[Please read this] Getting some quality from some .wav recordings

[SitusInversus]

Hello,

I play in a ska punk band and recently I have recorded a demo album with them. It was a DIY thing. The drums were recorded with the drummer's electric kit, the bass and the guitar were recorded via his PC with Sony SoundForge 9 and also the voice was recorded via his PC with Sony SoundForge.

The final recordings are quite good for a home produc and for a demo album ( we just want to share this with local clubs and promoters so they can make an idea about our style and sound)â

Anyway, my question is: we haven't yet started to mix the pieces because I would like to increase the quality of this recordings so do you know any methods to do so? Any softwares or techniques?

Thank you very much for any type of answer!

[kebeats]

What I usually do regardless of what was recorded is go back in & clean it up by silencing certain parts, fading in & fading out others. Possibly normalizing or amplifying uh few parts as well. That's all rly, specially if the quality is as you say. If it wasn't so stellar I may use some kind of noise reduction. Other then that mix it!

[CPhoenix]

Just to get you in the right frame of mind.... trying to "improve the quality" can sound really misleading.

Once you have something recorded... it's locked in stone.. and all you can do from there is clean it up and alter it. But the original recording is very important because of this.... it limits how good the sound can be. I know that's probably what you were getting at already... but the phrase "improving quality" can really be thrown around.

The #1 tool you'd be using to try to clean up some of the issues with the original recording would be your EQ. The EQ comes in many many shapes and forms. The noise reduction that kebeats said above is a specialized EQ, used to cut out a lot of the high pitched "static noise" noise that many recordings have. Waves has an awesome plugin that gets it right.... works very well on recordings with a few minor adjustments. High Pass & Low Pass Filters are very useful too.... they get rid of low end & high end sounds that were recorded but you might not necessarily want to hear, b/c it builds up easily and clashes with other parts of the song.

One normal thing to do is to High Pass filter any vocals. You might set it to 60hz, or 100 hz, etc... (whatever hz works for that song)... to clean up low end voice so it doesn't clash with the drums. If you're looking for techniques... that's very common.

You might also take an EQ and raise the mids a tad to add some "warmth" or "presence" to the recording.... or lower the mids if it's too "warm"/"present".


If the recording has parts that are really high, and parts that are really low... and it doesn't stand out in a mix... that's when you would think about using a compressor. The compressor lowers the loud parts, so that they sound closer in volume to the low parts. After you compress that.. you use the gain knob to raise the volume back up (since you DID sorta just compress it and make it quieter lol).

You might add a touch of reverb to a sound if it sounds too dry and plain.