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Now that I have finished remastering another album, I thought it might be fun to share a few things that go into the process.
As you know, The Story of Our Lives is a single song split into 12 parts. So, once the original master was loaded into Studio One, I split the track at the appropriate points (using the CD as reference) and made sure there were no gaps. Two-second gaps are normally generated automatically, so it’s important these are set to zero so that each part runs seamlessly into the next. This is even more important for the continuous version of the album.
Note that I am skipping over lots of intermediate processes to keep this post short. Namely, there is a serious bout of listening to the music before, during and after each stage. Anything not right, correct it and start again. And then listen on multiple devices. Painfully time-consuming, but necessary.
Here, you can see the tracklist. Once the single track was split, it created 12 in total. Each one was named and the gap set to 0.00 seconds.
As far as the splits were concerened, I managed to get them pretty much where they are on the original release
I then completed the Metadata, as I’m a stickler for that sort of thing!
Here is a look at the mastering chain
In the above image, you can see that each track had Ozone 9 on it and a VU Meter, set to -6. This is fairly simple, on the face of it, but with Ozone 9 you can slap in all manner of modules and get super complex very quickly! I am a great advocate for using the inbuilt tools with the DAW: Studio One has some fantastic things! However, for mastering, I decided to take a different approach and do it all (mostly) with Ozone 9 Advanced. Apart from anything else, it puts you in the right headspace for the task.
On the actual final output section, I have a gentle bit of saturation, some stereo width, a limiter and another meter! Love my meters!
And that’s just about it. If any track had required surgical work (fixing pan, L+R loudness imbalances, pops, clicks, noise), then I would have used SoundForge or RX7 to get into the nitty-gritty, but in this case, the original masters sounded decent and simply needed polish to make them sound even better.
Wrapping Up
In essence, the above is pretty much what I will be doing for each release. When everything is complete, a simple export to .wav file finalizes the job and it’s ready to upload to Bandcamp and CDBaby.
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