Hello everyone,
First off, I am not a full-time mastering engineer (I'm really more of a mixing guy). Every now and again I help out some of my penniless friends when I can't convince them that going to a specialist is worth every red cent they can scrounge together. I'm all ITB (except when tracking); I use Pyramix and have some very respectable sounding VS3 (DSP card) plugins, as well as a select few DirectX plugins.
Anyway, I'm working on remastering a record that was recorded in like 1993 in preparation for a re-release. The tracks are coming off the original CD. The mixes are total shit, and I don't think it was really mastered back then (a remix is not possible). The kick and snare are loud as hell and peaking way above the rest of the mix. The rest is just plain muddy.
I've been able to clean up a lot of the mud with loads of eq, and the snare, cymbals, guitars, and vox are starting to sound decent. I've also been fattening with a good deal of compression. What I have noticed, though, is that any amount of peak limiting beyond clipping protection (threshold=-0.1 dBFS) turns the mix into swiss cheese. I'm cool with that because loudness is not really a top priority; making the record listenable is. My issue is that I'm having a hard time making the kick work; I had to remove so much body while clearing up the mud that what I'm left with is an incredibly punchy kick with a lot of snap in the 4kHz area. There's a lot of 100 Hz as well which is making it hard to work with the bass (which was poorly recorded and muddy to begin with).
I'm wondering if you guys might be able to share some techniques you use in such cases. Parallel compression? M/S mastering? Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance,
Chris