as many songs as i can, and then tried to bring up the vocal and suppress the rest of the music and rework the original vocal into a mix with the new midi tracks. since the original has digital drums, i can lock onto the tempo with audio snap and use some nice drum, bass, strings and piano samples, etc. i can even lay some guitar and 4 string bass on it.

i was planning on putting a band-pass filter on the original audio and trying to isolate the vocal as much as possible, but aside from that and maybe some deep notches, i'm not sure what else to try.

is there any good audio restoration freeware?

any suggestions or pointers would be appreciated.

thanks.
  

M@ B


hello all,
i've been thinking about a project for quite a while now and i think i might actually give it a go, but i'd like to ask for a few tips and pointers from those who may have done this or something similar before.

a friend of mine has a few cassette tapes of his late father singing some old "crooner" songs like summer wind and some dean martin songs, stuff like that. he was singing at a small gig with someone playing midi files of the backing tracks on a synth. i listened to the tapes briefly and the are not well recorded, but he sings very well.

initially i was just going to bring the audio into sonar and do some dynamics processing and eq'ing, bring it up to level, burn a couple of cd's and call it a day, just as a favor to my friend so that his only copies of his dad singing would at least be on cd.

i then got to thinking, what if ran the audio through audio-snap and then went onto the net and downloaded the midi files to as many songs as i can, and then try to bring up the vocal and suppress the rest and rework the new midi tracks into a mix with the original vocal. since the original is synthesized drums, i can lock onto the tempo with audio snap and use some nice bass, strings and piano samples, etc. i think that would make my friend and his family happy to hear something like that and, at the same time, it would be a nice way for me to learn something new.

could anyone offer some wisdom, suggestions or pointers?
they would be greatly appreciated.
thanks,
matt

That would be a very nice thing to do and I think you will have fun doing it.  Do you have a cassette deck with a pitch control ? Would be handy to get them in tune.

your going to need waves my friend..theres alot out there..but waves was made for audio restoration(some of it anyway)
ive done a bunch of old 4 and 8 track stuff..running one track in at a time and synching it up in autosnap.these are tapes that are over 25 years old that i did as a teenager.but you gotta remember..i only went digital 4 years ago..i had cakewalk proaudio 9 but only used it to master from a 16track tascam reel(before the old 4-8 track days..i had a great 488..it was an 8 track cassette with high tape speed..great quailty believe it or not

M@ B


thanks guys, i do have a cassette deck w/ pitch control, my old 4 track. i hadn't considered the tuning issue, but your probably right thanks. i guess i'll tune the cassette tapes to a guitar or keyboard (A440hz)

btw, can anyone suggest any good audio restoration freeware?

I've even used a guitar tuner held up to the speaker to tune tapes, a chromatic one works best but one of the notes on a guitar are bound to come around... LOL !

M@ B


thanks chuck. i really don't think i want to restore the existing audio as much as i want to just extract the vocal as best as i can from the original cassette. i'm not sure how to do that. i was planning to start with a low and a high pass filter to attenuate the lows and highs where there is no vocal information. from that point, i guess i'll experiment with other stuff. the new instruments should hide a lot of the old ones that come with the vocal (i'm hoping).

you might want to throw channel tools on there,you can do alot of vocal extraction with that..and the vocal strip has some functions as well

Interesting topic. 

See sample on   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tr7HUp0TZc

The company that did that is http://www.audionamix.com.../voiceExtraction 

Another one is selling something called
http://www.musicmorpher.com/free-tutorials/voice-extractor.htm
I have not tried it but I think it only works with stereo where the vocal is in the middle.  I think you should be able to get similar result in Sonar in by inverting the phase and EQ in few steps.

M@ B


thanks chuck.
i'll certainly give channels tools a go.
how would you use the vocal strip to help isolate the vocal?

first you need to find a way to get the music a little lower.use a frequency aynalsis to find the right frequencys..use channels tools and experiment with it..you can drop the center out which does wonder for certain things.also the de-esser in vocal strip can do some cool things if you work with it