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
Remastering implies that you keep the original recordings and just change the mix. A lot of times the studio will have the original recordings that were used in the first master. These are usually in much higher quality then what was released as they used high quality analog tapes for studios compared to the lower quality tapes that were sold to end consumers. It is also possible to go through these recordings with new technology and fix them up so they sound better. The remastering process involves taking these original recordings and mixing them together to make a new master copy.
Sometimes they might not have all the original recordings for various reasons. In these cases they might have to try to seperate the different instruments from the original master. This takes a lot more resources to do properly but it is possible.
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