At the risk of this thread landing like a giant thud, I’m creating it anyway. Almost anyone on this site could get some enjoyment out of the YouTube channel as there is something on it for almost everyone. To most enjoy this opening post, I suggest putting on the channel in shuffle mode or checking out the Top 25 Most Played playlist that are included at the end of this post. Ideally, you will listen on decent headphones or speakers to get the full impact of what I’m doing with the channel. If you listen with earbuds or out of your phone speaker it won’t do much for you. All these songs will also play well in your car, especially brand new ones like dlk9s has. Thanks in advance if you take this ride with me. On to the story, and yes it is long.
I started the YouTube channel in November of 2022. I went in with zero expectations for the channel and was just hoping to use it as a skills sharpener if it didn’t get shut down by copyright strikes.
After I posted the first 10 songs, the worst that had happened was copyright claims. They allowed the songs to stay with generally no viewer restrictions outside of a few record companies blocking Russia and Belarus due to the Ukraine war.
Since then less than 10 have been completely blocked. No copyright strike was given on any of those and I just removed the affected songs from the channel.
As of today, there are 640 songs I’ve remastered from stereo mixes or remixed (basically new mixes) from stems I created since the beginning. I’ve been too busy for a while to have done much lately but am gearing up to do a bunch more. I have at least 100 candidates at the ready that I’m planning on doing when I get the time and I also take requests.
The channel has 1924 subscribers as of today and roughly 502,400 views. I have two other YouTube channels I’ve created that each surpassed a million views covering different subjects in entirely different ways. This one is well on its way to that milestone though I may not live long enough to see it passed.
My goal with the channel was simple, but my strategy dramatically changed since I created the channel. I call myself The Benevolent Remasterer because I never expected to make a dime from the channel. I was doing this project solely out of love for the music I remastered. I am expensive to work with and have donated an extraordinary amount of time to the channel.
The main goal was to find the best quality copy of the song on YouTube (often on artist pages), and have my remaster become the newest best quality version available on YouTube. In general, this is not considered Fair Use solely because of how dramatic the ‘improvements’ are to the songs I remaster or remixed. I actually do hope to replace them as people’s preferred version and that violates the spirit of Fair Use. One of the key tenets of what I’m doing is trying to make the songs sound the way I want them to sound. That can create sweeping changes to the songs while they still sound like the same song you already loved.
In the very earliest phase of the channel, I tried to compete with the loudness level of some extremely hot newer songs. I hate the loudness wars, but it becomes harder to hear some of the improvements I’m making when the original is so loud. Some people really do think louder is better even though it is not. I also was not intending to make technically ‘sound’ remasters due to only working with stereo mixes. That meant I would let technical errors through if what I’d done created the ‘feel’ and impact I was hoping for.
Very quickly, I determined I had no interest in fighting a loudness war as that was not in my image. I wanted to fight a quality war. Because of this, I went back into music history starting on my 9th remaster. Older songs were going for quality over loudness, but there were severe limitations on how they could deliver their songs due to the technology of the day. I went back into 70s and early 80s R&B (sometimes even further back than that) and 70s funk and disco as that was where most of the edge pushing was happening related to the limitations. Reggae also played a large role in these earlier remasters. These songs (outside of some of the Reggae stuff that was really effed up) were also well recorded and generally well balanced enough to begin my project. I often wished I had control over kicks and snares but I was ready to get to work.
Throughout this project, I’ve worked on three computers and multiple sets of headphones, which has complicated the project somewhat over time, as the volumes of the computers are slightly different and the headphones, despite being the same model, have slightly different perceptions. Most people won’t be able to tell a difference in volumes from computer to computer, but I can. It’s subtle but there.
I uploaded my first 10 remasters the week I was going on a Maui trip. The hardest part of a project like this is getting found. These are generally famous songs and in the scope of YouTube, my results should land at the bottom and basically never be seen. It seemed that would be the way after the first set that was also a test to see what kind of copyright issues I’d face. The channel would die on the vine or move forward after that. None were blocked despite most getting copyright claims. I knew then that the channel would not die and I could have some fun playing with a bunch of great music.
I uploaded the next batch of 10 the night before we left for Maui. When we got to the condo, I checked the channel and found my version of Automatic by The Pointer Sisters had 800 views in less than 20 hours. Somehow I’d been found. In our late night down time, I remastered more in Maui on my travel computer. These were some of my favorite early remasters.
They were:
Strange Games & Things by The Love Unlimited Orchestra
Jungle Love by The Time
Girlfriend Extended by Pebbles
Mercedes Boy by Pebbles
Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get by The Dramatics
September by Earth, Wind, and Fire (inspired by a Target commercial lol)
Operator by Midnight Star
All were copyright claimed, with September ultimately being blocked. It was either too good or too bad to stay. I’d like to think it was too good. By this point I was up to 27 remasters in a little over a week. I generally did at least 10 remasters a week until i got cancer and ended up in the hospital in May 2024. At that point I’d done 478 remasters. The last ones I think I was still ok for were:
1979 by The Smashing Pumpkins
Today by The Smashing Pumpkins
London Calling by The Clash
I was definitely sick when doing these last ones before the hospital:
How Long Will It Take by The Plimsouls
This Ain’t No Picnic by The Minutemen
Spinnin’ by Soul Asylum
Sodajerk by Buffalo Tom
Into Your Arms by The Lemonheads
My first remaster shortly after I got out of the hospital while awaiting my official diagnosis was Deja Vu by Teena Marie.
Since then I’m down to a bit under 10 per month with some substantial breaks. Sometimes I might do 10 in a weekend or 20 over a week but that’s been rare. I’m starting to get into a mode where I want to do a lot and expect to begin again soon. My latest remaster, which is more of a new mix is My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It) by En Vogue.
When I created the channel, I intended it to be secret, not attached to my name at all and it’s remained that way. I do have some remasters of my own work on the channel as Easter Eggs, which led to the artist who stumbled upon the channel to think I was some super fan of his music. I broke the news to him that it was me and we both thought that was funny.
I’ve had a few friends who are peers come up to my room and I’ve shown them the channel along with demonstrations of how I achieve it. The response by all of them was great, so I knew I had something.
I originally wanted to be a music producer/engineer as my career but had such a bad experience at my internship that I said f that and ended up in post-production sound. I always did occasional projects as a hobby but never anything full time. At one point I was interested in mastering but didn’t know why. I went away from that. I did some mastering for a talented musician I know in the early 2010s but it paid practically nothing. The one great thing that came out of that was a brief snippet of one of the songs I mastered (professionally, not part of this project) appeared in the final episode of The Good Place when Jason is DJ’ing. I about passed out when I heard it lol.
The channel came to be because of bad experiences with mastering engineers of music I’d mixed and also that I thought almost everything on YouTube sounded like crap. My original understanding of mastering was that great engineers would significantly elevate the original song. That they were the hitmakers with their styles. That people would go to mastering engineers whose style they liked and let them run free. That changed with musicians having access to gear for themselves and often very small brains going along with huge egos.
This caused a fundamental change in the approach to mastering and mixing. I remember asking my friend who mixed ‘I Wanna Sex You Up’ if he ever listened to demos of songs he mixed. He said, ‘Never. They hired me to be me.’ In the modern age, most mastering engineers receive a hot mix and are expected to slap it on a CD as loud as humanly possible just fixing small problems. Anything other than that and they probably get yelled at. For all the projects I mixed, the mastering engineers made all my mixes sound worse and basically stole the life out of them. I determined when I did The Benevolent Remasterer that my goal was to make the songs feel as ‘alive’ as possible. I think I’ve achieved that based on the comments I’ve gotten from my peers, especially when A/B testing with original and my remaster. I post the link to every original song along with my remaster, so people can easily compare them.
Not everything I do gets where I want it, but I think every song I do is improved in some way.
For the first roughly 180 songs, I only worked with stereo mixes of the songs. Starting around that time, I became aware of a program that allowed me to split out a stereo mix into these 4 elements: drums mix, bass, instruments mix, and vocals mix. This was much more flexible than a stereo mix and I’d use it when I had elements I wanted more control over. I still continued mostly using stereo mixes until around 290 songs in when I decided I liked the additional flexibility no matter how good an original song sounded.
Not long after I got out of the hospital, upgrades to the program allowed me to split out elements to kick, snare, hi hat, cymbals mix, toms mix, other drum kit mix, bass, lead guitars mix, rhythm guitars mix, keys mix, piano mix, wind mix, other instruments mix, lead vocals mix, and background vocals mix. That gave me 16 stereo tracks to work with. The flexibility of separating the drums changed the game for me and allowed me to get very close to my intent for nearly every song. That flexibility meant I could no longer let fixable technical stuff slide. It even allowed me to take some mixes I’d done in college and turn them into multi-tracks. My 8 track project now had fully split drums, which was wild. For a project we did on a malfunctioning 16 track analog machine I was able to create a new multi-track that allowed me to fix a lot of stuff I couldn’t in the original mix. Again, wild. We weren’t any good then but it was fun to revisit it.
That’s pretty much how I do everything now. I’m basically creating new mixes of any song I’ve done since that was implemented. I can’t remember where I started it exactly.
That’s the background and here are the playlists to peruse if you’re interested. The first is the top 25 most played. The second is a playlist in the order I did them (outside of a handful that I uploaded way after they were created). Set your volume at your favorite level for enjoying music with these songs and you won’t likely need to touch your volume again when listening.
For bonus points if you want to purchase the headphone I do final critical listening tweaks on, they are the Shure SRH440a and cost a little over $100 on Amazon.
Top 25 Most Played:
The Benevolent Remasters Full List in Order:
