People often ask me, “You’re a translator and writer. How come you also remaster music?” Well, here’s my answer.
In professional translation, there’s one principle you need to keep in mind: the reader of the translated text must have the exact same experience as the reader of the original text. I have loved this process since I was a child. To me, it’s a bit like a game or puzzle, taking something apart and putting it back together. Basically, as a music lover, I apply the same principle of faithful rendition to the remastering of music.
That skill didn’t come to me overnight. I was four years old when my dad taught me the basics of sound and film editing (that was one of his areas of expertise). I still remember editing audio recordings the old-fashioned way, which involved actually cutting the tape and pasting it back together, using a white crayon to mark the relevant spots. I was even experimenting with mono recordings and remastering them into stereo. Again, I was just four years old.
In 2016, I decided to revisit that skill—in the digital age. Having always been self-taught, I familiarized myself with the standard software for mastering and remastering music. I had simply grown tired of so many great songs from the past being lost or forgotten. One such example was the great music recorded in Québec in the 1960s, much of which had been lost. Until I started a preservation project, and now most of those recordings are back, the way they sounded back then (you can easily find them on iTunes, etc.).
A major fire in 2008 destroyed a lot of valuable and precious master tapes in Los Angeles. This is just one of the reasons why so much of the great music we once had is no longer available—not via streaming or for purchase: with no proper master tapes left, record labels have decided against re-releasing remastered recordings. At other times, master tapes have been lost or allowed to deteriorate beyond repair.
So, sometimes you have no other choice but to go back to vinyl records or broadcast tapes and use them as masters to remaster music that would otherwise be lost forever.
That’s essentially what I do: people convert their vinyl collections to MP3 or other audio formats, and I then work my magic to restore the sound (pops and crackle as well as any other damage to vinyl records). Just as in translation, I re-create a faithful version of the recording, the way it was intended to or did sound way back when. The oldest song recording I have remastered so far dates from 1908. And sometimes I freelance for record labels. In addition, I “do special requests”, such as creating a “record” or “album” for someone’s favourite TV theme, etc., and I have also done my share of re-mixes (although that goes against my general principle of remaining faithful to the original recording). You can sample hundreds of my recordings on my YouTube channel.
By way of an example, here’s my most recent project (at the time of writing this):
Finally, music is simply yet another expression of human language, and therefore, like anything related to language or languages, right up my alley.