![]() ![]() ![]() Boosting bass, correcting L/R balance, probably rolling out the top end during quiet sections to hide the hiss and boosting it again in the loud bits to counter the inevitable distorted mush that came with them. So, I would borrow a friend's ghetto blaster and use it's primitive 3-band graphic equaliser to copy the crappy transparent plastic TDK D90 original (remember them?!) across to a lovely new silver SAX90, making improvements as I went. I bought these in dodgy indie record shops for a pittance, on analogue cassette (remember those?) and then discovered I couldn't listen to them, because they were usually dull, distorted, off-azimuth and copied at such a ridiculously low level with no noise reduction that they were bathed in hiss as a result ! Bootlegs, to be exact - purely for my own listening - of Prince, no less, at various gigs on the Lovesexy tour and numerous after-show parties. But I was mastering, nonetheless - or rather, re-mastering - in my own fashion. That's not strictly true of course - I actually started work as a trainee tape-op at SRT roughly two years later, and mastered my first album for paying customers a few months after that. ![]() My friend Dan (nowadays I master his albums) introduced me to "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts" by Byrne and Eno - and with hindsight, it was the year I started mastering. I was in my second year at university, and it was the same time that Orbital's Brown Album came out, U2 released Achtung Baby, Screamadelica by Primal Scream was huge, Resevoir Dogs and the Director's Cut of Blade Runner were released, I was listening to "Copper Blue" by Sugar, Bowie's "Hunky Dory" and ""Mixed Up" by the Cure, and They Might Be Giants released "Flood". I vividly remember hearing "Little Fluffy Clouds" by The Orb for the first time - it was in 1991, and coincided with the beginning of one of my favourite times in UK music. Please forgive me a self-indulgent nostalgia post: ![]()
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