Do you know where your music comes from? Or how it should sound?
Here is the situation in my iTunes library:
The same song, but different times and bpm. So it must be three different versions, right?
Wrong. It is the same version. If I process the files to have the same playing time, they play in perfect unison. Every note and every nuance is exactly the same. Also, according to Brian Rust, the California Ramblers only recorded this song once. (Golden Gate Orchestra is a pseudonym for the California Ramblers. This also shows the problem with accurate labeling of digital music.)
So, what happened? Carelessness. Music from the swing era and before is only preserved on records. The master recordings that these records were made from are long gone. No seems to have thought about preserving them, and it is probable that companies did not want to spend the money to store them. Those that were saved were recycled to provide material for World War II.
When you buy this old music in any digital format, what you are buying is music that someone digitized from an old record. This is true of all music recorded before WWII. In most cases, this work is done by record collectors, not by a big record company or an archive. There is a real art to getting the best sound from these records. Some are good at it, and some are not.
Unfortunately, many transfers are not done to the highest standards. The proof is the fact that many of these transfers are not played at the correct speed; this is the easiest part to get right. This song is glaring evidence of that, but I have many, many songs with subtler problems.
You notice the problem when you have two copies of a song with slightly different pitch, or when you try to play your instrument along with an old recording and you can't. It is fairly common that these transferred recordings are out-of-tune or are in a key like B natural that no jazz band would have played in. Even if this were the fault of the original record, it is simple to correct in the transfer process.
So, this is a warning that not all copies are the same. If you find a song you love but the sound is poor, keep looking. There may be another transfer with better quality. If the tempo sounds unnaturally draggy or frantic, it may just be wrong.
We should be very thankful that all of these collectors have gone to the incredible effort of preserving this music and making it available to us. But we should be aware that the quality of the digital transfers varies greatly.
This article was first published on The Quality Syncopated Song Inquirer.
The problem with different sounds and speeds starts whith the digitizing: very often I see re-remasterd bad sounding tracks on CDs or on itunes that originally come from an LP that uses a remastered track from a 78 shellac record.
Some of these recordings were dubbed too slow on LP (in the 1970s unfortunally nobody cared for the correct speed of the shellac records: until 1932, there was no international norm for the recordings: German VOX label always works with 80 rpm from 1923 to 1929, British and American Columbia usually work with 80 to 82 rpm from until 1928, German Brillant works with 78 to 84 rpm until ca. 1936, Tri-Ergon always work with 80 rpm…o if one of these recordings was dubbed on LP with 78 rpm (about half a note to 2/3 of a note to low), and now for digitizing the LP does not run at 33 1/3, but at 33 or even slower, all over sudden you get a weird sound and some second too low sounding music: a track can get up to 20% longer, instead of 2’50” it will be 3’24″…
The filtering/remastering in the 50s, 60s, 70s followed other ideas of restauration: very often, sound engineers added some echo, fixed the treble into some unnatural sharpness… In my shellac collection, I have some “remastered” 78s that even in the late 1940s/early 1950s already show some “bad corrections”: The German Brunswick of “Choo Choo Ch’ Boogie” by Louis Jordan came out only in 1953 from a dubbing. It is too fast (!) and has lower bass than the original Decca master or any pressing from other countries… but the sound engineer in those years added some echo to make it sound a little more “modern”, like the ideal of 1950s pop music.
I only use the historic shellac records for digitizing to my CD-series, my turntable gets infinitely variable to the needed speed, I tried to check recordings with my clarinet and I found out that some companies like German Brillant made those huge varieties of speed.
So I try to get the correct speed into my editions (and hopefully the best sound quality possible – I get some compliments of fellow DJs and dancers…).
Unfortunally, most people are not aware of this subject.
So 1000 times thank you Adrian Seward for making this a theme, thank you Christian for sharing!
(label scan of SOPHIE TUCKER/TED LEWIS BAND “Some Of These Days” 1928:
“Speed 80” on top left near the publisher emblem means 80 rpm, NOT 78 rpm!)
Great insights, Stephan. Thank you for that!
Stephan, thank you so much for the additional insight. I am not an expert about transfers, and I didn’t want to overwhelm readers with too much information, but I’m very glad that you pointed out that speed is only the first problem. The quality of sound that is extracted from the original records varies so much, for so many reasons! One could say that the transfer is always an act of interpretation. The person doing the work must have not only skill, but also good taste to make good decisions.
I had read this article previously at The Quality Syncopated Song Inquirer, but was happy to discover it reprinted here with interesting commentary by Stephen Wulthe!