SoundSurgery Audio Restoration Service
SoundSurgery audio restoration can rejuvenate old recordings, remove background noises, adjust tempo and pitch, and in many cases even correct mistimed entrances and clunker notes in otherwise-terrific performances.
Simply put, "It's Cosmetic Surgery for audio recordings!"
SoundSurgery is where I combine my electrical engineering knowledge and expertise in digital signal processing with my creative abilities and musical skills.
This video provides a brief introduction with some interesting examples...
Who Needs SoundSurgery?
Do you have old recordings - treasured memories - that you would like to have restored and improved?
- voice recordings of family members, but you wish that a voice was clearer or more intelligible?
- you played in a garage band that sounded great, but those old audio cassette recordings sound muddy and awful?
- school plays or concerts that have disturbing thumps, clunks, clicks, coughs?
(yes, I did!! - and after I retired that's exactly what started me on a new technology journey in audio restoration)
Or are you a singer or musician with new recordings that have a few flubs in an otherwise-perfect track?
- a wrong note in one chorus that was spot-on in another one - argh!
- a great choral group recording - except for the spot where that one singer came in too soon - ugh!
- a live video recording that you want to showcase on your website - but that one flub is awful - yuk!
In many cases, these problems can be fixed amazingly well (please watch the video above for examples).
I will remove hiss, hum, clunks, clicks and clean up audio recordings that are precious personal memories. I perform audio restoration using commercially available, state-of-the-art software tools. But where automated tools fall short, I will perform editing of the audio signal waveform to cut, paste and smooth the signal and/or editing of the audio spectrum to selectively remove, reduce or add certain frequencies. I often use multiple tools to mend a wound in the sound, often by "grafting" another portion of audio from the same track. As both a musician and an electrical engineer, I strive for the best balance of maintaining audio fidelity and clarity and removing unwanted artifacts.
Contact me to discuss your audio restoration needs and how I can help!
Please send me an email at: Sound_Surgery@yahoo.com
Note: I only work on digital files, so if you have old analog audio or video tapes, please use a digitization service to transfer the media to a digital format. Uncompressed (.wav) files are the preferred starting point for restoration.
SoundSurgery audio restoration is for music and entertainment purposes only. I will not alter a recording to misrepresent the spoken word of any individual.
Distributed Audio Production Services
The covid pandemic has brought a halt to many wonderful musical activities. Since covid, I have collaborated with many other musician friends over the internet by sharing reference tracks and having each participant make simple home recordings in sync with the reference, which we keep re-mixing, iterating and improving until we get a really good result. Maybe it's time for your church praise band, your high school choral group, or your musical theater club to give this approach a try? If this is all new to you, I can provide you and your group some simple consultation and coaching help on how to use PCs and phones to get you started.
Or, if you are well on your way with the basics of Distributed Audio Production, but you have tracks that are out-of-sync or you need help to get a professional sounding result from a musicians and singers each recording tracks at home, I may be able to apply SoundSurgery techniques to align and blend tracks and to correct note timing and pitch.
Please contact me to discuss your needs and how I might be able to help. (email: GlennReitmeierTV@gmail.com)
Audio Technology
I will provide audio samples from a variety of instruments for audio system analysis and audio compression codec testing. Below are examples of the effect of audio compression on a sequence of G, C and D chords from a Martin D-35 guitar. (These and more are shown in the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers course on ATSC 3.0)
The original source waveform and spectrogram are shown of the right; listen to the sound clips below to see and hear the effects of extreme audio bit rate compression.
MP3 audio compression at an extremely low bit rate 8 kbps. Listen to the warbling and phasing artifacts in the audio and observe the spectrogram to the right. You will actually hear the high frequencies come and go.
MP3 audio compression at 32 kbps. While greatly improved, you can still hear substantial degradation compared to the source. You can also see the differences in the spectrogram, which clearly shows the loss of the rich high frequencies that give the original source recording its vibrance and texture.
Please contact me to discuss obtaining various guitar and bass samples and recordings