ndiamone
600 Club - QQ All-Star
Geria said:
If you wonder why the Poni-Tails sound funny, it's because the right channel is leading the left by a considerable amount.
In the Marcie Blaine, it's the left channel that leads. I popped it into Adobe Audition, separated left and right and re-adjusted the sync.
It's more than a quarter-wave out. Of course when you put it back, it loses some of the `spaciness' but it also sounds better and more anchored.
It also sounds better swapped left for right after resync, saxes on the right and piano and guitars on the left.
For some odd reason, this also corrects a few of the vocal echo artifacts.
It's been said this could've been either a 2-track or very early 3-track session, but it sounds a little odd to me for a 3-track session.
Even with it's offset corrected and swapped left for right, it kind of reminds me of the stereo version of Summer Nights by Marianne Faithfull with it's mostly everything on the left, centered vocal and backup on the right that you find on the UK CD (and that I made one of myself out of elements).
Either that, or it's a label's sync-up between the basic tracks and the vocal overdubs and they didn't get it exactly right.
I popped it into my L-R discriminator on my recording console which lets you slide channels up and back while you're listening,
and no matter what you do, you can't find the center for more than 10 or 20 seconds at a time.
Mine comes a lot closer than theirs though to having a center.
When I listen to the vertical channel and start sliding back and forth, this is as close as I can get, which is still a lot closer than theirs.
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This Born Too Late song is special to me because my granddad had an old Seeburg 78 jukebox in the basement. Living in Michigan so close to Canada we could get all these great girl-group and doo-wop numbers on 78 that you could only get on 45 in the States, this being one. Plus, all my aunts sung as little girls and my dad and uncles all played instruments as boys, up to like high school playing and singing all this same music from the Seeburg jukebox. By the time everybody had kids, all the instruments were put up, but by the depressing early 70's people needed a little bit of a musical lift.
So before summer family picnics in the early and mid 70's, they'd rehearse a couple dozen girl group songs and some doo wop, and this was one of their favorites.
My Aunt Adelaide would sing alto and lead, my Aunt Eileen second alto, my Aunt Jeannie soprano and my Aunt Kathy would sing the bass, my Uncle Phil would play guitar, my Dad would play piano, my Uncle Don would play drums and my Uncle Randy would play either trombone or trumpet depending.
On the doo wop numbers, Addie played piano, Kathy played drums, Jeannie played guitar, and Eileen played trumpet or sax (she was too short for Tbone) and then my Dad would sing tenor, Phil would sing bass, Don would sing baritone or lead, and Randy would sing second tenor.
By the time I got old enough to go into recording, all of us kids had grown up, the mood of the country had improved and everybody had stopped playing and singing. So in high school once I got back into recording, I got `em all to rehearse every number they ever did either as kids or at the family picnics.
We brought the janitor a bucket of chicken to let us into the music department and sneaked in to the school's recording studio over a weekend. We recorded onto 2 sets of Ampex 440-AG tube type 4-track half inch decks and ended up with like 15 reels of different takes of basic tracks and a couple reels of vocal takes.
We did the standard 4 tracks of basics, mixed it to mono and then laid the vocals on 3 tracks over the top of that.
Even then I was forward-thinking (for a school recording engineer), recording leads of my aunts or uncles on one of the 3 tracks and splitting the backup vocals between the two remaining tracks. So when I'm done, I'll have 4 track basics on like two dozen songs, and 3-track vocal overdubs.
After getting screamed at by the elderly music dept chairman and listening to a half an hour harangue about what kind of a heart attack I’d given him and generally how much hot water I was in for sneaking in and bribing the janitor with KFC, it got me 4 A's in a row, the recording lab manager job and my first job in radio production. Plus it got me out of both gym and algebra class, pretty good for a really fat non-math-mole.
Not much has changed from that day to this. Still fat, still a mole and still hate math.
My Dad recently unearthed all that original half-inch session tapes going through his garage and couldn't figure out why he had `em.
So my Dad calls me last week to tell me he'd found all these tapes in the garage, and I'd forgotten all about it, especially since he said the tape was both too big and too wide to fit on the reel to reel at the house. It jogged my memory a little bit and I said `Do you think it's the session masters from when we all recorded in the 70's?' He sent em to me, they just got here and they sound as if they were just recorded yesterday with that big tube sound.
So, instead of trying to do re-syncs here, I'm gonna spend the money to send `em to Jaime Howarth to get synced from the bias frequency, and then remix from that. Should be fun.
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