INSERT_MAP I’ve used some extra software that I’ve “re-found” (!!!) on my PC to adjust the sound a bit (well a lot actually) of these two consecutive tracks from a live gig recorded at “The Golden Eagle” pub in Blyth, Northumberland in 1980-ish. The sound is pretty crap on the cassette and the tape is old (I’ve already had one break), so it’s taken a while and I just can’t get it right without taking too much away. The newer clean-up can be found on the Crawling Chaos site here.

The software is the HarBal Equalisation System for windows operating systems version 2.3 revision 1

Just trips off the tongue really… You can get it here and there’s a SoundOnSound article here.

I found it quite neat to use and it does smooth out the sound when you work at the settings. It doesn’t seem to like high bit rates i.e. anything better than CD quality. Next time I’ll pre-EQ and then clean up and maybe post clean-up EQ again to see what happens. A neat thing is the harmonic picker-outer (technical phrase – harmonic cursor), where you can select a peak and it points out the 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc harmonics to that frequency and you can see if any coincide with other higher frequency peaks. The third harmonic is the killer because it’s discordant. I found one major peak that had a peak on it’s third harmonic. Reducing this removed loads of harshness. This is why I think it’d be a good experiment to try this tool BEFORE noise reduction etc – I think I can chop off the hiss without data and kill a few duff harmonics to make the noise removal process more effective.

Watch this space!

I’ll give my ears a bit of a rest and then go back to them to choose the best one. If anyone has any preferences about what to leave up then speak up now.

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