who else here modifies their music?

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oh my good man, there IS such software that i have been using [in one form or another] for the past 15 years. they are as follows-


Thanks.

I've still been at it with my stereo difference experiments, looking for hidden/buried layers of instrumentation. Can anyone think of some particularly densely layered songs for me to try it out on? I've been pulling apart California by Mr Bungle, one of the last albums to be recorded completely analogue, every little detail is beautifully clear and intricately written. Also, I'm thinking of starting a youtube channel to post my experiments (there's already another guy who does them: http://www.youtube.com/user/stereodifference)

i did something like that using SoundForge, in re-doing an old patsy cline song, "San Antonio Rose" of which there were several mixes done throughout the decades since her death. i chose my favorite parts from the various mixes and had to use time alignment and the sum/difference technique in order to get them all to gel.

i was browsing the used record bin at seattle goodwill a while back, when i chanced upon an old 50 year-old recording of lorin whitney at the manuals of his custom robert morton wurlitzer-type theatrical pipe organ, playing old-timey spirituals with hawaiian steel guitarist bud tutmarc. this is surreal, ethereal music, and i had a "calgon moment" listening to it. after declicking it, i heard that it had real modification potential, with "holes" in the melody line and accompaniment that could stand a little contrapuntal help, so i am trying to decide which chromatic and non-chromatic percussion samples i should add to it, in experimentation. first a little tap cymbal in emulation of how an organists keyed [on the pedals] percussion accompaniment might sound. i might have to derust my fingers and record some accompaniment on my own console [home] organ for additional musical phrasing. sounds like an adventure to me

I used to make up an extra harmony part on certain Beatles songs, as if I could go in a time machine, sing it for them, and point out they really needed to hire me to help their band out....

somebody really needs to invent the WABAC machine

on one of my trips to the seattle goodwill store, i found a neat old flat friend [i.e. phonograph record or LP], a 1961 recording of cornetist bobby hackett and organist johnny seng [a demonstrator for the wurlitzer pipe organ company] playing jackie gleason-type "make-out" music, oh so lovely sounds. i later found on amazon a CD copy from the original master tape that left out a few songs, so i am going to make a combo CD including both the restored audio from the LP as well as selected tracks from the CD. my main problem is that the LP has substantial mistracking damage from having been played on an inferior 'table with a misadjusted cartridge and blunted stylus, thereby chipping permanent damage into the adjascent groove walls producing a raspy distortion over most of the record. decrackling software was only able to take the edge off this distortion, so i am struggling to balance treble extension with the opposite goal of covering up the treble mistracking distortion on this disc. just rolling off the trebles and then synthesizing the missing trebles won't work on this disc because there is a cymbal as percussive accompaniment which only resides in the same frequency spectra as the mistracking distortion, so i have to just keep the distortion in. damn. this is a pretty hard to find LP, btw.

anybody perchance actually reading this post, have any suggestions for me? they would be appreciated.

i have found that Acon Digital Media's "High Frequency Rebirth" algorithm is very useful at restoring missing/corrupted trebles in old recordings. i could not live without it, in terms of how it helps my restoration projects. This one is useful hand-in-glove with Virtos Noise Wizard's similar algorithm.

i took a 60s stereo recording of Billy May's Jazz Orchestra playing an instrumental version of Bunny Berrigan's "I can"t get started", and then copied and pasted Bunny's original version of his hit, into the Billy May version, thus creating a new version which is mostly in stereo sound and high fidelity, with Bunny's original [1936] version having been heterodyned for increased trebles, and decorrelated into artificial stereo so as to make a better match with the newer stereo Billy Mays recording. the finished result sounds surprisingly organic.

I'm using Audacity (so digital, not analog) to edit a lot of others' and my own recordings lately.

Such as trying to remaster stuff, typically bad productions that I want to fix.

Another low tech thing I did was to create a 20 minute long Louie Louie megamix. Some thirty different rock bands doing thirty different versions of the same one song( Louie Louie) spliced together.

Using only an old fashioned componet stereo system, and the pause button on the cassette player, I took my collection of vinyls and CD's with versions of Louie Louie and spliced them together into one long song on a cassette tape.

The song has three verses, so I just took: verse one played by band A, grafted verse two by band B, and so on..with the song repeating itsself with three different artists to a cycle.

My friends loved it.

It has the original R+B version by RIchard Berry, the well known notorious Kingsmen version (in which you cant understand the words so they must be dirty!), and.. metal versions and punk versions, a rap version by the fat boys, ez listening by Pete Fountain, and by the Sand Pipers. and on and on....

I don't modify my music but a few years ago when I was a DJ for an online radio-station I would sometimes adjust the pitch/tone & the pace/speed of songs. I noticed if I slow that group Aqua down & raise the pitch; that girl has a very beautiful voice. & if I did the opposite which is speed it up & raise the pitch; the guy has a really good voice. I somehow figured out how to record a few Aqua songs where they both had really good voices. I quit using that program when I quit DJin & I lost those modified songs when I had a major computer problem

You ought to go into business restoring old records.
If we were nieghbors Id hire you myself.

some stuff remains unfixable.

Unfortunately, true... but there's always something that can be improved. With over-compressed stuff: even if it's from de-amplifying the original signal, editing the spikes that are clipped (which I have a tool that does this to save me time; I just review what it did and clean up other errors myself), and applying an equalizer to the areas that are made worse by the original compression (if it ended up too muddy, turn up the highs a little bit; vice versa with turn up the lows if it sounds too tinny, etc...).

I'll never get the song to sound the way it *should* if it was never over-compressed (unless I find the original master tracks, which sometimes are available for download; which I still am using Audacity for), but I could make something about it sound better.

Or so I hope; either way, it's a learning process at the moment.

the unfixable stuff was recorded, by and large, on very primitive equipment which simply could not register most parts of the musical performance, such as acoustic 78 rpm phonograph recordings in which a horn was literally shouted into so that the soundwave could be vibrated via a sharp cutting stylus into a wax disc. the term hysteresis applies here, in that the ingoing signal was extremely attenuated at the frequency and dynamic extremes, leaving a range of tones between roughly 300 and 3000 cycles per second [similar to a telephone], and a dynamic range of approximately 20-25 db at best, equivalent to AM talk radio. the effect of this was to make music sound as though it were recorded from across a great distance under a blanket, with the performers wearing tight girdles.
but i agree with your point that just about anything other than the acoustic discs can be improved, some by amazing amounts.