A few months back I mentioned that the drummer in my college band was cleaning out some old boxes and found an old cassette tape of part of a campus-wide mixer we played at the U of Michigan Student Union building back in 1968. It wouldn't play, so he found a company that was able to extract the audio and put out some digital files.
Sure it sounded dull, primitive, distorted and awful, because his cassette machine was a dictation machine not made for music recording, but heck, it was still audible, and was a blast from the past I was pretty happy to have.
As far as we knew, it was the only record of our college band that we had so much fun playing in. Who from my generation gets to go back in time like that? I felt so lucky.
Since I got it, I've been working with my audio tools to make it sound better, more lifelike, restoring some high end and naturalness, and now you can hear the vocals, the drums, etc. But there's still a lot of distortion and hiss, and there's only so much you can do, even with the best tools.
I finished working over the 9 songs from that cassette last night and got them back to our drummer, Gerry. He was happy with them. I was happy with them, given the quality of the original.
Today I got a surprise.
Gerry had just located Tom, our bass player - a guy we thought must have been kidnapped by aliens long ago, because neither of us could find him, and it was not for lack of trying - and was on the phone with him for about an hour and a half. He mentioned that we'd send him the restored music of the 9 songs we had from that show.
Oh yes, there's more...
Turns out that Gerry's tape of 9 songs was dubbed from an open reel tape Tom made at the gig using a portable open reel machine. And he still had the tape.
Better yet, Tom had already converted them to FLAC and mp3 files a while back and archived them!!
And there were 21 songs on that open reel tape, not nine. Pretty much all of our sets from that night (including a 14 1/2 minute version of In A Gadda Da Vida, with the obligatory drum solo (yeah, it was that era and got us the best applause of the evening), but I digress
).
They sound pretty good for tapes made in 1968 in mono on a portable machine with a single inexpensive mic.
Much, much, much better than the old cassette that was restored. There's a lot less distortion, you can hear high frequencies, everything sounds pretty OK for a portable open reel machine of that era.
I'm going to do a little audio magic with them to see if I can improve the audio further. Am I ever stoked!
Even better was that I called Tom right away and was so happy to talk to him. Still a great guy!
Sure it sounded dull, primitive, distorted and awful, because his cassette machine was a dictation machine not made for music recording, but heck, it was still audible, and was a blast from the past I was pretty happy to have.
As far as we knew, it was the only record of our college band that we had so much fun playing in. Who from my generation gets to go back in time like that? I felt so lucky.
Since I got it, I've been working with my audio tools to make it sound better, more lifelike, restoring some high end and naturalness, and now you can hear the vocals, the drums, etc. But there's still a lot of distortion and hiss, and there's only so much you can do, even with the best tools.
I finished working over the 9 songs from that cassette last night and got them back to our drummer, Gerry. He was happy with them. I was happy with them, given the quality of the original.
Today I got a surprise.
Gerry had just located Tom, our bass player - a guy we thought must have been kidnapped by aliens long ago, because neither of us could find him, and it was not for lack of trying - and was on the phone with him for about an hour and a half. He mentioned that we'd send him the restored music of the 9 songs we had from that show.
Oh yes, there's more...
Turns out that Gerry's tape of 9 songs was dubbed from an open reel tape Tom made at the gig using a portable open reel machine. And he still had the tape.
Better yet, Tom had already converted them to FLAC and mp3 files a while back and archived them!!
And there were 21 songs on that open reel tape, not nine. Pretty much all of our sets from that night (including a 14 1/2 minute version of In A Gadda Da Vida, with the obligatory drum solo (yeah, it was that era and got us the best applause of the evening), but I digress
).They sound pretty good for tapes made in 1968 in mono on a portable machine with a single inexpensive mic.
Much, much, much better than the old cassette that was restored. There's a lot less distortion, you can hear high frequencies, everything sounds pretty OK for a portable open reel machine of that era.
I'm going to do a little audio magic with them to see if I can improve the audio further. Am I ever stoked!
Even better was that I called Tom right away and was so happy to talk to him. Still a great guy!
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