# Do you ever tinker with the audio of recordings?



## Clairvoyance Enough (Jul 25, 2014)

I used to think this was heresy but lately I've been more flexible, especially with baroque era stuff. I alter tempos, add echo effects, increase bass, etc. A lot of the time I find these changes necessary for me to truly connect with a performance I'm not willing to abandon. 

It becomes especially necessary when my ears try to transition from Hip Hop, Rock, movie OSTs, and other genres that are very heavy on sound-effects, bass, and other textures that were tailored to sound rich in headphones, something that is not true of classical music in many cases; honestly, in the arena of headphones dense orchestral masterpieces often sound less rich to me than techno videogame OSTs, not because of anything related to the composition or orchestration of those pieces obviously, but because stomping 808s and distorted electric guitars are just better suited to my SRS enhancer than the strings of a symphony orchestra.

And of course there are times when musicians just play something too slow or too fast. Maybe the sound quality was just downright bad or too old. I often have an issue with singers' voices sounding too sharp and loud compared to the orchestra. What's the most you've ever altered something if you ever have at all, and why did you do it?


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Never, I've never changed the sound of a recording apart from volume, I use a passive preamp, I never use headphones at home. What I'd love is for you to post some examples of the original recording and your changes.


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## EarthBoundRules (Sep 25, 2011)

Sometimes I will change the key of a piece for a little variety.


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## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

I do it all the time using the Sony Soundforge. I do most of my classical music listening with headphones and create my own albums for my iPhone. Since the volume level of recordings varies, at the very least, I will adjust the volume so that all the works in my custom album will have a close enough volume so I won't need to keep manually adjusting it when I listen while walking or whatever.

Then there are situations where the high dynamic range (difference between softest and loudest passages) typical of classical music can be a problem when one is trying to protect their hearing when using headphones. Soundforge makes it very easy to select parts of a work that are suddenly loud and decrease the sound level by a few db.

However, at times I have no problem committing the admittedly heretical practice of editing the music itself even to the point of chopping out parts that I don't like or editing in a way to make a particular movement work as an individual piece where, for instance, the movement has no break between it and the following movement.

An example of the playing fast and loose with editing: The Peter Benoit 1865 Larghetto is a beautiful piece with an overall early Romantic flavor, but at about 18:12 to 20:58 it suddenly changes to a late-Romantic-sounding segment which I found disconcerting. (Others may justifiably disagree.) It was not too difficult to simply chop it out. I have a fair amount of experience with sound editing & production so it was fairly easy to do it such that no one who didn't know the work would be able to tell that that segment ever existed. Due to copyright issues, I won't show my edited version, but here is the work in question and the place where I edited (btw: I used my own, not the YouTube recording):

Beginning of the Larghetto:






Beginning of the place where I edited:






Point where I ended the edit:


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## Logos (Nov 3, 2012)

Sometimes I add a bit of reverberation to Toscanini's old NBC recordings since they sound as if they were recorded inside a shoebox. I find it helps the sound 'breathe', or at least that is the illusion created.


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## Figleaf (Jun 10, 2014)

I'm not clever enough to do this sort of stuff, but I once got my son to use Audacity to try to correct some pitch fluctuations on an early recording. It didn't work too well, as the software apparently had trouble determining what the correct note should have been, and the enhanced version had the singer apparently singing all kinds of strange embellishments which certainly weren't part of the original record!


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

It's really irritating when a composer writes a perfectly good symphony but chooses the wrong key. Oh well, easy enough to fix these days!


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## premont (May 7, 2015)

Mandryka said:


> Never, I've never changed the sound of a recording apart from volume, I use a passive preamp, I never use headphones at home.


The same applies to me.


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## Becca (Feb 5, 2015)

I have occasionally been guilty of slightly speeding up a work which I wanted to fit on a CD but was just a few seconds too long even using overburn. Only once will I admit to making a change because I disagreed with the conductor and that was with Paavo Jarvi's recording of Sibelius _Kullervo_. I love almost everything about it except the overly slow last movement which is about 3 minutes slower than other recordings. At first I thought that I could learn to live with it but I found it too irritating. Now 'my' version is only about 2 minutes slower than other recordings and that I can tolerate!


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## SixFootScowl (Oct 17, 2011)

I have a few vocal recordings where I lowered the volume on the choral parts because it was way too loud compared to the rest of the recording. I have one recording where I amplified ever track because it was simply recorded at too low a volume and it was hard to hear on my earbud.


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## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

Mandryka said:


> Never, I've never changed the sound of a recording apart from volume, I use a passive preamp, I never use headphones at home. What I'd love is for you to post some examples of the original recording and your changes.


This goes for me as well .


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Editing out Schubert repeats is a special hobby of mine.


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## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

KenOC said:


> Editing out Schubert repeats is a special hobby of mine.


Strange hobby's you've got.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Pugg said:


> Strange hobby's you've got.


Wasn't it Schumann who spoke of Schubert's "heavenly length"? Sometimes it seem to me more like "stunningly tedious, boring, and altogether avoidable length."

Usually in the first movement. We get a few bars of vamp and then we're into the main theme. OK. It goes on for a while, then some modulations and noodling around, and the second theme arrives. The second theme is usually ravishing, and Schubert knows it. Like any good tune, it's hard to develop, so Franz just repeats it again and again, in different keys. OK Schwamerl, I get it already! Then the usual wrap-up with a closing theme, some more cadences, another closing theme, and so forth. So now ten minutes or so have passed, and what does Schubert do? He rewinds to the beginning and does it all again! And of course we still have to look forward to the same exact thing, all over again, in the recap.

Friends, you don't have to put up with this! The Schubert Anti-Repeat Society (SARS, not to be confused with the disease) lobbies for repeat omissions and organizes boycotts of performers inflicting these repeats on us. You can contribute to SARS through me. I take PayPal.


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## Antiquarian (Apr 29, 2014)

I used to do a lot of tinkering with sound when I was younger. I used an old analogue box, that ran between the tape monitor output on the preamp and one of the preamp inputs. (My memory is foggy here, and I could be remembering it wrong, bear with me...) It allowed you to change depth and delay, and had a reverb setting. It was probably one of those basic guitar effect boxes. If an old recording (like the Toscanini mentioned above, but also some 1920 -1930 Stokowski recordings that are quite low-fi) dissatisfied me, I would try this box to put some extra life into it. If this sounds like I became some sort of audio Dr. Frankenstein, let me say that you are not far off because some of the sounds that I achieved were truly monstrous. Eventually, I perceived that any tinkering I might do was not going to help my enjoyment, so I decided to live with the sound of any source as is, and not fiddle with it. This all was back before the advent of computers, ( indeed long before I aquired my PC) so sound shaping technology was rudimentary. For a brief time I used a tube amp simulator plug in for my computer, but the sound was not quite right, so I abandoned all that and developed a healthy respect for audio engineers.


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## Rosie (Jul 4, 2016)

One of my ex-boyfriends once made an hour long edit of the whole Wagner Ring Cycle. I thought it was funny,but the only editing I've done was putting one of Bach's Violin pieces into protools and editing it after I first heard a piece by Edgard Varese :lol:
I don't think it was that great lol


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

I tend to create 12-minute versions of Bruckner symphonies. That's about right.


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

Never. The artist's and engineers craft is sacrosanct. Would you crop a painting to fit a frame? (Actually, some philistines do, to my horror.)

The only thing I'd even consider is volume normalization with my other files. On the other hand there are times when I wish I had a good compressor so I can hear the quiet parts without jarring the neighborhood on the louder parts. Why engineers think a wide dynamic range in this age of noise pollution is desirable is beyond me.


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## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

Weston said:


> The artist's and engineers craft is sacrosanct. Would you crop a painting to fit a frame? (Actually, some philistines do, to my horror.)...
> 
> ...Why engineers think a wide dynamic range in this age of noise pollution is desirable is beyond me.


Ordinarily, the engineers, rather than adding it, are recording the wide dynamic range that is a natural part of classical music. One of the major benefits of digital recording when the CD came along was that the compression of dynamic range that was necessary in LPs could be removed.

I think there would be a lot of squawking if engineers started adding compression to the digital recordings of today. It would be like cropping a painting.


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## Becca (Feb 5, 2015)

DaveM said:


> I think there would be a lot of squawking if engineers started adding compression to the digital recordings of today. It would be like cropping a painting.


And yet very few ever squawk at what goes on in the MP3 lossy compression algorithm where it makes assumptions about what sounds won't be heard and then ignores them.


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## Becca (Feb 5, 2015)

Antiquarian said:


> I used to do a lot of tinkering with sound when I was younger. I used an old analogue box, that ran between the tape monitor output on the preamp and one of the preamp inputs. (My memory is foggy here, and I could be remembering it wrong, bear with me...) It allowed you to change depth and delay, and had a reverb setting. It was probably one of those basic guitar effect boxes. If an old recording (like the Toscanini mentioned above, but also some 1920 -1930 Stokowski recordings that are quite low-fi) dissatisfied me, I would try this box to put some extra life into it. If this sounds like I became some sort of audio Dr. Frankenstein, let me say that you are not far off because some of the sounds that I achieved were truly monstrous. Eventually, I perceived that any tinkering I might do was not going to help my enjoyment, so I decided to live with the sound of any source as is, and not fiddle with it. This all was back before the advent of computers, ( indeed long before I aquired my PC) so sound shaping technology was rudimentary. For a brief time I used a tube amp simulator plug in for my computer, but the sound was not quite right, so I abandoned all that and developed a healthy respect for audio engineers.


When I was a science student at university in the 19<censored>'s I took some classes in the music department. At the time they had some fascinating new fangled equipment including one of the first Dolby boxes which weighed about 80lbs in a 19" rack mount) and a device for changing the speed of a recording without changing the pitch. I suspect the latter is what John Culshaw indirectly refers to in his book about recording the Ring Cycle where they made Windgassen's voice sound more like a baritone when Siegried used the Tarnhelm to appear as Gunther.


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## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

Becca said:


> And yet very few ever squawk at what goes on in the MP3 lossy compression algorithm where it makes assumptions about what sounds won't be heard and then ignores them.


Yes, that's one of the great ironies of this era. All those years in the past, there was the quest to achieve classical recordings that were close to the concert hall experience in dynamic range etc. And yet, here we are listening to highly compressed MP3, AAC and other lossy music. Go figure!


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