I have some reel to reel tapes from the early 1980s that I’m trying to restore. The engineer that transferred the tapes had a slight issue with one of them shedding, so he baked it, but the sound has some issues that he thinks go back to the original recordings, rather than being with the tape itself.
The files have regular dropouts and pumping on the channels. I’ve attached a short example of it below. I have Spectralayers 12, but only really used it for unmixing so far, so I wonder if anyone can give me an idea where to start on trying to get the sound evened up before I dig in any further?
Do you have a multi-track recording, or just the stereo mix? I’d probably start with some EQ adjustments to clean it up–that might make it easier to hear any issues you need to address with the dynamics. For example, there’s seems to be some heavy ringing at around 326 Hz that you might want to tone down. Having said that–it sounds pretty good to me
Just the 2-track unfortunately - a copy for my own use taken from the master back in the day when 2" tape was too expensive to give away (if you had a small studio) or to buy (if you were a struggling punk rocker).
I’m digging into it now, so I’ll try your suggestion and see what gives. The second tape which was done around a year later has come out really well and Spectralayers is doing a handsome job of unmixing it.
Now to get the timing onto a grid (no fancy click tracks for us back in the day!)
