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 On
Teensy Ticks/Pops:
With our new monitor system we also became aware that the
first two albums had some peculiar tiny ticks and pops
within the music in many places. These were not so
noticeable at that time. But for this project, once those
tapes were mastered to 20-bit "Hi-D" sound, I became all too
aware that on an ultra decent CD master the formerly
"insignificant" ticks were not easy to ignore. They began to
drive me nuts! Where were they coming from? Hard to track
down...
It turned out that they
were on individual tracks of the multitrack tapes, and could
be heard just as slower attack patches began, at the exact
point when the Moog keys were depressed, in fact. A
hard-attack sound hid them. It was only in certain patches
that these audible bugs were generated along with the notes.
I'd just not noticed them on the first two albums with the
modest speakers I was using (this is a lesson to all of you
who master your own music: be sure your monitors are
faithful and of decent quality!)
Okay, small ticks
existed at the start of certain Moog patches, mostly the
softer, slower pieces on the first two albums,
W-TS
especially. Hundreds of them. What to do? I really don't
trust any automatic program for taking out more than really
obvious pops and clicks, such as transferring of old LP's
and film soundtracks to digital. These things were very
subtle. To remove them would risk removing some music as
well.
Time for the old Pencil
Tool... Ouch! Yup, this tedious method is what I did, for
three weeks, going carefully over each track for the set,
and whenever I found some of these rascals, I'd go through
probing the waveform, trying to center the teensy intruder
on screen, which is hard to do. In most cases once you'd
enlarged it enough, you could see the distinctive "twidget"
right there on screen. Yeay! Fire! Usually you saw a few
minuscule spikes, like a little damped wavelet that was
barely there, but too easily heard. Then you'd have to draw
it out, or pop an extremely brief low-pass filter on the
millisecond affected, to kill it. Check playback before and
after a few times. If not undetectable, try it again. You'd
get to be pretty expert after the second or third 12-14 hour
day of this... :^)
There were a few I just
couldn't remove completely. I reduced what I could, and just
went on, as what now remained was very hard to hear, unless
you know exactly where to find it. These are all extremely
small fixes, but in some passages where it sounded like
birdseed being dropped onto a tin plate (hey, I'm
exaggerating!), all is now smooth and lovely, and in
retrospect the tedium was well worth it (no, honestly).
On
Individual Note Glitches:
During the recording of S-OB,
I often worked with Ben (Folkman) there, at all hours of
night and day, frequently overtired and frustrated with
equipment nightmares long past. I must confess to being
fairly influenced by a collaborator (with Rachel we were
BOTH obsessive, thus "no note was permitted to survive until
it was near-perfect!"). Ben was far more pragmatic than us,
so my obsessing over every detail must have driven him nuts.
He often would say after a reasonable take: "that's just
fine, let's move on". Most of the time he certainly was
right. But there are several places where I was not
satisfied then, nor later when I heard the LP release, nor
when listening to the album years later. I should have
fought for another take or two to get it in fact "correct",
not merely close enough. But I deferred
(and
probably carried a bit of a grudge all these years, to
remember and bring up such petty issues here and
above,
on the opening
of Brandy #3).
There are two passages
especially clumsy, both in the Violin I part of the Brandy
#3 third movement, where the 32nd note passages occur. The
final uppermost note of both of these passages is "fluffed"
on the master, barely played, as it was exceedingly
difficult to do with that old clunker of a keyboard.
Grr...'s for years. Now I wondered if on the digital audio
workstation (DAW) it might be reasonable to try to repair
these fluffs at long last.
Indeed, it was! You'll
barely notice, assuming you ever did before, those mis-keyed
two notes. I could boost them in level and tricky EQ
peakings that made you think you were hearing those
exceedingly short notes played as they ought have been
played. I didn't believe at first that I could get away with
such a simple, if time-consuming trick, and saved a few
versions plus the original once again, to listen to the next
day or two. The best of these is nearly undetectable, and no
longer do I wince when hearing them. In fact I have
difficulty finding them now, which implies they're pretty
decent. Big sigh of relief! Boldened, I touched up a few
similar spots on a few other isolated notes that were not so
badly played, but could use a similar fix, too. In an age
that permits punch-ins and edits and copies and looping,
this kind of careful blemish repair seems to me to be called
for and a wonderful gift.
While these individual
note touch ups above were done to repair performance fluffs,
I also discovered that the modest monitor speakers I had
been using were inadequate to judge the levels of very low
bass parts. With my Velodyne subwoofers (amazing, amazing
speakers!) I've found a lot of recent orchestral recordings
contain stage or traffic sounds, thumps and rumbles and the
like (c'mon, people, get some decent speakers!). It was also
obvious that several notes on the first two albums for this
set, had inconsistent levels. Some were much too loud in
context and muddy, others were not as deep and resonant as I
had thought they were.
It was quite easy to go
in and touch up the lowest octave a very little on the
offensive notes, to fix that which I'd have caught
originally if I'd had excellent monitors as I do now (you
don't find them on the third and fourth albums, for
example). Also, once all the tracks were collected together
for the whole set, I became aware that some pieces were
either overall too bassy, or not bassy enough, similar with
the overall loudness, to match with all the other tracks.
This was a good chance to bring all the tracks into better
alignment with one another, so you can now jump from
selection to selection and not feel an urgent need to touch
your volume or tone controls.
On
Tempo Glitches:
The majority of cleanups made on the boxed set were for
audio reasons, as you've read. But there were also a few
minor places where I had to touch up a raw-sounding tempo
shift that had been intended properly, but came out faulty.
As you must know, tempo is tied to the pitch (and timbre) of
most recordings. Change the speed and you slow down but also
become flatter, and vice-versa. I recall that we had been
forced to allow to stand several notes, generally in a
ritard or allargando, that were unintentionally a little
uneven and inelegant. The only choice, to do the whole thing
over, was something you did only if the problem was very
noticeable. We had to do that nightmare often enough, but
got better at preplanning our special click tracks, with
experience.
Even so, there still
exist those mildly clumsy tempo spots. I had repaired one of
the worst already last year: the trailing off end for the
speeded-up "William Tell Overture" on Clockwork
Orange betrayed a
clumsy several notes. I just went in on remastering and
spaced them as the intention had been, a matter of a few
milliseconds of shifting here and there. Much better now,
and honestly what we intended in the first place, but were
thwarted by the earlier technology. Some of the same thing
exists on the Bach/Baroque selections, perhaps six spots
over this complete set. It was not too hard to repair these,
as none of them was more than a few percent of change. Only
an obsessive compulsive like me would notice or care enough
to dive in to such microsurgery these many years later, what
the heck. I can only say I'm relieved and much happier than
I've ever before felt about these selections, no
kidding!
There
is but one such repair that I expect any of you might notice
(congrats if you did, it's a brief change). That piece ought
not to have been allowed on the final tape for
S-OB
in the first place. We did it for sentimental reasons, as
this was the very first Bach piece we'd attempted, but also
because it was fun. I refer to the "Two-Part Invention in
F". This was truly a "baby piece", using a non
touch-sensitive keyboard (the only such on the set) played
in mono, sound on sound (pre-multitrack) with no click
track, rechanneled into stereo after the fact. Yet it was
fun, and short enough not to outstay its welcome.
But we had difficulty
trying to get the ritard right at the end (not to say last
chord, which I had to cheat), and grudgingly settled for the
version you know. That ending happens to be momentarily kind
of embarrassing for us, even if one may get used to the
clumsiness (just play it over and over... ;^). If I could
have, I'd have inserted one of our more graceful and natural
sounding ritards. Even now there's but so much you can do
(oh, no, another compromise!). It still seemed worth a try.
I spent many hours on those last two or three notes, trying
to stretch, space and underline them with a bit of brief EQ
so that it felt more human and less like the mistake it
actually was (including an early tape edit "repair" that
didn't help one whit).
The new master acquired
a small amount of reverb-repetition on the next-to-last note
for just under a millisecond, which I hand-smoothed as much
as possible. I tried a few variations, and again came back
to listen and compare with the original over a week, to pick
the best. The original goof was something we certainly knew
about, and flinched about, and talked about, after fussing
about to no avail. For the first time it is now very nearly
what we'd tried to do on our modest experiment, before
Switched-On
anything had been invented.
On
the Ending Tails:
I was surprised that many of the final tracks that we'd done
for the Brandenburg set had one notable weakness: the
fade-away of reverb at the endings sounded a little abrupt,
and clipped. It had become necessary during the middle 70's
to use some single ended noise reducing equipment at times,
as we had begun to experience some RF noises and buzzes out
of the blue. Drove us crackers! We discovered that the house
next door had installed high-wattage lights on solid-state
dimmers, and these would transmit a horrid hash of RF
frequencies into our equipment! At night, when they would go
to bed, the ugly noises ceased.
But we often had to
work continuously, and would pick up some noises here and
there, if the music had silences or fade-aways in certain
places. Later we got an electronics wizard (Chuck Harrison)
to come help us reduce the equipment's vulnerability to
detect such noise signals, and this helped enormously.
(Better still, my current studio's a "Faraday Cage", and is
immune to all such problems!) But we often heard some noise
at the very end of the reverberating tail-offs of selections
that ended very loudly, then slowly faded away into silence.
We were forced to edge the tail down somewhat faster than
we'd have liked, using the master fader. At the time it
seemed reasonable. But on the 20-bit masterings, you could
hear that the last bit of tail had been truncated
slightly.
For the new set, I've
restored these long tails with the same equipment that
produced them originally. Only the last note is affected in
each case, as it decays and fades away. It's not a crucial
series of repairs, but certainly on the newest wide-dynamic
range equipment, it's a graceful way to restore what had
been intended, but had to be compromised for technical and
practical reasons.
--Wendy
Carlos
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