I will attempt to enhance the track Reflection just for fun. I’ll apply some basic mixing and mastering and see what I end up with. Check it out in the 3 videos below and you decide the difference between the before and after.
The original track which I have as source material is in a *.mod format and it was made in 1994 by a guy named Piotr Bendyk (aka XTD) using Noisetracker/Protracker on the Amiga computer. The machine had only 4 sound channels and 8-bit sound, which doesn’t really impress anyone today but at that time it was a mini home studio for hobby musicians. However, XTD achieved magic with what was offered back then much thanks to his musical and technical skills. His work is still impressive though, even today – to me at least.
Okay, basically what I did was:
- Extract and separate all sounds to their own channel and import them into Ableton
- Compress the sounds
- EQ – add/substract some frequencies
- Stereo widening – source is mono
- Add some room/reverb
- Add some echo
- Add some more compression to glue it all together
- Limiting
Video 1 – Original song, before mixing and mastering.
Video 2 – My mixing and mastering workflow
Video 3 – My final result
Jozef Lahoud 