You are allowed to enjoy this…

Purposely, I’ve not been recording of late. Hurrah, I hear you all cry, but instead I’ve been busying myself with this self-imposed archival programme. The problem is that I’ve got a lots and lots of recordings that were recorded on non-standard software that’s no longer compatible with current computer operating systems/hardware and I want to have them in a format that’s going to be accessible for the immediate future.
I’ve already converted one album to this format. “Fade In/Fade Out – The Legacy Edition” is available for download and was a joy to re-visit because it was just a matter of rearranging audio tracks and giving them a little bit of audio polish.
The next album in the archive chain is “Heavy on the Magick” and I must say I’ve never wasted so much time on something so dissatisfying creatively. The problem with this recording is a lot of it was recording on a synthesiser. A lot. In fact, I’d forgotten how little guitar I’d played on these recordings until I went back and look at the master tracks. There was MIDI data tracks everywhere and a little piece of me died inside.
I’m not against MIDI. I think MIDI is great. I just prefer working with audio tracks. In ye olde days, I tried to record all my synth parts as bare MIDI and routed the data to an external synthesiser unit – the Yahama MU50. This synthesiser was then fed into a mixer and the audio mixed down to a MINIDISC recorder. It was a very convuluted process compared to nowadays where raw mixes are created on the hard drive with a click of the mouse.
But going backwards, I no longer have the MU50, so I had to approximate all the synth sounds of the original mix. This is a task in itself, going through all the presets in the various software synths I have installed in Sonar and decided that patch sounds roughly like the original and spending an hour trying to find a patch that sounds like the waves of the sea and generally tying yourselves in knots.
And then you sit back and think you’ve finished and you compare the new mixes with the old and realise that you’ve wasted your time. The old mixes are still valid and these new mixes sound appalling, like a cheap knock-off, because you are missing those original sounds that embued the recording with the character you were aiming for.
On the upside, I have these tracks now stored for the future. The downside is that part of me thinks I shouldn’t have bothered.
Here’s an example of how I’ve made a complete pig’s ear of this albums “restoration” thanks to not having access to my old trusty MU50.