EDIT AND WED IT
This is the story of a small sound editing job. It is not exactly of world-shaking importance, yet for a few individuals, including myself, the finished result is not far from a human miracle. As is any good tape editing.
I made the original nearly a half century ago--43 1/3 years, to be exact.
Now, at last I have edited it on tape into a final form. How's that? For the first time, thus, this recording is now playable as I surely intended it, ideally speaking, though there was no editing then except, maybe, in Hollywood talkies. Somehow I sensed the future possibilities, if nothing could be done in the old disc medium-for in its tape transfer, this was the most fruitfully editable recording I have worked with for a long time. Wonderfully susceptible to improvement! Shaping the salient material, rearranging, re-pacing and--most important-removing the appalling quantities of sonic junk that are a permanent part of the disc original.
Dozens of false starts, abrupt endings, blank stretches, squawks, sputters, growls, dropouts, pops, roars, and, most of all, insane 78-rpm repeats of a syllable or two, over and over, where faulty grooves lock up. What could I do? I was an amateur in a professional field. I couldn't help myself. But I knew instinctively how to get down the gist of what I wanted, for future reference. The editing had to wait. Until editing was invented.
I have come to realize that sound editing is one of the great and primary innovations in our field, on a par with the basic innovation of sound recording itself some 75 years earlier. Is it any wonder that digital editing, still enormously costly, is a major factor in the upheavals of our recent digital sound revolution? I made my little record in August of 1940. It is not music (though music of a sort appears now and then), but voices. A wedding! The biggest wedding we'd ever seen in our corner of Connecticut. That was the year I bought my first recording equipment, a radical move for any consumer in those days. No tape then. No cassettes. Nothing that one could casually tote around to social gatherings, lectures, concerts, ball games and the rest, as we do now. The only portable recorders were those unwieldy electric jobs at 78 rpm, good for three or four minutes at a time, by means of which the early folk collectors-such as Alan Lomax and his father John, the people at the Library of Congress-took down Leadbelly, the Carter Family and other folk music greats. The sound was abysmal. Noisy, grating, dull, no highs above maybe 3 kHz. That was it, outside of the studio. The best commercial 78s reached a level of 6 or 7 kHz (though we are now aware that much more could be, and was, done inside the big labs, including Bell), but almost nobody had home equipment to play that sort of high end. We were accustomed to a muffled sound, both on radio and records, minus overtones and without sibilants. "Super Soft Suds" became, as a matter of course, "Fooper Foft Fuds." We weren't bothered; we got the gist of both speech and music.
What fired me up in early 1940 was a new, light Astatic crystal cutting head that was said to cut a usable 6,000 cycles, phenomenal for the day, at least in home or semipro equipment.
Also, and coincidentally, there was a new semipro recording lathe that was fastened onto a home turntable (sturdy type) like an extra pickup arm and then lowered down over the (short) spindle.
The revolving table then screwed the overhead cartridge sidewise, as in larger and heavier professional models. All in all, this was more than I could pass up. I bought the whole shebang and began experimenting only a few months before this large wedding came along, my childhood friend Sally and her Jack.
Some wedding! A dozen bridesmaids under white parasols, innumerable male attendants, Mother of the Bride in a white hat with a large dove, a veritable pigeon, wings outspread, nodding and dipping as she greeted her friends. And a state policeman.
Also a colossal thunderstorm which burst just as the knot was tied (outdoors) and immediately knocked out the power transformer right outside the house, leaving us groping in darkness for the champagne. No-I wasn't allowed to record the ceremony. Would have been thought blasphemous. Nor could I take 8-mm movies, though I got all the visible rest of the wedding from start to end (clearing the debris). Instead, I set up my sound equipment in a small room next to the wedding buffet supper, the power having been restored. The idea was to record a brief, personal wedding message from every guest who could be snagged into that side room, though I missed a few in the general exuberance. For this purpose employed, Shall we say, beaters. They rounded up the guests, fair game, and ushered them or dragged them, one by one, towards the fatal mike. Most had never seen one before. They got flustered, muttered to the mike-as though it wouldn't listen-"What shall I say? I don't know what to say!" Or, loudly at .the end, "Is that enough? Shall I say something else?" And almost every one of them forgot to give his or her name. (Shouts in the background: "Your name! Say your name." Then suddenly, triple forte, "Oh, AUNT RACHEL!!" 200% overload.) Absolutely no mike technique. Except for those inevitable few, including some elderly people, who were born with an instinctive microphone charisma and did it exactly right with no coaching at all.
One was the Governor of the State of Connecticut. He went ape. ("I'm de boid on de top of your mudder's hat. ") There was one, hideous, overwhelming deficiency in my 78-rpm disc equipment that defied improvement.
The chip. Not the electronic chip of today, nor the chip-off-the-old-block, but that wiry, horsehair-like, coarse black thread which sprang out from the cutting stylus (steel?) as it chiseled through the shiny surface of the recording disc. At 78 rpm, that chip really shot out. Being a species of plastic, it was prone to static and would instantly stick to almost anything it touched. With much more coming along at high speed, a snarl and tangle would build up, almost impossible to stop. Worst was the wraparound: The chip would stick to the disc and whirl around like lightning to hurl itself under the rear of the cartridge. Instant dropout, derailment and lift off; instead of cutting, the stylus tried to ride over the chip. No grooves, no sound. You had to stop and start again.
We tried everything. You learned to grab the chip and haul it to one side--if you could get hold of it fast enough.
Then, briefly, it might pour, by gravity, over the edge of the table for an unscathed recording. With care, I got three or four uninterrupted minutes on rare occasions, but in the hubbub and hurly-burly of a wedding supper, with more champagne, the chip problem became acute. I did my best. Sometimes I achieved maybe 20 seconds before tailspin, often much less. (All you could do was to stop and then try again a bit further on the disc.) Mostly I got fragments, punctuated by hideous noises and those insane repeats as the groove broke down. But I went straight ahead, undaunted. The courage of the pioneer! Well, yes, if on a very modest scale.
What did the professionals do about the chip? Just what they do now. An elaborate vacuum-cleaner system, sucking it up silently at the instant it leaves the cutting point. But, short of mounting a real vacuum cleaner in some distant closet with a 100-foot tube from there to the recorder, I could not imagine any vacuum cure that might be practical for me. Old vacs made even more noise than new ones today. So I had to make do. Or, if you wish, I made did.
That August day in 1940, and part of the next for leftover guests, I filled up both sides of a big 12-inch blank disc, which could ideally hold considerably more at 78 rpm than the standard commercial record due to its smaller, closer grooves. The results were pathetic, but touching. The disc, with all its faults intact, was later presented to the wedding pair, who of course had left before the party began. They didn't even know, so it was a surprise. In spite of the noise, here were the voices of all their wedding guests, friends, their relatives, preserved-for posterity? Snippets, little bits, but even so, precious.
Sally and Jack scarcely dared play the record (rightly) for fear of damage by heavy 1940 pickups. They tried it, and then put it away for safety. I suspect this was among the first (non-Hollywood) weddings to be sonically recorded as well as photographed in depth.
So--came the War and, after those long, depressing years, came peace--and recording tape. In time, a long time, this new idea got through to Sally and Jack, who by then had children, almost ready to listen.
Why not copy the disc on this new tape? What an idea. (Well, not so new, but even so ....) It was done. And what a job! Almost impossible. At least two-thirds of the disc wouldn't track unless the stylus was ever so carefully edged with a finger, then pushed on to the next usable (maybe) portion. Some perfectly good passages had grooves you could barely see. It was enough to drive any willing technician nuts-for this was awhile back, when we weren't so familiar with the tricks as we are now.
Worst of all, the disc turned out to have been recorded too high in pitch, producing semi-Donald Duck sounds, quaint but unnatural. That wasn't the idea at all. This early tape copy, perforce, skipped a lot of unmanageable stuff, and it still played too high in pitch. But at least the original was preserved.
Without editing, that would have been the end for this audible chain of recorded voices, so far away and yet so poignant, because by this time many were already in their graves. Poignant for me, too, not merely because I made the recording (and on occasion narrated), but because my own mother and father, as well as the bride's, all deceased, are movingly heard in the midst of all the noise. Also other old, mutual friends, now dead.
The rest is simple. By no coincidence at all, the bride and groom of 1940 have been my hosts each recent spring in Eugene, Oregon. So this is another Eugene story, and even includes another Eugene audio concern.
Last year, Sally and Jack, who will celebrate their 44th this coming summer, got out the old record and the copy for me to look at. Could anything be done? The copy was already old and not really very satisfactory; they no longer dared play the original at all. What could I do? I think you can understand that I could do a lot, but I needed professional help and good equipment. I dared to play the disc, using their Fisher, which had a relatively lightweight cartridge. Yes, there was indeed a lot more material that might be retrieved, with immense care and pains and a very delicate finger to push the pickup.
Yes, the pitch was too high, and would have to be adjusted in any copy. I used my finger to slow the table and got an approximation-much improvement. Now, was there, I asked, a suitable pro in town who could make us the basic corrected copy with all this taken care of? With that, I could then do the actual editing myself.
Right across the street was a curious audio studio with an intriguing name, Real To Reel. Somebody must have a lot on the ball, I thought, to devise that neat pun. So we walked right over to chat. Dark, dismal front hall, closed doors. A frantically barking dog behind one of them. Nothing else. So I had to go along home, East, wondering what kind of an audio place this was. Sally, the bride and now a grandma, had to follow up.
A tape arrived in my mail! Wow--they did it. Real to even realer. It was, when I played it, a superb and really understanding job, such as I could scarcely believe. The pitch, to begin with, was perfectly restored; the voices were themselves to the life, no longer vintage Donald Duck. Most of the formerly missing material, unplayable, was miraculously retrieved, often after many brave and careful tries. That included my own father, who died in 1961. Now at last the recording was of real people! And sibilants. At 6 kHz, you do get them and they add presence and intelligibility.
What was most important for me was edit-ability. Those people knew exactly what I needed. As made, their tape was a nightmare of noise, all the original and a lot more added. Appalling.
Dozens of new 78-rpm closed-loop repeats, as they tried again and again, enough to drive you crazy. More pops and scrapes, more added blank stretches. All this, the folks at Real To Reel evidently understood, was easily removable, both the original sounds and their additions, and they were right.
So I edited. Razor blade, Editall (thanks, Joel. Tall), and splicing tape. I took out, seemingly, miles of taped junk. The floor was littered with it.
Everything, the squawls and pops and hisses that made the tape sound like a sandblasting operation, the insane one-syllable repeats, over and over, the false starts. All easily removed. I left one repeat, deliberately-Sally's now-departed mother, at the very end, saying, "sends love, sends love, sends love ...." I joined syllables from several tries, damaged, to make a complete version; I restored husbands to wives (two couples), reversed the order here and there for drama, timed each entrance for best impact, and in the end hooked up the entire thing into one smooth, even continuity, both sides of the old disc. Miraculously, the good parts of the recording, where the stylus was doing its job right, were not excessively noisy. In the final version you can scarcely notice the 78-rpm turning noise.
I was proud of this little job and gratified at how well it all turned out. The finished result is strictly synthetic, of course, but it is also real. Just as I would have had it in 1940. Its importance to you, and you, is simply to attest to the power of this idea of sound editing. It is indeed one of our most fundamental audio discov eries. Need I say more?
(adapted from Audio magazine, May 1984; EDWARD TATNALL CANBY)
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