Good fkkng god. 3,300 original hi-fi catalogs and datasheets scanned (in good quality), cataloged, and uploaded. Get ready to be 10% less productive for the next two months. The vintage knob dot org. Well done sir.
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Category: Uncategorized
…but try to tell me you didn’t laugh. Courtesy of this eBay auction. New actual PS dot com content coming shortly, i promise.
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The Guitar: 1964
Download a five-page scan from “A World Of Music,” Fall 1964: the subject is ‘the guitar,’ and we are treated to a visit to the Gibson guitar factory.
DOWNLOAD: A_World_Of_Music_Fall1964
AFAIK, this piece on the Gibson plant has not been reprinted anywhere… not sure if there are any actual insights here but what the hell. Alright so… haven’t been updating the site too often lately and it’s not for a lack of subject matter. My lord do I ever have a big pile of new (old) stuff to upload. Just been short on time. Working hard tryin to make some dinero to pay for all the wonderful things in life… like a new timing belt for my VW. Love/hate cars. OK NEways… Anyone out there playin an old Fender Jaguar?
Saw this ad in the aforementioned issue of ” A World of etc.” I use a 1968 Jaguar (with flatwounds) pretty much everyday… it’s one of my regular electrics in my lil home writing studio. It sounds great but my god does it ever play badly, even after two ‘PRO’ setups. Anyone?
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Studio’d
Above: the Kawaii EP608 electric stringed-piano. Anyone?
Been super-busy at the studio lately, leaving me very little time to attend to this ole’ country blog. Got some really great stuff on the horizon once the mist clears, so stay tuned…
Here’s a little gift for y’all tho: I recently picked up a Casio 630 at an estate sale, and the sounds are actually pretty great in an aggressively-retro way. Anyhow, I made a drum-hit sample set (a coupla loops are in there too); here it is, feel free to download and use it however you like.
DOWNLOAD: Casio CT630 samples
This is pretty far afield from the general mission of Preservation Sound dot com, but those of you who have been reading my writings for a while might be interested in checking out my advance review of some pretty interesting new audio software.
Regular readers might get the impression that I am a luddite who fetishes any/all things vintage and damaged, and you might be correct. But I am also a working producer and composer and I actually do give a shit about new audio technology that offers the potential for creating new sounds and new meanings.
My friends at Production Hub, a film/TV industry website, asked me to be one of the first people to review Sony Creative Software’s new product SpectraLayers Pro (disclaimer: I did work for SONYMUSIC for many years, but this had no bearing on the review selection; I don’t think the folks at Production Hub were even aware of my history there).
You can click here to read the review. If you work with digital audio editing on any kind of regular basis, I think you will find the software to be pretty remarkable, if even from a purely academic perspective. Elevator-pitch: what if you had a stereo mix of a rock track, and entire production with vocals, lots of parts all going on at once all the time, and there was an out-of-tune vocal note that you wanted to fix? Leaving everything else alone, just retune the vocal? Well… now you can. pretty easily actually.
Anyhow, lest my intentions here by lost: this is not a paid endorsement or sponsorship of any kind; it’s just not that often that I am impressed by something that I feel is truly ‘NEW’ in the world of audio production. Which might be why I am always digging around thru the past looking for ‘new’ ideas to bring to my work. I imagine that this sort of technology will show up in all DAWs in a matter of time, but for the moment, prepare to be surprised…
I think they left out Phase Six: smoke grass. Jesus my car stereo really started fukkin up y’day. The CD player (which is an enormous, inscrutable six-disc changer built into the dashboard) started spewing out nothing but insane digital hash. E. suggested that perhaps some force was trying to direct me to the New Sound. Before I could get a recorder to sample it, all returned to normal. S’pose it’s just a matter of time before the doorway opens again. And then: The New Sound.
If you’ve been reading this website for a while, you’ll know that I post a lot of old print adverts and catalogs featuring 1920’s – 1980’s audio equipment. I collect this sort of paper and I have 1000s of pieces of this stuff that I am slowly bringing online for y’all.
Larger consumer electronics chains also produced adverts for cable and local television broadcast. Most of them were negligible affairs driven solely by budget concerns, but every field will have its mavericks. My good friend GJ turned me on to the collected television advertising of the Federated chain of stores. GJ: “…the Federated spots…were done by Shadoe Stevens when he was a young unknown playing a guy named Fred. They were small time/ cheap and weird and made a little shop really popular. Developed a cult following…some are amazing and inspiring.” No small praise coming from GJ, a fine director himself. You can watch his latest production, a music video for the fantastic group Peaking Lights, at this link.
I won’t offer any analysis or commentary on the Federated spots, as one could quite literally write a book about this series of spots: there is that much going on as far as the highly intertextual and media-aware nature of these little narratives, the smart visual language, and the savvy use of minimal production bucks to create memorable advertising that really does relate well to actual consumer-benefit of the products offered. So get ready for a journey through time and space:
Download a four-page article from “High Fidelity Music at Home” (yes this was the title of an ancient magazine…) circa 1958 on the subject of Oh How Things Have Changed (in Jazz recording):
DOWNLOAD: HFMAH-5804-Jass_Band
Yeah yeah sure DAWs have changed music, MP3, etc., etc… but how about electricity? I recently started reading a couple of books from Mainspring Press on the subject of “Recording the Twenties” and “Recording the Thirties.” It’s a little tough for me to get through owing to the fact that I have no interest in the vast majority of music that the author discusses, but shit if I am going to sit here and harp on and on about audio history, maybe I should have some of the facts straight? NEways… some interesting stuff for sure. I bought an old spring-powered Victrola for a few bucks at an auction last week and ran some 78s on it… it sure didn’t sound great but music came out. Music made and recorded without the benefit of microphones, speakers, wires, or electricity. Crazy right?
A “Jass” session for Gennet Records circa 1923. All of the sound happening in that room vibrates a small metal diaphragm located somewhere down in the bowels of that wall-mounted horn; this diaphragm is mechanically coupled to a needle that cuts a varying groove into a spinning disc. A record is made.
A Jazz session circa 1958. The sounds happening in that room vibrate thin polyester diaphragms inside all of those microphones; a particular instrument’s proximity to a particular ‘mic’ determines to what degree that ‘mic’ will pick up that instrument rather than the others. Electrical signals flow from each mic to an audio-mixing panel where the various signals can be combined or rejected to the taste of those with appropriate authority in the mixing-room. Eventually, a record is made.
The only thing that we can count on as music-production professionals is change. Market forces drive change. The tastes and talents of the young, both music consumers and makers, drive change. Just get the job done and make the music feel powerful. Shit, I plugged my iphone into the HD3 system today to provide a quick synthesis source for a vocoder part and I’m not ashamed. The MS20 was just too far across the studio for me to bother with. As the author of the above-posted essay correctly states: “While we must encourage engineers to improve recording and reproducing equipment… the great enjoyment of music comes from understanding its aesthetic beauty, rather than concern with the techniques by which music is produced.”
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Magnetic Film Recording (1953)
The Hallen Corp magnetic film-recorder circa 1953. A bargain at $13,000! (adjusted for inflation)
The Stancil-Hoffman magnetic-film recorder circa 1953.
Everyone (that reads this website…) is aware that magnetic wire recording gave way to magnetic tape recording, which gave way to magnetic discs, which are currently being slowly phased-out in favor of motionless ‘solid-state’ memory (via i-am-typing-this-on-maybe-my-last-macbook-that-will-have-a-spinning-harddrive). Progress is rarely purely sequential though, and just as there was the short-lived metal-tape recorder of the 1930s (see this previous post for info), the Ampex/Magnecord dominated early magnetic-tape era was challenged (for fidelity, at least) by magnetic film recorders. Aside from their heavy endorsement from Fine Recording, I don’t know much about these machines. Are any still in use? What made them superior to magnetic tape, and why? Let us know…
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1975: Record Yourself
I think I will, thanks…