How does one go about remastering a song? Is it the case that some skilled musicians will attempt to replicate the original instrumental lines, while leaving the vocals alone? I’m thinking particularly of artists like Bob Dylan or Led Zeppelin where the sound is so distinctive but the older recordings can be poor quality. How do you keep that same feel in the music albeit with a better quality recording? And do artists tend to remaster their own songs or is it done by independent parties?
In: Technology
A “master” is the original high-quality recording. With analog media, every time you use it degrades a little, so masters were usually only copied a few times then put into a vault.
Remastering means opening up that vault and making a new copy, presumably with improved technology. That copy will have separate tracks that might be reprocessed, and modern audio processing techniques might be used to improve the sound. But mostly it is just a new copy from the original.
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