What does it mean to remaster an album?
In: Technology
Mastering is the process of preparing recorded music for distribution.
A re-mastered album is just an album where they re-do the mastering step. Music recording standards change over time and sometimes a label will want to re-release a version of an old album that fits into a modern playlist a little better. Or maybe they just want any excuse to re-release an old album.
Mastiring an album is the act of taking all the sound recording from the studio and cut and mix them together into one master version that can be copied for sale. When someone is remastering an album they are taking the original recordings that was used for a previos version of the album and mixing it again. This may be done to use new technology and new styles to make a new version of the album which hopefully sound better then the original.
It means going back to the original recordings that were taken in different tracks. Maybe one track has the lead singer, another has the guitar, another bass, and so on. They take those high quality recordings and remix them to make the whole track sound better. Once they are mixed down they will combine the tracks into a “master” track that is then sold.
In a studio, each separate element of a recording (e.g., vocals, guitar, bass, drums) is recorded separately and then combined together to create the final recording.
Remastering is the practice of going back to those recording elements and changing them before mixing them together again, and/or mixing them together differently.
This can be done just to clean things up if they originally sounded muddy or noisy, or things may be changed in more subjective ways owing to people’s preferences changing.
When a song is recorded, it isn’t typically recorded as a full band into a single microphone straight into a recorder, but as individual instruments, each with separate microphones, are recorded independently – sometimes with the band playing together, sometimes recorded in a studio one musician at a time, and sometimes even having different takes recorded in completly different studios at different times.
This means that a recorded song can be made up of numerous separate tracks, all recorded at different times on different equipment. These separate tracks need mixed together and mastered to turn them into a final recording – so the best tracks (or parts of tracks) are selected, volumes and EQ are set so that they all sound good played together and everything balances (which can vary over the course of a track), effects can be added like reverbs and various signal processing systems utilised to improve audio quality, and the final track is mastered to ensure it is suitable recorded into various different mediums and played back on different systems – so that the file is the correct volume and format to be made into a cd, when pressed as a record, or released as an MP3.
Obviously technology and opinions have changed over time, so modern mixing and mastering allows the audio engineers far greater control nowadays than they did when everything was performed using tape decks and and analogue mixing desk.
When an album is remastered, this is generally done by taking the original audio tracks (normally stored safely by a band or record company), then redoing the modern mixing and mastering process in an attempt to improve the audio quality and sound of an album.
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