“There are plenty more gems out there”: How to reissue a record in 8 steps with Mr Bongo

Step 4: Make the music sound as good as possible

Dave: In terms of the process you get the rights holders first, and then go get the tapes if you can, clean them up, you might have to bake them, if they’re old tapes, in the oven.

A lot of the old tapes are basically stuck together or partly destroyed and one of the processes of enabling them to be unwound is via a light baking process, don’t ask me how it really works – it can also ruin it but it’s a risk you have to take.

So we’ve done that on a few albums, especially the old Batucada stuff we used to do, a lot of the tapes were really old, like quarter inches that were stuck together. And if you do it yourself they’ll really just flake away. Maybe the baking just gives it a bit more strength and then you run it off and try and get as much of the sound off as you can.

And then we go to Walter Coelho[mastering engineer] and he’s got a couple of guys who’ll clean up vinyl, like the Hareton + Meta which had to be mastered from the vinyl, as that’s all we had. So then they’ll clean it up and all this de-clicking stuff and will do little test cuts and then after a while he’ll get a good cut that he’s happy with and we’re happy with. And he’ll send us a sound link and we’ll do some test pressings and Andy [designer at the label] will start doing the artwork.

---