Perhaps you pros could give me some advice and tips. I have been trying to
recreate some of the sound effects from an old tv soundtrack I have. I
can't just record directly because the original tracks are too noisy (and
noise filtering hasn't worked), plus I don't want the new sounds to be an
exact copy. The way I have been trying to go about my recreation is to
attempt to match the original frequencies of the sound with modern musical
instruments of a similar pattern. The original track is used as a "vocoder"
for the modern instrument, which tends to filter out everything but
"portions" of the original sound, depending on "how close" the modern
instrument notes are to the original. However, this very slow approach has
been hit and miss. The original tracks have so many harmonics that I can't
seem to mix the modern instruments properly to "match" it. This has been a
project I have been working on for quite some time and I am running out of
time. I've tried various other things... convolution, which didn't get me
anywhere, noise reduction applied somewhat like the above with the vocoder
(but still not getting too far), etc.etc. Someone once told me that it is
impossible to recreate an orchestra without the orchestra (in other words,
it is next to impossible to do all digitally), and I am starting to believe
that. So, how do I do this. I have an original tv sound that's very weak
on a tv soundtrack; I need to recreate this as closely as possible but I
don't have access to an orchestra or synth, but I do have an electric guitar
and some music samples. How in the world can I figure out or calculate the
notes and harmonics I need for the recreation? When I look at FFT graphs of
the original sound effect, there are just too many notes to count; when I
try to apply the aforementioned methods, I tend to make a small "dent" in
the graph and that's all with the sound very very flat. This has become
quite frustrating and I wish there was a better way. Perhaps there is which
is why I am asking.

Thanks, in advance, for any tips or advice.

Jayson Peterson