Ways to treat old, worn out samples

[reddvinylene]

Hi,

I use a lot of old cassette and vinyl, so my samples are often worn out and distorted.

Are there any ways to smoothen them out, make them sound like new?

Thanks!

[variant]

Hey,
I'm no production expert, but what I have found is that there may be a point of interest in the difference between material from sample CDs/soft synths and what you or I may be able to record from an analogue input.
I think that perhaps originality in sound comes from the source, even before composition.
My old Juno 106 inspires me - it's richness of sound, texture and capability for sounds which, whilst may not be musical, always act as a basis for experimentation.
I say don't fight it - many work hard to emulate the character of tape. Use it to develop dialogue between it and other cleaner elements.
Use the original character of the recording itself, as well as the content of what it is meant to be 'of'.

Sorry if this is obvious or insulting.
I just wish someone said this to me.

All the best.

[Area593Studio]

Hi,

I completely agree with Variant, the sound of tape and vinyl is very sought after and can have a really nice character, so work with it if you can I know one producer who spent a couple of years trying to find a copy of the Amen break with the "perfect" tape saturation, lol

If you really must clean them up then there are a few tools that I use for that purpose, including iZotope RX and the Waves X series (C-Click, X-Crackle, X-Hum, X-Noise). I tend to find various combinations of them tend to work quite well.

Good luck with it!

[arafel]

IMHO - no matter what you do - make sure you have those samples backed up. You might really want that old character someday. Getting rid of the dirt/ grime/ and old feel without being able to go back would be a shame.

Try layering your Tape Samples with new ones - combine the grit & feel of the old with the punch of modern samples. Even just having your samples as a subtle underlayer with help keep the 'new' samples even fresher!

+1 on keep your originality

[DjDiabolik]

For some radical EQ'ing try parallel processing - basically by splitting the audio and putting an extreme process on one send and then blending that into the original you can change the sound with less coloring.
Your enemy here is latency though, and I've had some confusion finding a stable routing in Live.

Here's one method that seems to eliminate problems
> send track to two returns and turn the tracks output to sends only
> choose a return as your EQ channel and use an EQ8 at high quality lets say
> for an example : try radically eq'ing it to have two peaks, one around 100hz at a 3db gain, one around around 10khz at a 3b gain, and make a deep valley in the middle
> copy this EQ to the other return and reset all gains (from the EQ8 options menu) ... basically what I'm doing is enduring there's a duplicate plugin setup on both returns to force similar latency and then set one of them to have zero effect
> now blend the heavily Eq'd return with the other return until they sit together

This is one example, you might want put a soft gate or compressor on the returns (making sure you have no latency phasing)


Cleaning audio with something like Wave Arts Restoration suite or Sound Soap can also help but can sometimes destroy the soul of the original if not applied carefully ... make sure you save your original


Another completely different thing you can do for tonally based samples
is to make a rack that notches out a well chosen frequency to a resonator (something like DefEq's morph filter with resonator). Then automate the resonators pitch to the same key as the sample (or whatever sounds good). Blend together to taste. This works well with melodic type samples or vocals

[AudioRuso]

you could eliminate latency by using a SINGLE audio effects rack on one track