What do you guys think of this? You go out to buy remastered copies of Ozzy's first two solo albums and something isn't quite right. Hmm. They haven't just been remastered, they've been re-rhythm sectioned!
The work done by the original bassist and drummer have been replaced!
(There's a dispute on royalties not paid.)
Is this kosher? What do you think?
And honestly, how do they do that? I don't understand the recording process at all. How can you take out individual instruments from a recording like that and replace them?
the process of that is quite simple to do, as is any kind of musical fakery and trickery in these days of protools, autotune and so forth....
When they initially recorded the albums, they recorded Multitrack masters on a 24 track tape machine. the drum kit gets appx. 6 of those tracks, the bass usually gets 2, the guitar gets 4 for rhythm, 2 for lead,2 for keyboards and the rest for special effects and vocals.
At that point, that 24 track tape is mixed down to a 4 track "master" that is then sent to the Mastering Lab where final editing, processing and filtering happens. What comes out of the Mastering Lab is a 2 track (left and right stereo) mix of the original tape. What was done by the Osbournes in this case is an absolute abortion.
They took the original 24 track masters and fed those into pro-tools. each track getting the same track assignment in the digital environment. Any individual track can then be heard by itself, or in reference to any other by manipulating the faders on the mixer. At that point, you can make a track that is JUST the drums and bass for a drummer and bassist to learn. At that point the new musicians come into the studio either together or separately and re-record the parts note for note and beat for beat in place of the originals. At that point more trickery must be used in the form of amp simulators etc. to replicate the tones and nuances of the original instruments. Then, once they are done with that, they mix it, remaster it and release the newly modified cd on an unsuspecting public. In this case they further added insult to this by modifying Randy Rhoads guitar tone to add dynamics and frequencies that werent there originally to satiate the bass heavy preferences of today. This ultimately adds up to misrepresentation on behalf of the osbournes, and a little bit of false advertising in the process.
I heard the remastered stuff on the radio and I knew the difference immediately and have lost a LOT of respect for Sharon Osbourne for thinking this was a good idea. Essentially, they stripped half the soul out of the recordings and replaced it with artificial music.
The other problem, and this is really the bigger problem really, is that they dont really tell the public that they arent buying the original recordings. essentially what you get is a karaoke recording.
For any recording industry people that may read this forum please read closely:
-6 DB is as loud as it needs to be. your killing the dynamics of recording by brick wall mixing. less compression is better. Dont mix for IPODS. Mix for clarity, punch sonic dynamics, let the listener determine how loud the volume should be.
