Re-Mastering Basics

I started re-mastering the “Ramble on” track by Led Zeppelin by listening to the song over normal hi-fi speakers, at a reasonable monitoring level of around 70dB. I did this because the louder the sound the flatter frequency response we perceive it to be; (see: Fletcher and Munsen loudness contour graphs).

I first noticed that the track’s stereo imagery was round the wrong way (with the guitar in the left and snare in right) compared with the re-master I used as a guide, so in Soundforge I flipped the stereo imagery.

Then before equalizing I restored the audio to eliminate most clicks and pops from the surface noise of the needle on the vinyl record. I used Soundforge’s audio restoration as pictured below.

However, this plug-in didn’t remove the clicks as much as pull down the high end, leaving me with a muffled mix. Unimpressed with the quality of such a plug-in I decided to use the Waves X-click plug-in as shown below.

This proved much more successful and acted on a dynamic range as well as equalization. You could also solo the clicks and pops that were being eliminated by the plug-in which was very useful as it meant I could accurately place the threshold without removing too much audio from the original song. I then went on to equalization shown below.

I used the spectrum analyzer plug-in to compare to the original, commercially released re-master.

I used the time-stretch function in Cubase to make the “16” drum loop the same length as the “32” drum loop by setting the locators to the range of the “32” loop and allowing the time-stretch plug-in to do the rest.

Then to extend the loops I highlighted each track individually and Ctrl+K’d the audio regions to make copies of the loops thereafter.

Crossfading was quite simple, I cut up the audio using the scissor tool (keyboard shortcut and overlapped the audio, and simply pressed X to crossfade between the two audio regions.

A problem I had with using Cubase SX3 with this was importing the stereo .wav files. It always forced me to import them onto either one track, the left and right one after another, or on separate tracks, even when I made a stereo track to start with and they were interleaved files.

This is the exporting dialog box that appears when exporting an audio mixdown in Cubase SX3. You can choose various options, such as the sampling rate, bit resolution, what type of file format it is saved as, the file path, file name, and of course the channels, mono, stereo split, stereo interleaved etc. Although you can choose these, there are no apparent dialog boxes that appear when importing an audio file. So it came out as stereo split in the mix. However, if I need to add an effect to both the left and right channel, which I did in the other tasks, eg. Equalization. I simply added a group channel and changing the routing to output through the group channel, then put the processor plug-in on that one group channel instead of recreating it on both channels.