Wow.....Just........Wow......
History's Dumpster = GLORIOUS trash! Kitsch, music, fashion, food, history, ephemera, and other memorable and forgotten, famous and infamous pop culture junk and oddities of yesterday and today. Saved from the landfill of time...
Thursday, September 20, 2012
YuMex: Yugoslavian Mexican Music of The '50s
Yugoslav authorities had to look somewhere else for film entertainment.
They found a suitable country in Mexico: it was far away, the chances of Mexican tanks appearing on Yugoslav borders were slight and, best of all, in Mexican films they always talked about revolution in the highest terms. How could an average moviegoer know that it was not the Yugoslav revolution?
Emilio Fernández's Un Día de vida (1950) became so immensely popular that the old people in the former republics of Yugoslavia even today regard it as surely one of the most well known films in the world ever made although in truth it is probably unknown in every other country, even Mexican web pages don't mention it much.
The Mexican influence spread to all of the popular culture: fake Mexican bands were forming and their records still can be found at the flea markets nowadays."
- http://www.mihamazzini.com/ovitki/default.html
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Vinyl Mystery: Wrongly Mastered Singles And Albums
Ahhh......the long and odd sounding history of the wrongly mastered record....
Nothing new really. Countless early recordings since the days of the very first hand wound cylinder recordings have had various pitch and speed anomalies until the earliest standard was set when electrical recordings were introduced in 1925, mandating 78.26 RPM as the universal speed for recordings on disc records in North America from 1925 until the end of the 78 RPM record (slighty less, 77.94 RPM for European recordings.).
And all was well...for the most part. There are some who beg to differ. Many Glenn Miller fans had issues with some of his recordings, namely this classic:
But considering there was only so much recording time on one side of a 78 RPM record, if it sounded a tad rushed, it probably was. Just like many other 78 RPM direct to disc mastered recordings. But everything seems to be on the right key here.
However, when tape began to be used as a standard of mastering albums, an old problem reared it's ugly head. Some of the earliest tape mastered albums of the '40s had something called "wow and flutter", very noticeable on analog piano recordings when the player plays a sustained note. (Play a sustained C major note on a piano and record it on an average analog tape deck, then play back the tape and you'll hear the difference.) Technology improved to reduce that artifact dramatically over the years. But analog tape still had that problem, no matter how top quality the tape and recording machine was. But the technology was refined enough on better tape decks to make it much less noticeable. Digital recording virtually eliminated that problem, but at the expense of everything else in the recording. Namely high-hat and cymbals on the early digital recordings.
Tape and record players themselves always had pitch and speed control problems. Until the '60s when better audiophile technology came of age and pitch controls were a feature of better made turntables, there was not much you could do about the problem.
However in the mastering process of many recordings, either deliberately or by accident, some tracks in the studio tapes were mastered at the wrong speed. The most infamous example was the original Family Production's label 1971 release of Billy Joel's Cold Spring Harbor LP.
The instrumental tracks sounded fine, but Joel's voice was speeded up and sounded far too high pitched. It's been said Joel himself went around to New England record stores to buy up as many copies of Cold Spring Harbor as he could (luckily, it never fully went into national release at the time. But the 1971 release never sold many copies to begin with.) Some of the 1971 originals sold then and they are prized collector's items today.
Here is a sample of that original recording (note the pitch difference in Joel's vocals):
It was re-released by Columbia in 1983 with the vocals restored to normal pitch, but also remixed with slightly different instrumental arrangements on some tracks.)
But the crux of this particular biscuit is Robert Johnson's blues recordings of 1936 and 1937, which have been featured on countless compilations. In 1990, Sony re-released these historic sessions on CD, faithfully remastered from original acetate master discs.
However recently, it's been discovered that the pitch of the original recordings may have been exaggerated. When the recordings were slowed down by 20%, some say they had a more "natural" sound to them than the more frenzied tempo we are used to hearing Johnson's recordings at. The sound that many claim started rock 'n roll.
And if that's the case, how many other classic blues recordings from everybody from Bessie Smith to Blind Lemon Jefferson are mastered at the wrong speed?
Well first, being direct to disc, it's hard to deliberately master the disc at the wrong speed. But on a portable recorder/cutter being battery powered (likely), as used in those San Antonio and Dallas hotel rooms when Johnson cut these sessions, it COULD make a slower initial recording and when the recording was played back at AC powered 78 RPM, it can sound faster than the actual recording was.
It's debatable amongst blues fans, but it IS a plausible scenario.....read more here
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/may/27/robert-johnson-blues
Nothing new really. Countless early recordings since the days of the very first hand wound cylinder recordings have had various pitch and speed anomalies until the earliest standard was set when electrical recordings were introduced in 1925, mandating 78.26 RPM as the universal speed for recordings on disc records in North America from 1925 until the end of the 78 RPM record (slighty less, 77.94 RPM for European recordings.).
And all was well...for the most part. There are some who beg to differ. Many Glenn Miller fans had issues with some of his recordings, namely this classic:
But considering there was only so much recording time on one side of a 78 RPM record, if it sounded a tad rushed, it probably was. Just like many other 78 RPM direct to disc mastered recordings. But everything seems to be on the right key here.
However, when tape began to be used as a standard of mastering albums, an old problem reared it's ugly head. Some of the earliest tape mastered albums of the '40s had something called "wow and flutter", very noticeable on analog piano recordings when the player plays a sustained note. (Play a sustained C major note on a piano and record it on an average analog tape deck, then play back the tape and you'll hear the difference.) Technology improved to reduce that artifact dramatically over the years. But analog tape still had that problem, no matter how top quality the tape and recording machine was. But the technology was refined enough on better tape decks to make it much less noticeable. Digital recording virtually eliminated that problem, but at the expense of everything else in the recording. Namely high-hat and cymbals on the early digital recordings.
Tape and record players themselves always had pitch and speed control problems. Until the '60s when better audiophile technology came of age and pitch controls were a feature of better made turntables, there was not much you could do about the problem.
However in the mastering process of many recordings, either deliberately or by accident, some tracks in the studio tapes were mastered at the wrong speed. The most infamous example was the original Family Production's label 1971 release of Billy Joel's Cold Spring Harbor LP.
The instrumental tracks sounded fine, but Joel's voice was speeded up and sounded far too high pitched. It's been said Joel himself went around to New England record stores to buy up as many copies of Cold Spring Harbor as he could (luckily, it never fully went into national release at the time. But the 1971 release never sold many copies to begin with.) Some of the 1971 originals sold then and they are prized collector's items today.
 |
| The original copies of Billy Joel's Cold Spring Harbor album did not have a Columbia label. |
It was re-released by Columbia in 1983 with the vocals restored to normal pitch, but also remixed with slightly different instrumental arrangements on some tracks.)
But the crux of this particular biscuit is Robert Johnson's blues recordings of 1936 and 1937, which have been featured on countless compilations. In 1990, Sony re-released these historic sessions on CD, faithfully remastered from original acetate master discs.
However recently, it's been discovered that the pitch of the original recordings may have been exaggerated. When the recordings were slowed down by 20%, some say they had a more "natural" sound to them than the more frenzied tempo we are used to hearing Johnson's recordings at. The sound that many claim started rock 'n roll.
And if that's the case, how many other classic blues recordings from everybody from Bessie Smith to Blind Lemon Jefferson are mastered at the wrong speed?
Well first, being direct to disc, it's hard to deliberately master the disc at the wrong speed. But on a portable recorder/cutter being battery powered (likely), as used in those San Antonio and Dallas hotel rooms when Johnson cut these sessions, it COULD make a slower initial recording and when the recording was played back at AC powered 78 RPM, it can sound faster than the actual recording was.
It's debatable amongst blues fans, but it IS a plausible scenario.....read more here
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/may/27/robert-johnson-blues
Hey Love
I LOVE this commercial.
Three dudes and three chicks, they're at somebody's house, sitting SEPARATELY, doing nothing else but listen to the clock tick.
They are all silent, nobody is busting a move. Detention in Catholic school isn't this bad. And this is supposed to be a party.
Then one of the guys mentions, almost as an afterthought "Hey y'all, I got a great new album in the mail today"
He puts the needle on the record, the girls begin to smile and everybody begins to dance.
Well, in spite of the fact that in real life, the girls wouldn't have even gotten out of the car, let alone put up with guys this lame. I guess it did sell some records. The selections on this 3 record set looked pretty good......
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