Remastering Telos - 2013

In July 2013, we began remixing and remastering our Debut Album; Telos. We'd been dissatisfied with the overall sound of the album for at least 18 months prior to this point and wanted to see if we could improve it using some equipment and know how that we had built up since the album's original release back in June, 2011. We also wanted to release the album as a free download in order to increase the number of people that have heard the it and as such, we combined these 2 desires and decided to remix and remaster the album and re release it as a free download from our website. 

The remixing and remastering work was all done by me, Thomas Drew, and took 3 full months to complete. In total, I calculated the time I spent on this project to be over 300 hours. 300 hours being locked in a small studio listening/experimenting/mixing down, etc. Needless to say, it was a pretty tough task to complete.

I had a sharepoint online where I would upload the latest mixes on a daily basis for Braun and Dave to provide comments on which I would then take into consideration the next day. I also spent my commute to and from work listening the the latest mixes and making notes so in fact, I spent far more than 300 hours on this project and essentially I was living it nearly full time.

The 2 main areas that I set out to address initially where the bass and the overall loudness and lack of punch of the original album. The bass was unfocused and muddy, the guitar was often too quiet, not cutting and very unfocused, the vocals were too loud in general with too much variation in volume and not enough presence, the drums simply did not cut through the mix and sounded weak and almost faded. Then overall the album was just not loud enough as a whole when compared directly to other professional mixes. 

Here's an overview of the changes I made instrument by instrument:

Bass: I did not do too much to the bass sound in general although I did apply heavier compression in 2 stages with a ratio of 4:1 and a reduction of around 3db on the heavier setting. This volume loss was then (obviously) made up by adding make up gain. I also used an EQ plugin called Equilibrium to pull out some frequencies between 300 and 800 hz. I added a small amount at 2khz for a bit of presence and in order to merge the bass with the guitar sound. 

Guitar: The guitar ended up needing a fair amount of work. One of the main changes that I made was adding a fairly steep a high pass filter at 100hz to give the bass some room and allow me to turn the guitar up in the mix without it becoming too overpowering in the low end. In fact, the low end of the guitar was the cause of a lot of our bass problems in the original version of the album. I used 2 compressors in sequence with the heaviest compression setting at 3:1 reducing the volume by no more than 4db. I added a slight bump in the EQ between 2khz and 4khz and then had a steep low pass filter set at around 6khz to give the drums and vocals room in the high end. Dave also worked with me on the guitar sound throughout the first month so really this was a combined effort.

Vocals: There is no doubt that the vocals took up the majority of my time. Due to our lack of experience when recording Telos, we had vocal comps with greatly varying dynamic levels. Added to this, the microphone that we had used did not suit Braun's voice at all. We used a Neumann TLM 103 which accentuated the mid range frequencies too much. Braun is a very diaphragmatic singer and a microphone with a really nice high end suits him best as it balances his vocals out. With the Neumann, we ended up with a bit too much honk (mid range between 1khz and 2khz). This was not the only problem by a long shot. After weeks of experimentation, the setup that I ended up with was 5 duplicated audio tracks with very different sounds on each one. 1 channel for the extreme high end, 1 completely flat with no compression, 1 heavily compressed (parallel compression), 1 with a character plugin and another with a different character plugin. The completely flat vocal was then sent 100% to a side chain reverb as was the compressed vocal (but only 50%). All of these tracks including the reverb then fed into a single vocal bus.

Drums: The drums had a fairly standard treatment although I used a trick on the snare to get it to cut through the master buss compressor and limiter as much as possible (although it's never really going to cut through the limiter). This involved duplicating the snare track and then using a plugin to get just the transient but none of the sustain. I also had a heavily compressed snare track (parallel compression) which I blended into the the snare sound. I also duplicated the kick drum track and used a high pass filter at around 3khz to get only the high of the kick drum. This allowed me to control the 'click' of the kick separately from the low and mid. We had no room mics for the kit but the overhead mics had a high pass filter set at around 1.5khz. All tracks were then sent to a reverb side chain. 

All tracks apart from the guitar were then sent to a very light master reverb bus with a 5% wet setting which then went out to the master bus.

I had an SSL Duende Master Bus Compressor set at 2:1 ratio, .3 attack and auto release giving a db reduction of around 4db on the master. The .3 attack was to allow the snare transient to pass through to the limiter.

After the master bus compressor, I used Slate Digital's FG-X plugin. I have used many different limiter plugins and FG-X is in a different league when used correctly. The intelligent transient preservation works extremely well in order to get loud mixes that retain perceived dynamics.

Without going into too much detail about RMS levels in mastering in this post, we ended up with an RMS level of around -10db whilst maintaining clear dynamics and transients. In short, that means that the average volume of the tracks is -10db with the highest peak being -0.1db. The highest possible volume is 0db and the higher the RMS level (average level over time) the louder the song will sound when compared to tracks with a lower RMS level. The original release of Telos had an RMS level of -16db. 

The remastered version of Telos was then finally released on September 29th, 2013 and is available to download for free HERE. The link to the remastered version on Youtube is HERE

Hope you like it!