For sure. I still remember when it started. Was pretty redefining at the time.
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It made me want to get into radio. I used to win trivia contests on there all the time. In my last semester of high school George Gimarc offered to let me be his intern but wouldn’t let me do it when he found out I was still in high school.
I ended up being the intern for my radio mentor Alex Luke for the summer on his how The Adventure Club. You would not believe the record collection he had and he had encyclopedic knowledge as well as being a primo music picker. He was still going to A&M in that first year commuting up on the weekends.
I probably have mini stories about most of the DJs who were there at the beginning, who was nice etc.
Hot off the presses is the song I listed above. I’m posting the original and my version below. This remaster was hard af. After demastering it, it was clear this was not a great mix and was made more in its mastering. I had to do A LOT of surgery to get things to play close to how I wanted. There are still a few little things I don’t like, but overall it got there for me.
Original:
My Version:
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If anyone has any requests, I will consider doing them.
How about blue Monday by new order. Is that even doable?
Yes, for sure. I think there are multiple versions of that song so post the one you’d prefer me to work from here. I’d been thinking of doing the long version of Elegia but not sure it’s worth it.
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Out of curiosity, what made you choose this version over the original? They added a bunch of gimmicky stuff at the beginning that is much worse, but the mix overall is a bit better than the original (poppier too). The Blue Monday original is much more like a Joy Division song than what most people think of New Order as.
You can do the original. I want the version that’s on substance, I may have picked the wrong one.
It should be this one. Does this sound right to you?
@Marksman Here’s the original and the remaster I did it from. I’ll leave it here without comment and you can ask anything you might want about it after you’ve compared the two.
Original:
My Version:
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Listened to original about to listen to your version. I will comment after I finish. Thanks for doing this.
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Okay so first listen, right away I noticed the opening keyboard to be more open (excuse my musical terminology ignorance), I really liked that, and it feel like it carried on through the whole song. Around 4:13 I heard another interesting tweak on the keyboards and again near the end with the deeper organ like sound. I am interested to know what you did with the drums as I had a harder time identifying differences.
I really want to see your commentary on what you did so I can relisten with that in mind. I listened to the original before listening to your remix but I have to be honest I haven’t listened it to a lot recently so the original was not really stuck in my head while listening to it, I appreciate this project and thank you for taking the time to do this request. I will be listening to it some more and look foward to your commentary.
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Try finding a website that allows you to download the mp3 from YouTube videos making sure it does 320kbps.
Download the original and mine and compare them again. You’ll get both versions’ full volume to really compare. The differences will become more stark when the natural volumes are both displayed. YouTube probably slightly lowered my mix and slightly raised theirs.
Once you do that, ask any new questions and I’ll begin commentary. This was the second song in a row that was so exceptionally difficult to do that I had to limit flexibility on it to get the feel better for me.
As one bit of info, the song mostly reaches its limited potential in the original version. It’s got some mixing deficiencies that I’d put down to the era, but it’s still a good mix for the era. I was never going to be able to elevate it more than 30%, unlike the Men at Work song because nothing is really hiding in there (there’s not really a lot going on in the song either, like it’s someone experimenting with a new keyboard). I’ll let you know my biggest improvements to the song when you’ve compared the mp3s, where you should be able to discern the changes more easily.
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It doesn’t look like you took me up on the mp3 offer, so I’ll go ahead and try to break this down. This will basically serve as an in-depth look at my process, without giving away the exact things I do that I think make what I’m doing special in comparison to others.
For this particular song, the background is that in 2017 I mixed an album that used a lot of early 80s synthesizers, even though these things had been recreated in emulators with none of the tech problems and all of the automation kept that did not exist in those keyboards. My artist was a purist and wanted the analog synthesizers, and you gotta write really well on those to make them play nicely with each other in a song. He didn’t do that, and I was flooded with tech problems I couldn’t hear except in very particular environments. It led to a ton of second guessing and me ultimately hating the project, especially after mastering. It was probably the project that most made me want to do the mastering project. This song gave me a lot of PTSD from that project, because it was using a lot of those keyboards or at least a main one he used from 1982. That meant some of those same problems showed up.
For the actual song, I tried to use my AI splitting program to give me the desired 16 tracks, which I’ll list below:
- Bass
- Kick
- Snare
- Hat
- Cymbals
- Toms
- Other Drum Kit
- Keys
- Lead Guitar
- Piano (not in this song)
- Rhythm Guitar
- Strings
- Wind
- Other instruments
- Lead Vocals
- Background Vocals
Like the song I remastered before this by The Wonder Stuff, the program was so confused by certain elements that I had to reduce the flexibility to get things to play more ‘right’. While I’m trying to adapt a song into how I want to hear it, that doesn’t usually mean I’m trying to take a song completely back to the drawing board unless I just don’t think the mix gets there at all.
This breakdown created a situation where string type sounds were ending up on three tracks, other stuff was mixed together that shouldn’t have been and were in the wrong balance from the original track, etc. Because of this, I went to this split configuration:
- Bass
- Kick
- Snare
- Hat
- Cymbals
- Toms
- Other Drum Kit
- Guitars
- Other Instruments
- Vocals (this was done because the only thing that was on the background vocals track was the delay at the end of the 2nd verse)
Doing it this way still gave me the flexibility over the bass and drums, but limited my flexibility with the synthesizers. I felt it was the best compromise to retain most of the feel of the original while attempting to elevate it.
Once I do the splitting, I then do a de-mastering process that’s proprietary. I guarantee you no one will be able to duplicate my results without knowing what that is, and I’m not telling it to anyone who isn’t a trusted soul that has literally sat in the same room with me when I talk about it and demonstrate it. I’ve shown it to 3 people so far, and would maybe show it to one other if they ever visit me.
What I will say is I use a program called Slate VSX in tandem with Pro Tools that has studio emulations inside a proprietary set of headphones from Slate Digital. Anyone can buy this system for probably under $500 that can be used with many audio DAWs. The studio emulation I use is Archon Studios because it has the type of sound I want to hear in my mixes. I like a very immediate sound in my headphones, which means I want everything to sound close and present with a lot of detail. Many of the emulations do not give you that, but Archon Studios largely does and after removing much of the built-in reverb they put in, I found I could get usually good results with it.
After I’m done with my VSX version, I switch to my Shure 440A headphones for critical listening to tweak, as these are high quality consumer headphones. Some songs, I barely need to tweak anything at this stage. Others, I might need to do quite a bit of tweaking. I play both sets of headphones at a ‘reference’ volume so that I tend to get consistent levels based on how I’m hearing. My goal with the YouTube channel is for you to never have to turn your headphones up or down once you listen to the first song at your preferred volume. I started this project on an old MacBook Pro laptop using the headphones. Then, it went to an iMac Pro using the headphones, and finally is on a 2023 MacBook Pro with all the bells and whistles using the headphones. Each one of these devices plays the ‘click’ volume slightly differently. I prefer the version I have now the least compared to the other two computers, which means my overall volume sound has probably changed a little since toward the beginning of the project. It’s generally not enough to care about.
Part of the de-mastering process is lowering the overall volume of the mix so that I can begin tweaking it with ‘room’. That means I usually take down the volume of the file anywhere from 10 to 15 dB depending on how it was mastered. If I’m taking it down 15 dB, that means someone was trying to win a loudness war and there is almost no dynamic range in the song to begin with. For those, I’m just doing a quality battle, even though it’s harder to perceive that for the audience due to the loudness issue. I do not fight loudness wars, but my levels are still considered professional ‘good’ mastering levels that usually retain plenty of dynamic range unless I’m going for something else but no one would accuse most of them of being ‘loud’ masters mainly because I hate that sound.
Once it’s lowered to the level I work at, I do my proprietary de-mastering sound for the song, and now I’m ready to get to work. The first thing I do is bring the de-mastered song back to my starting point ‘mastered’ audio levels with a very particular style of compression. I’m always consistent with this particular compression, which gives a unity to the channel across many different genres. It is a very overall light compression that is part of my signature sound. I then go into individual tracks tweaking the sound of them to my desire to get the feel I’m going for and fixing issues I don’t like in songs. Once I have everything back together, I do a lot of listening and tweaking, first in the VSX headphones and later in the Shure headphones. If I like the result, I export it and show it to the world to see what happens. If not, I usually keep going until I get something close to what I want and in some cases I might just kill the remaster if I don’t get the results I want. I’ve revisited some remasters after killing them and found them acceptable. It’s usually because the song didn’t fit in a run or what was around it was so much better quality than what I felt I did in that moment. I am pretty picky with what I do, but stepping back for months or longer sometimes makes me think, ‘hey that’s still pretty good, I should post it.’
For this song, I had to keep going for a long time, because in the original splits I did, the song was not balancing right with the synths and I didn’t like how certain instruments took over the mix in ways I knew they weren’t intended to because of the weird way the AI split the song out. After the first day (I probably spent about 2 hours on it the first day), I thought about the song overnight and decided I’d probably be better off going to the less flexible split. I was also struggling a little bit with the volume I wanted for the song. The song was coming across louder than I’d expect at the levels it was at, and overall compression was sort of an issue at this phase (on my last listen, I actually turned the mix down a bit because I felt it worked better at a slightly lower volume). As I was tweaking it, I kept wanting to turn everything down to a point where none of my settings were really making any sense.
I knew I had a pretty good sound based on where I was at, but it wasn’t where I wanted it yet. The next day I probably spent another 3 hours on it (5 hours is a very long time for one of these for me, but it happened on my last two remasters), but was using the less flexible split this time. I adjusted all of my channels to be back in a normal range, and started building it again. The results were a lot better to me, and I ultimately posted this version to YouTube.
The best way to describe in more exact detail to you what I did is to first let you know what bugged me about the original and what I was trying to do to elevate it. I’ll let you know how successful I was in all counts at the end of the post. I’m basing this on a new listen of the original mp3 version from the YouTube original I posted above:
Things I Don’t Like About the Original (from memory, not an in context listen):
- The overall volume of this song is a little low, and I want to bring it up to a bit more modern mastering level, though not that hot.
- The kick drum is that early 80s very wimpy sounding synthesizer sound. The kick is distorted a little bit because they’re trying drive it into less of a wimpy kick. My goal is to make this kick sound better and more full, though it sounds bad enough in its original form that I do not expect to have particularly good results. If I were really redoing this song, I’d change the kick. It doesn’t work in the song for me.
- The snare overall is a good sound, especially for this era with a drum machine, but it’s moving all over the place in the mix for reasons unknown to me and the reverb on it sounds unflattering because of how they EQ’d it. It largely sounds like it’s coming out of the left speaker more than the center, except on the additional hits like at 1:32 (this is way too loud, btw). I think it can be clearer than what it is, in addition to trying to anchor it more in the center of the mix.
- The hi hat feel is a little low in their version.
- The cymbals crash type stuff is irritating and loud in this version.
- The toms are too loud and often irritating.
- The bass also is kind of moving around a bit. For a portion of the song, it’s coming more out of the left, and then it comes back more toward the center as a bass should.
- His vocal is mostly coming out of the left side. I wanted to give that more of a center anchor
- I think the electric guitar type sound is a little low usually in the song.
- The pads of the keyboards are often too loud.
- The stab keyboards, especially after the 2nd verse are too loud.
- I’m not enamored with the various sound effects that are usually too loud.
- Something really good is happening when the bass comes back in at 5:47. This is not highlighted in their mix and is something they should have had in for the entire song. It’s a sub bass undercurrent that really works with the song. You can barely hear that energy in the original version.
- The vocal pad at the end of the song is way too loud.
- The guitar sound at the end of the song is way too loud.
- The two keyboards at the end are also way too loud. I wanted to bring all those a bit more back into the mix.
Like I said in my original post, a lot of this song sounds like experimentation with a new keyboard to me. My goal with the song was to work on the fundamentals (bass, kick, and snare) and really make them work as good as I could in the song. After that, almost everything else becomes ‘gravy’ in a song like this where it just seems like they’re throwing everything at the wall to play around. I think the song is often annoying because of all the gimmicky stuff, but they made some of that gimmicky stuff even worse in the 88 version. I’ll point out time stamps of stuff I like or don’t like so you can hear what I’m hearing if it’s obvious enough.
- The keyboard at the start of the song that begins at about :16 is the A+ element in the synthesizers of the song. It is a great sound that provides all the undercurrent needed for the song. They could have done what they did with the drums, bass, and this keyboard and pretty much locked it up right there with some additional variation. But they didn’t. Once the second part of the bass gets going, this keyboard will play in tandem with it. It’s a very similar keyboard to the main keyboard in the song ‘The Bump’ by The Commodores, just used to a very different effect.
- At about :30 the snare sounds very left heavy to me and that keyboard I like is coming across a little more right heavy than I’d like to hear.
- Also at about :30 the first bass comes in. It’s very different from the rest of the song and I don’t know why.
- At about :48 the keyboard moves to a better positioning for me, even though it’s still a little right heavy for my tastes. I think moving the snare over will help this, as well.
- At 1:03, the main bass line comes in. It’s slightly left heavy, but you can’t tell in the original because the snare is also left heavy. It’s further to the right in the left side than the snare, so it doesn’t feel particularly left heavy.
- At about 1:11, very annoying and too loud toms start coming in. Because of the wild delays that were put on the toms, the AI couldn’t interpret them properly. It got they were toms and put it on the right track, but it thought the delays were instruments and put them on the other instruments track, as well, mixed with a bunch of other stuff that couldn’t be adjusted to make the toms feel more right.
- The second good instrument that comes in to really help the track is the guitar sound that begins at 1:18. I want to make sure I don’t lose the impact of that.
- The snare hits at 1:32 are in the proper placement in the stereo image and I have no idea why the main snare isn’t.
- At 1:35 there are crazy loud cymbal hits that are awful and really kind of unnecessary to the track.
- At 1:36 is the third good instrument, the vocal pad synthesizer intending to emulate a choir type sound. This generally works throughout the song when it’s used.
- At 1:40 is a terrible and nonsensical keyboard that does not work in the song at all. It sounds like pure experimentation and I have no idea how it made it to the final mix. It does not in any way fit the tone or style of the rest of the song.
- Without the 1:40 keyboard, maybe the one that comes in at 1:58 works with the choir vocals. I think something needs to take us into the verse and this works for that.
- At 2:10, the vocals come in and they are very left heavy because of the effect they’re using on the vocals. This needs to be fixed.
- At 2:12, those stupid toms come in again. Why are you distracting from the vocals?
- At around the same time, the guitar comes in again, and I don’t think it’s appropriate here as it again distracts from the vocals.
- At around 2:15, there is a stabbing keyboard sound that is the 4th good instrument, but I don’t think it should be here under the vocal.
- The vocoder effect at 2:24 works, but is a bit too loud. I can probably tamp this down a bit with my sound and it still will work.
- During this whole verse, they’re usually putting the guitar sounds between his words, with some exceptions, so it generally sort of works, but I think it might play better without those there.
- At 2:53, there’s a nice interaction between the vocals, vocoder, and guitar that I really like and think works. That’s more what they should have focused on in the verse as opposed the to the guitar undercurrent or in between words style. Because this changes in the second part of the verse, they seem to be experimenting. If I gotta keep the guitar under the verse, I probably like the style of the second part of the verse better than the part of first part of the verse.
- At 3:08, the intro to the ‘chorus’ is goofy, with that stabbing keyboard. It’s an important sound in the song, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near the right volume. It sounds like an anomaly to the rest of what we’re hearing, but it’s not anything I’d want to cut. I’d just want to make it more subtle.
- Around this same time, there’s another keyboard that is occasionally playing notes. It basically works, even though it’s a little weird. I would not call it a ‘good’ sound.
- At 3:21, there’s a flamming sound on the kick for three beats where it sounds like there’s a loose drum head. This is something that needs to be removed, because it’s not actually on the kick track, and it sounds like a mistake in the bass track.
- At 3:25, there is more experimentation with sound effects. I don’t really care one way or the other what they’re doing here, I just want it to work in the mix.
- At 3:33, there’s basically a gun shot sound. I have no idea why. This has to be made more subtle.
- Everything going on in the 3:40 area is so random and distracting from the vocals. I don’t know what they’re doing here.
- At around 3:50, they bring in the every once in a while note of the keyboard, and it really doesn’t need to be here. This is just them probably thinking the song has gotten boring at this point. There’s no structure to either verse in this song. Instruments are playing randomly and in different styles in both verses. This is not really how that’s supposed to work.
- At 4:08, did he forget to keep singing? It just seems like an odd break, and the guitar is kind of wimpy here not at the right level.
- At 4:31, this is a very clumsy vocal delay. It’s too loud and doesn’t fit in the mix. A goal would be to make this a bit more subtle.
- From 4:38 on, it’s really a bunch of experimentation that generally works, especially with the guitar and the stabbing keyboard.
- At 5:46 is one of the best parts of the song beginning. It has a really nice filled bass stage and should have been there that way the whole song, in my opinion.
- At 5:54 the vocal choir comes in and totally works again with still way too many toms playing.
- At 6:09, the guitar comes in too loud but also totally works.
- At 6:23, I don’t know why the f they put any of the additional instruments in. Just walk it out with the guitar and vocal choir and be done with it. It’s just noise to me.
- At 6:39, the high keyboard probably would have worked without the lower noise pad and the weird walking keyboard, but that isn’t what they did.
- As a final note, I think this mix sounds a bit flat, especially in the drums and my main goal will be to try to make this mix sound ‘alive’ with the very heavy synthesizer elements in it (making them all feel open and bringing them to life). I’ll be trying to bring the kick and snare to an exciting better presence than in the original. The kick and bass relation is also very heavily emphasized in my version. In their version, they’re fighting a little bit. My goal is for them to come across as a unit when they play together. There’s also kind of an issue with the ‘4 on the floor’ sound of the kick. What I think they’re going for is a bit of a disco snare (the effect produces a phatter snare), which is done by the kick and snare playing at the same time. This means the drummer is always hitting a kick on every beat for both the kick and snare beats. The problem is that in their version you hear the kick every beat. You’re not really supposed to notice this effect under the snare. Part of what I was doing was trying to make this kick/snare relation much better to where you don’t really notice it’s a ‘4 on the floor’ beat as much. I’m also trying to make the very bad drum machine sound of the kick sound a bit better.
If you want to listen to my version multiple times, I sugggest reading my notes about what I did below, and then listen again while reading down the specific notes above, so you can hear the actual notes in action and see if you hear and agree with them.
Those are basically my notes on the song that I’m thinking about as I’m listening to it. It gives you an idea of what I like and what I don’t like about the original. I think, overall, this is a weak song and rather boring especially at its very long length. I think the best parts of the song are great and this could have been greatly tightened to make a very good radio song. I don’t love the 88 version, but they did some better stuff overall with that one (though I haven’t revisited it since my remaster of Substance 1987).
Now I’ll go through what I did on the song and give an idea of how successful I thought I was. As an aside, one of the things I generally do to every song is turn the kick drum and bass mono, except in rare circumstances. This allows me to anchor the key elements in the center, and makes it much easier to hear panning issues. For this song, for most of the time I was tweaking it, I had the bass in mono, but it just felt too forward in comparison to the rest of the elements in mono, so I switched it back to stereo, which opened up the slight left heavy nature of it in the early part of the song.
- At the beginning, I’ve definitely given the kick more impact. It still sounds like a drum machine kick, but it’s better than it was. I still think it’s the weakest sound in my mix.
- For the opening keyboard, I think I successfully opened it.
- The bass is now very forward in the mix as an element I wanted to hear.
- The snare has been corrected. I think it sounds alive.
- The vocal has been corrected.
- To me, the guitar sounds generally work better in the verse.
- The stabbing keyboard has been pulled back into the mix.
- The extra flamming problem has been fixed.
- The gun shot has been brought into the mix.
- The toms are reduced to be less annoying.
- The lazy keyboard in the second chorus works better at this volume.
- The delay has been made more subtle.
- The guitar is more subtle.
- The stabbing keyboard and lazy keyboard work better overall in the mix, in my opinion.
- The toms are less annoying after the second verse, but still very annoying.
- Sound effects feel about right to me.
- All cymbals effects are largely in balance now.
- At 5:48, you should really hear that bass stage I was talking about. I brought it out and it doesn’t sound this way in the original.
- I pulled the guitar more into the mix at the end.
- I tried to pull the random keyboards more back into the mix at the end.
I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of this remaster I did, but I think it mostly works better now, considering there wasn’t a whole lot to pull out and make exponentially better. It’s just not really a well recorded track, so it’s more about trying to balance it differently and highlighting the things I like and make many of the things I like less more subtle, and obviously doing a lot of fixes. I think the kick might be a little loud in the mix on this last critical listen, but it’s not terribly offensive to me. It would not go on my best of list, but some people will probably like it if it gets found.
That’s an in-depth description of how I approach just about every song I remaster. I can listen to a song once, and know where I’m headed with it based on what I hear. Sometimes that’s easier to accomplish than others. Sometimes the AI splitting is such a bonehead that I can never get certain things the way I want. But in nearly all cases, even though you’re hearing an updated version of what is often a classic song, it shouldn’t press any button in you that makes you say ‘this is wrong and bad’. If that happens, I probably did something wrong or I just like it better the way I’m playing it. You can only know if you ask. I hope this was worth the read. Thanks if you did.
@Marksman No pressure but wanted to make sure you were aware of my commentary post if you weren’t.
Sorry I didn’t get to this sooner but I am doing it now. I found a site to make 320k mp3s. So I will do it and listen then read the rest.
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After the difficulties of doing the song by The Wonder Stuff and the song by New Order, I decided to try to get back into my wheelhouse and am currently doing a funk set. The main subject for this set is the band Lakeside, who provided the undertrack for the Coolio song Fantastic Voyage and was also sampled in other 90s west coast hip hop. I started by looking up their greatest hits and found a song I hadn’t heard before called ‘Your Wish Is My Command’. I felt there was a lot to elevate here and decided to have that be the first song. I was overall happy with my results, and dig the song as an added bonus. If there are any funk lovers in here, and I know there are, I hope you’ll check these out.
Original Version:
My Version:
The next song is the aforementioned Fantastic Voyage, which was harder mainly because the keyboard bass and real bass are on the same track in my split and the balance is opposite of how I’d prefer to hear them. It made me need to compromise on my overall bass sound, but I still think it turned out even with a slight technical issue I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from to fix it that wasn’t enough to really harm the overall song.
Original Version:
My Version:
The next song will be Raid by Lakeside and I’m not sure how it will turn out. It sounds like there’s something in there, but it’s not quite as clear to me as the other two songs.
I’m going to wrap up the set by doing a TV track of Snoop Dogg’s Doggy Dogg World featuring The Lady of Rage and The Dramatics. I have no interest in the lyrics of that song, but think it’s a great track, especially the chorus and a TV track is basically an instrumental of the song with the chorus included. I’m hoping for good results on it.
I’m editing this because I thought the chorus singer on Doggy Dogg World was Michel’le but it was very obvious when I listened to the voice by itself that it wasn’t her. It turns out it was The Lady of Rage, a quite good rapper famous for the song Afro Puffs. She can sing.
I’ve finished the songs I described above and here they are. The first is Raid (Radio Mix) by Lakeside and the second is Doggy Dogg World by Snoop Doggy Dogg ft. Tha Dogg Pound and The Dramatics Instrumental TV Track. TV Track just means I brought along the chorus to make the instrumental slightly more interesting.
Original Version:
My Version:
Original Version:
My Version:
This is hot off the presses. Maybe there is a fan of The Cult in here.
I found a funny piece of trivia about the producer of this song. He previously worked as a recording engineer before becoming a producer, and one of the bands he worked with was Loverboy. When I listen to the original version of this song when knowing that, this song literally sounds like a Loverboy song. In my version, I got rid of a lot of those stylistic elements that made it sound that way. Mine is just a much harder driving rock song. Some may like it, some may not.
I thought this was the one and only song that captured the essence of the group in producing it. Rick Rubin is all over their great second album, robbing the band of its personal identity. The first album is too all over the map in style to really get a sense of what they’re like. I’d really have liked to hear She Sells Sanctuary in the style of this production from the first album. It probably would have sounded even better. Overall, I think Sonic Temple was an atrocious album with only this single gem.
If you want to own my version of the song, just find an mp3 ripper for YouTube videos and it will be what I created. The YouTube version is somewhat compromised for whatever reason.
Original Version:
My Version:
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