Making a song sound old.

Special Interest Groups Audio Processing
1

I would love to make some songs sound “old”. There’s a particular kind of sound to songs from the 30s and such that I would love to capture—mostly the voide, like it comes out of a gramophone. I suppose I can just record it being played so it sounds a bit worse and gets this effect, but I don’t know if that’d make the voices get that chorus-like effect they get…

Here’s a great example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXpAsQIYyeQ

And in this trailer the change in the song is very obvious: first it sounds gramophoney, then good quality, then gramophoney again:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXpAsQIYyeQ

So please help me take normal songs and making them sound like this.

2

old recordings had limited bandwidth
and may not have been equalised
and some more harmonic distortion
plus surface and thermal noise

measure the spectrum to see what bandwidth to try to start
and to estimate how to eq it
add just a touch of distortion and noise to suit your taste

the mikes also may have had a rising freq response with many peaks and valleys in it. dont think you need to do anything about that explicitly if you can make your final file look like the sample file you want to dupe as those effects would already be included. ditto for the playback machine back then.

3

Try looping this mp3 and mixing it with your track modified as per Whomper’s instructions

BTW the mp3 wa made using this … http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=12743

NB: 1920’s recordings were 78rpm, the Freesound sample is probably 33&1/3 or 45rpm.
so if you want historical accuracy you’ll have to find a recording of a 78, try here.

4

<<<And in this trailer the change in the song is very obvious: first it sounds gramophoney, then good quality, then gramophoney again:>>>

It’s the same cut. Point us to a piece you want us to mangle.

Koz