[Dixielandjazz] cut & paste

[James Kashishian]

I see I may have opened a can of words with a confession that I spliced
a bit of recording!

I admitted, in my last post that our trumpeter & myself both had played
ok, but not exciting, solos on one song.  I was able to make the song
more interesting...and a bit shorter....by using splicing techniques.
It was just for laughs, really, just to see if I could do it
successfully.  No big deal!!  

Doesn't remove the fact that we had 6 nites of live recording on tape,
which was done by starting the tape at the beginning of the evening &
stopping it at the end.  We just played two normal sets a nite...as is
usual....only it's all on tape (digital, Hi8).

However, what Ringwald said is true:  a blooper on a recording is heard
over & over, which is not the case of a bad note on stage.  So, if that
blooper can easily be repaired, why not?

The very first Monks of Silos Gregorian Chants CD, which was a worldwide
hit a few years back was put out by EMI when they bought up the Spanish
record company Hispavox, and found these old 1950's tapes in the cellar.
They bopped one recording straight onto CD and made a
fortune....maintaining the tape hiss, long pauses, bad eq, etc.  All
profits, no interest in the actual music!

I was given the job, by the actual Monks, to restore another 12 CD's of
their 1950's recordings. 
I worked with a producer who reads Latin and is a musicologist.  He
decided where pauses should be reduced...as they were not warranted by
the flow of the words, or the Monks were obviously just enjoying the
long reverb in the cathedral (it can be a drag listening to 5 seconds of
reverb tail on a recording), etc.  I decided on how much hiss to get rid
of, how much equalization, etc, was needed.  We even took the liberty of
using recordings of the bells at Silos (near Burgos, Spain), and
lowered/raised (electronically) the tones of the bells, creating a
cacophony of bells &mixing them into the recordings at musically desired
moments.

We were given the freedom to do all of this.   The breathing in, before
a musical phrase caused as many problems as did the recorded music, and
important decisions were made on silences & breaths, as much as with the
actual music.  We spent over 30 hours of studio time on each recording.

I've purchase gobs of CD's of old analogue recordings where I wished
someone had taken a little effort with the transfer process.  Seems that
there are a lot of Louis Armstrong recordings that have suffered that
fate.  Shame!  

On our band's latest CD it says the live recording was made without any
electronic tricks.  That's true, but  I neglected to mention hours of
work mixing the 8 tracks, or the cut & splicing that I did (which was
actually very little).  Those are not tricks, just necessary tasks to
insure a good finished product.  As I said in my last post, I left in a
goofed up vocal 'cause the rest of the song was so good, so the music
was never, ever compromised.

I daresay if anyone else had the equipment that I am so lucky to have (I
sell this stuff to recording studios!), and the knowledge to use it
(I've been working with hard disk audio editing systems.....AMS NEVE
AudioFile....since the first one came out in 1987, and have literally
hundreds of CD's out there with my name on 'em), then they certainly
wouldn't refrain from using it on their own recordings.

Besides, I had fun doing it!  Anyway, it is all down to good taste.

Jim