Here Comes Santa Claus!

[Shane_B.]

Howdy.

Back around 89 my brother and I recorded a Christmas album on a 4 track tape machine. He sent me the master tapes a few weeks ago and I transferred them in to my DAW. I cleaned them up and added the lead parts and used Ozone 9 Advanced to mix and master this and two others. It passed the car sound test with flying colors to my ears and I'm happy with the mix. There were 7 songs total but I only had time to finish 3 this year.

My Brother: Drums, Bass, Acoustic Rhythm, Vocal (All done in 89).

Me: Tiny Harmony parts in middle of verses (1989), All Lead guitars (2021), Sleigh Bells (2021).

Hope everyone enjoys. Thanks for listening.

Edit: BTW, my ears are pretty much done. I used the meters extensively. Any input good or bad is very welcome on the mix, performance. Anything. Thanks again.

Edited December 22, 2021 by Shane_B.

[Jimbo 88]

This sounds really good.   I know those old cassette tape decks would add a lot of hiss and noise.  Did you use any Izotopes noise reduction plugins?  I can't hear any kind of noise that would ding my ear.  The acoustic guitar has a little of that phasing sound,  but if you had not said anything about an old cassette deck.  I would not have noticed.

 

--NICE 

Edited December 22, 2021 by Jimbo 88

[Shane_B.]

@Jimbo 88

Hi. Thanks for listening.

I didn't use any noise reduction. We had the signals high enough to drown it out, and there isn't much to begin with because it has DBX Noise Reduction on the machine. I don't think I have a noise reduction plug-in but I'm not sure. Ozone 9 Advanced is a beast to learn and it may be buried in there somewhere.

For example, I just found out after I mixed and mastered this that there is a plug-in in O9A that will allow you to raise and lower the levels of certain things in a mixed down track called Master Rebalance. It's made for Vocal/Bass/Drum and uses AI to isolate one of them and raise or lower the volume on a mixed down track.

That odd guitar you hear is an Ovation via DI. It's mixed down on to the Drum/Bass/Rhythm track on the tape to make room for vocals and the isolated tracks were recorded over. The AI in Master Rebalance hears the Ovation as the vocal track. I could have significantly reduced the volume of it but I didn't realize I even had the plug-in until I was completely done and passed it around to family and friends. I don't like the sound of Ovation guitars, especially DI like that was.

My brothers tape machine died decades ago and I just found a similar one on FB. On the one I got there are 4 outputs that come directly from the tape heads and bypass the mixer so I can't raise or lower the levels on the machine. The pre's in my Studio 1810c are super clean though. I had the gain on some of them up all the way and it introduced no hiss at all.

I used iZotope's Tonal Balance Control 2 to mix it and it helped significantly. O9A has a Mastering Assistant and I ran the that after I mixed and mastered it manually using TBC2. It did nothing but add a tiny bit of dynamic EQ on a few frequencies, set the high and low roll-off, and set the Limiter (they call it the Maximizer plug-in) to -14LUFS. I've used it on 3 tracks so far and got the same results and it does an excellent job at making all the levels even.

So far all I've had to do is use O9A's Mastering Assistant just to set the Maximizer and it's been perfect. I always master my tracks to roughly -18db RMS/-6db Peak then run it through the Mastering Assistant to bring it up to -14LUFS. I was reading that -14LUFS is what streaming services prefer so I set it to do that. So far, not once has it had to limit peaks and gets the tracks up to -14LUFS without compression. It really is a great program and worth every penny. There's no way I could have done that mix/master without it.

[Tim Smith]

Great mix and expert salvage on that old mix.  I either use TRacks 5 or O9 when mastering. Lurssen  Mastering console has been absolute junk on my machine. When I throw a track into it all I get is a garbled mess.

Nice work! You guys could play even way back then.

[Shane_B.]

3 hours ago, Tim Smith said:

I either use TRacks 5 or O9 when mastering.

I used to like TRacks but got away from it. I mentioned in another thread how O9A was so slow to load. I realized last night I hadn't updated it in a very long time so I did all the updates to it and Neutron 3 Advanced and it's all significantly faster now. A good 60% faster now to the point where I'm not even considering upgrading anything now except maybe putting in a good video card. If my DAW was froze where it is right now software wise for the next 10 years I'd be very happy.

[markno999]

Shane,

Sounds good, listening to this music I almost wish we were still recording to tape.   Less choices make you focus more on arrangement and delivery.     Really enjoyed this track and had a few listens which definitely created a Christmas mood.

Regards