Years ago, in my student days, I used to be really into music and was in a band. We did our fair share of gigs and a few recordings, the latter of which you can listen to here.

I was never unhappy with the tracks we recorded there, but never entirely happy, either. We were students when we recorded the tracks, and so had limited money to throw away. Even budget studios clock up costs relatively quickly, so we had to take a few shortcuts that we'd have probably not done had we had more money and time to dedicate to the recordings.

A few weeks ago, Coz, who was in the band with me and played guitar, and I were out on a night out up in Newcastle. We got to talking about how good it would be to hear the individual tracks from the recordings again.

A couple of weeks went by and, after another night out, I decided to see whether I could find any cheap ADAT machines on eBay.

ADAT machines became a reasonably cheap digital alternative method of recording to analog spool machines. The machines themselves were expensive, but the tapes, which are sVHS tapes and look more or less identical to a regular VHS tape, were very cheap.

You'd have three machines all synced up together, each recording 8 tracks to give you a combined total of 24 tracks. I kept the tapes from the recordings, which is why I started my hunt for an ADAT machine of my own.

I managed to find one that was surprisingly cheap, put in a low bid, and won it - which surprised me, because I only put in a small price, given that I was just doing all of this on a whim.

Coz has kept up with recording stuff and has Nuendo. He also has a decent sound card and a small mixing desk, so I took the machine and tapes around to his place a week last Sunday. We got to rigging everything up, but it took longer to get the sound card and wiring figured out than I thought - about an hour. Neither of us have much time these days, so once we'd done that, we just had a quick play around with getting a couple of tracks over onto Nuendo and then I went home.

He copied a couple of the audio tracks for me and put them onto a portable harddrive and I went and collected them last Sunday. When I got them onto my computer and into sound forge, it became apparent that they needed a bit of tidying up.

Any half decent technician will immediately do a couple of things (amongst others) when recording instruments:-

- Apply Compression. Most instruments have quite a dynamic range. If you tap a drum, for example, it'll be a lot quieter than if you give it a good whack. This is a good thing, it's the nature of the instrument.

However, you need to limit the range, so that instruments don't drown each other out in the mix. You can overdo it, too - if you over compress, the instrument literally gets a sound like it's getting the life sucked out of it.

Although most instruments are recorded with a degree of compression on them, it's sometimes necessary to add some compression on the mixdown, given that you don't want to overdo things as you're recording the track and find out you have to re-record it.

- Noise Reduction to get rid of unwanted sound. I'm thinking of the vocals, here, though it applies to other instruments. Those who're familiar with recording will know all too well that sound that's sent to the musicians earphones can spill over into the mix.

So, when I got these tracks into Sound Forge, the first thing I did was to see if the tracks could do with any further compression. They didn't, but there was quite a lot of background noise that I needed to eliminate.

The result is pretty clean vocal tracks. Coz and I are going to have a go at creating different arrangements when we get a chance, though if any budding musicians want to give it a go, let me know and I'll get the tracks to you. I only currently have the two lead vocal tracks for Patchwork Sky and Song for Someone, the latter of which was recorded to a click track, so shouldn't require any time stretching. Not sure about the other track, it's been 10 years since we recorded them.