Mixing

Mastering archives of Tomasz Stanko Quintet

Founded in 2016, Astigmatic Records is an independent label out of Poland focused on vinyl releases. The label has mastered and released records across a variety of fresh and distinctive music genres drawing on jazz, electronic, and hip hop. Their work includes digging into archives of artists, finding unreleased music, and publishing full vinyls of these releases. Their team focuses on uniqueness and high artistic quality with each release.
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Mastering archives of Tomasz Stanko Quintet
Working with AudioShake

To commemorate Tomasz Stanko's 80th birthday, Astigmatic Records partnered with the Tomasz Stańko Foundation and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute to release these two parts as “Wooden Music I” and “Wooden Music II.” In mastering the second album, sound engineer Marcin Cichy found that the archives of the Wooden Music II had a serious problem that prevented the production of the analog record. The recording was only available in stereo and the main microphone seemed to be out of phase with the rest of the microphone settings on stage. Therefore, each solo, especially the trumpet, was in complete anti-phase.

To properly mix the previously unknown performance, Cichy needed access to the stems from this original performance. Both to achieve the audio quality he desired as well as to make individual improvements to the trumpet, which was arguably the most important instrument on this album. However, as you’d expect in a broadcast taped for radio over fifty years ago, the project files and multi-tracks were not available. 

Łukasz Wojciechowski, Co-founder of Astigmatic Records, reached out to AudioShake. With our AI, stems from the archival broadcast tape were created in seconds. Allowing Cichy to master the album at the proper caliber and elevate Stanko’s performance for listeners.

"The resulting stems enabled me to seamlessly re-mix the audio material. To preserve the original atmosphere of the recording, I could smoothly switch between new stems and the original stereo mix while working, thus eliminating problematic moments… We are at the beginning of the road where AI technology comes to help us and literally do the work for us which was previously impossible, the results are already extremely promising and of satisfactory quality."
Marcin Cichy
Sound Engineer for “Wooden Music I” and “Wooden Music II.”
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