“First of all, remastering can be something as simple as just running the tape again,” states Mike Matessino from his studio in Los Angeles. “It’s a blanket term that can mean a number of things, but importantly it doesn’t always indicate an improvement.”
Mike should know. Born and raised in New York City and a graduate from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, he is not only one of the world’s most acclaimed soundtrack album producers, but also a film and music historian and preservationist. Over the last several years he has restored works by pretty much every well-known composer of movie music, breathing new life into some of the world’s most beloved soundtracks.
He has produced, edited, mixed and mastered hundreds of releases with numerous labels and studios, most notably for the acclaimed Universal Studios Film Music Classics Collection, begun in 2018, and nearly three decades of work on the catalogue of music from the films of 20th Century Fox.
Even more notably, he is an official collaborator and producer of reissue soundtracks for John Williams, and has produced some of his most successful remastered releases, including Fiddler on the Roof, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan and Harry Potter. Mike also served as music consultant on the 2024 documentary Music by John Williams and has additionally consulted on the live-to-picture concerts of the composer’s music.
“Before the digital era, everything was obviously recorded on analogue tape, which is organic material and therefore responds to its environment,” explains Mike. “There are methods used to preserve it for as long as possible but it can eventually degrade. In fact, there are an infinite number of variables in terms of what the condition of an original tape might be; something from the 1940s might still sound fantastic but something from the 1960s or 1970s might have a lot of problems. It depends on the stock that’s used, how it’s stored and so forth. I have personally opened boxes and keeled over from the smell of vinegar or things with dust and oxidation.”
Although Mike studied how to handle analogue tapes at university—and has the splicer scars on his fingers to remind him of it—his work is purely digital, and has been pretty much since he graduated, since that coincided with the shift towards computer processing. “There are people who do still work with the tapes of course, and to me that is an art akin to being a museum curator or archaeologist. But in my world, everything shifted once you could actually see the music’s waveforms in front of you on a screen. And of course over the last three decades that technology has continued to improve, and has permeated society in terms of being able to clean up old photos, create 3D conversions etcetera. What I do is basically take this analogue material, look at spectral representations of the audio that can indicate what the problems might be, and we go from there. But the most important part is just listening.”
The advent of computer technology marked a larger shift, too. The process of repairing and updating old soundtracks that was once done in large and costly studios with “refrigerator-sized equipment and tape machines” could eventually be done in a project studio, making the process both more efficient and cost-effective. That aside, Mike is at pains to underline the fact that the kind of work he does is not only about technology, skill and precision: it’s also about emotional attunement.
“Music is by its nature emotional,” he insists. “We don’t usually have an ambivalent or indifferent response to it. It becomes part of our memory and gets into our DNA. If we love something when we are young, we carry it with us all our lives and it doesn’t get old. Film and television music is a unique field that taps into this and requires a special kind of attention that the average person working in the pop music industry, no matter how brilliant they are and how many awards and accolades they have, do not have. There’s a certain fine-tuning of the ear required, and that generally comes from someone who has been very passionate about it in the beginning, someone who has that gene in their DNA of responding to movie music and understanding how it works and why it resonates emotionally.
“While there is of course a technical, even surgical aspect involved in removing and fixing pops and drop-outs, the score is the soul of a movie, and when you separate the music from the film, you need to factor in exactly what that emotional response is that people love, and work out how to accentuate it while maintaining the same spirit in which it was originally created and recorded. It’s a very fine line between using all the brilliance that modern tech has to offer and giving something a chance to live and breathe again.”
Mike sees his own listening skills as having also evolved in parallel with technology. His earliest musical memories include absorbing the easy listening and big band music his parents played around the house, and his first major film soundtrack—“Fiddler On The Roof,” which he says is “the first time I sat in a large room and heard recorded mixed stereo.” He has since learned that he is an audile, someone whose memory is more attuned to the audible than the visual.
“My ear is even more finely tuned nowadays,” he says, “so I am hearing things that I wouldn’t have heard before. But the tech to deal with this work is also more advanced, and if you work with it enough, it becomes second nature. Sometimes people will ask for the technique or keystroke move for this or that problem and sometimes I just don’t know—the tactile memory is just intuitive and fluid, like a pianist sitting down and just playing. The fingers just do it. There are a lot of factors, human and technical, that coalesce into a complicated process and you just end up in ‘the zone,’ looking at colours and spectral readings and your hands move and it just…happens.”
Most recently, Mike has been nominated for a GRAMMY Award in the category Best Historical Album for his work on the Super Deluxe Edition of The Sound Of Music. “I’ve never taken it for granted, the material that comes to me,” he concludes. “I always keep in mind that this might be the only time that anyone ever gets to work on it. Nobody sets out to create a bad movie or score, so you owe it to the artists who all worked hard to create it and present it properly. It might be the only chance, so you need to know what you’re doing and you need to get it right.”
Words by Paul Sullivan