Vocal Enhacement

Hello All!,

I need some help in enhancing some old 2 track mono reel to reel tapes that I have copied to adobe.  They are old Garage bands from the 60s and the vocals are muddy and basse to a point.. Most of them are behind the guitars and drums.. I wish I could find the old band tracks and vocal tracks that I had seperate. And some parts of the vocals are so low that I dont know if I can do anything with them...

Any Ideas? Info? etc.. I will try anything at this point..


Thanks
Joe

The muddiness is probably best handled via EQ.  As for the vocal balance, you may find judicious use of the centre channel extractor will help things along.

[mono]

As for the vocal balance, you may find judicious use of the centre channel extractor will help things along.

Unfortunately I don't think it will. The OP said "old 2 track mono reel to reel tapes..."

Yeah, can someone educate me about that?  Mono and two-track?  If it's mono, what's the point of two-track?  Is it two tracks, one left, one right, which substitute for a true stereo track?

If I am correct its like saying taking a band track and a voice track and putting it into one.  its how they did it in the 60s.. Hard to word

[mono]

As for the vocal balance, you may find judicious use of the centre channel extractor will help things along.

Unfortunately I don't think it will. The OP said "old 2 track mono reel to reel tapes..."

Yup!  Missed that 'mono' bit.

After keynote9's last post, I am really confused as to what it is he really has to work with?

Generally, two track recording was the term used to indicate that there were two tracks on a piece of 1/4" tape, but they didn't have to be stereo, or even run in the same direction. There were a heck of a lot of tape recorders built that were only mono, and to use the second track you turned the tape over. In the same way, you got four track recording, only this time it was two pairs in each direction. And that didn't have to be stereo either! On a lot of cheaper early machines you got a track switch, so you could record two mono tracks on each side if you wanted.

But kids recording garage band tracks in stereo or even dual mono? Sounds rather a lot on the unlikely side to me...

But kids recording garage band tracks in stereo or even dual mono? Sounds rather a lot on the unlikely side to me...

I know about the different track formats, it was his throw-away comment about having the band and the vocals seperate at one point that made me wonder what we were really dealing with?

On balance, I agree, if the only available copy is mono, there's not too much that's going to be possible.

Er, it wasn't you I was telling(!) - I should have quoted the request from Dobro, who wanted to know.

Whoops - silly me 

For what it's worth, the oldest tapes in my parent's collection were made on amateur recorders beginning in 1950. Until they got a 4-track (2-per-side) machine in the 70s, every tape they have, from a variety of sources, is in the 2-track arrangement with the exception of a rare full-track mono one.  For some unapparent reason, we always referred to those machines via fraction instead of number of channels (e.g. half-track or quarter-track ).  Also, unless it was full-track mono, the description always seemed to be appended with a mono, stereo, or quad designation.

We used to refer to them as either 1/2 or 1/4 track as well, but appropriately appended mono or stereo to this to differentiate, and generally that's pretty clear I think. But I've heard other people call them all sorts of different things...

Does anyone have any other questions for me?? I guess all I have to work with is the 20 band EQ?!?

Thanks for all of your comments..

You could also mess with multiband compression, but if you've never used it before this sort of project might be a bit too steep.  Depends on how detailed your aural skills are.  (I wouldn't want to!)