Any tips or tricks for sprucing up 4-track cassette recordings?

[zhuzh_michael]

Over the past four years, I've recorded hundreds of little song bits and pieces to an old Fostex X-12 cassette 4-track. I've just recently finished importing them all into Pro Tools, and now I want to start picking out the highlights and creating an album out of them (though in reality it will be more like a mixtape of sorts). Here is one such example, in it's raw form without any digital editing on my part:

https://soundcloud.com/bark-leafgood/thanks

Now, I composed these songs using my Boss RC-20 Loop Station, adding multiple instruments and many layers. Since I imported each one into Pro Tools as a single stereo track, I am unable to separate any of voices/instruments/layers in Pro Tools—so my options are fairly limited. My question to you is this:

What can be done to enhance this track from its meager beginnings? What I am looking for is a wider, bigger, fuller sound. Granted, the potential is limited given my constraints, but I want to be sure they are the best that they can be. I've consulted a few friends, and have developed the following approach:

1. I slap a 7-band EQ on there and start dragging the dots around until it sounds ... better. It's here that I try to eliminate a bit of the tape hiss on the high end.
2. I add a Stereo Slap Delay effect and offset the left and right channels by about 10ms—this is a trick a friend of mine uses to get a bigger sound. Alternatively, a different friend suggested achieving a similar result with AIR Reverb and messing with early reflections.
3. I add some additional reverb, even though all these songs already have reverb from my guitar amp, which I ran them through while recording to tape.

And that's pretty much it. I am an amateur when it comes to Pro Tools, so I thought I would throw this question to the community and hopefully get some new ideas. Any help you can offer would be much appreciated. Thanks!

[Southsidemusic]

Hey Man

Holy Snabels I LOVE That sound

If you EVER wanna have one of those song ideas made into a real release with one of our artists from Universal, Email me as I got a million vocal and lyric ideas on the bongos song right off the bat

We have the nice pleasure of having our own artists and still be signed to a big record label so if you wanna do something together with one of our signed artists let me know. i felt like i was hearing like a new improved The XX here man

Great Job!

Christopher

[zhuzh_michael]

Thanks for the compliment, Christopher. Very encouraging!

[nst7]

It will depend on if you consider this the finished track, or more of an idea that you can add to. It seems to me like there's a lot you could add to it, like drums, bass, vocals, extra layers of more guitar parts, synths, and so on. If you do that, you can then record those separately, and pan those parts where you need. In the case of the background vocals that are already there, you can add to them to thicken them up, and again, then treat those separately to fill things out.

This example really does sound more like a loop that can be added to. If there are other songs that have more in them already, then it may be harder to work with.

As for tape hiss, it's probably better to use a noise reduction plugin for that, rather then trying to just EQ it out. If don't have any and don't need to buy any for future use, you can demo some plugins, and if you work it right, treat all your songs within the demo period.

[zhuzh_michael]

Originally Posted by nst7

It will depend on if you consider this the finished track, or more of an idea that you can add to. It seems to me like there's a lot you could add to it, like drums, bass, vocals, extra layers of more guitar parts, synths, and so on. If you do that, you can then record those separately, and pan those parts where you need. In the case of the background vocals that are already there, you can add to them to thicken them up, and again, then treat those separately to fill things out.

This example really does sound more like a loop that can be added to. If there are other songs that have more in them already, then it may be harder to work with.

As for tape hiss, it's probably better to use a noise reduction plugin for that, rather then trying to just EQ it out. If don't have any and don't need to buy any for future use, you can demo some plugins, and if you work it right, treat all your songs within the demo period.

Hey, thanks for the input. I'm not planning on altering or adding to any of these songs, aside from what I can do with PT plugins. Some of these I've been holding onto for four years now, so really all I want to do is give them a spit-shine and share them with people so I can move on to bigger better things. Thanks for the tip about the noise reduction—I had a feeling there was a more sophisticated solution. I'll definitely look into that!

[smfelton]

RX3 by Izotope is absolutely your best bet for audio restoration.
https://www.izotope.com/en/products/audio-repair/rx/

[zhuzh_michael]

Originally Posted by smfelton

RX3 by Izotope is absolutely your best bet for audio restoration.
https://www.izotope.com/en/products/audio-repair/rx/

For the price O_O that must be an amazing tool! Don't get me wrong—I don't intend to fool anyone into thinking my four-track recordings are anything more than that. I'd be happy to just cut out some of the tape hiss with whatever standard plugin works best.

Aside from that, I want to do what I can to make them sound louder, punchier, and generally BIGGER—with what tools I currently have at my disposal (mostly standard plugins). For argument's sake, I'd say my budget for achieving this goal is effectively $0.