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I need to edit myself a new term before I can go on to more audio-biography: Sound working.
I'm tired of "edit"; it's getting to be like "software" or "processing." I sometimes go for processed cheese, but I'm already allergic to processed words. Then there are the oldies like "time" and "live," now stretched to their elastic limits. Real time? Is there any other kind? Of course, so we talk about the real thing as though it were somehow abnormal. Live on tape? Well, if it's on tape it isn't alive, but even so . . . .
Time warp? Could be.
Black holes, or is it white holes? We need to confine "editing" before we begin to "edit," say, press conferences. Or bouquets of flowers, or a gourmet dinner. It's like musical "software"--you may remember I drew my own line when it got to Beethoven. He did not write software for symphony orchestra. Nor, I should add, does the Met run software on its big New York stage. It produces operas, thank you.
Enough is enough.
Editing was once entirely for the printed word, books and magazines, literature. Then the movies took it over for the film assembly line, followed by audio tape and then video. This new technological sense is well-established and useful in the great present complexes of film, video and audio--it is always the actual physical process of snipping and cutting and assembling, joining up segments through a variety of technical systems that is in itself bewildering. That's enough, for our type of editing.
So let's divide the process in two:
We'll confine "editing," when it goes beyond the printed word, to the purely technological sense of assembly, from razor blade and EdiTall to time codes, wave matches, Dolby, and a dozen syncs on a grand scale. Sound working, then, is more the arts and crafts side, a matter of aesthetics. To work, transitive, is a splendid oldie full of pleasant memories: Woodworking.
Working in clay, oils, pastel, bronze, sheet metal, acrylics, wrought iron we can "work" sound, too, into sonic shapes both useful and beautiful.
That's my idea.
When I first had glimmerings of this idea of working sound, shaping it, there were no tools, no tape, only the early talkies. If you edited the picture, you had to edit the sound. We had only the disc, which is why it took me 40 years to edit a wedding recording I made in 1940 (see Audio, May 1984).
But at least we younger music teachers (which I was) could pick out a musical "theme" on a record and play it, excerpted, with minimum squawks and blats, which was a kind of sound editing. By 1940 I already had four fat years of this behind me, and I enjoyed it. You got so you could "read" the record grooves in a strong light and drop the pickup exactly where the tune began, then use the volume control to fade out at the end. Or, with the right equipment, you could cue up, the table turning at speed while you held the disc motionless.
But you could not thus "slip" records on any existing home phono, nor those in most classrooms. Not enough torque, even with a felt slip pad underneath the disc. Automatics were out, of course. You pick up the pickup and it takes itself instantly away and turns the machine off, even in "manual" mode.
We haven't progressed very far here in 40 years or more. Consumers are still frustrated trying to transfer selected parts of an LP onto cassette. And have you tried to cue a cassette player that turns on its electronics with the "play" button? Push "play"--and no sound.
Not at the cue point! There's silent play for an exasperating second or two.
That's enough to spoil your cue if you are shaping an accurate musical time.
Very soon after 1940, the summer of that wedding recording on disc, I made some startling discoveries in sound working. It was, quite indirectly, via FM. The students at my college were putting on a radio drama. I have not the faintest memory of what it was about, but the Dramatics prof (female) asked the Music Department (me) whether I could fix up some musical bridges for this show, out of all those records I had. Seems she had made contact with a new radio station, some new system called MF, was it? And she had their studios for a production on the air.
Much as I hated musical bridges, especially "classical," how could I re fuse? I had never been in a radio station. My knowledge of radio ended at the AM receiving antenna. But, oddly enough, I had listened to this new "MF" radio sound, which was of course FM. That way, at least, I was a small jump ahead of the drama class.
And so in that spring of 1943, at the bottom of the big war, with New York fully blacked out (even to the subway cars) and my volunteer job of air-raid warden very seriously taken, I barged into my first radio station for this utterly inconsequential little show. Perfectly good-just not earthshaking. I brought along records. I gave them to the engineer, who played them, mostly in the wrong places. No great matter; it was only bridge music. The show was rehearsed, and went on the air. Five minutes later it was forgotten.
But there was I, in a real studio. For the first time I gazed upon enormous professional turntable consoles with big, 16-inch castings revolving on top and long, strange-looking arms equipped with very strange pickups the Western Electric 9A, featuring a built-in diamond stylus. This pickup not only produced real, audible highs (when they were on the record, which was seldom) but, with a flip of a switch, could play either lateral or vertical grooves. The latter were on gorgeous, big, transparent-red plastic, 16-inch, 33 1/3-rpm ETs ("electronic transcriptions") from a rental library available to radio stations. This in 1943! Stereo? None of us yet had heard of that, in particular the lateral-vertical combined groove that is now standard for discs. But surely, with a bit of rewiring, that pickup could now play a mod em LP in stereo, full range, though with a certain steely sound that I expect would be frowned on today. (That would have been partly a matter of equalization; there was then no standard and plenty of different recording curves.) Detailed knowledge of these pick ups came later-this was the station where I was to spend the next three years, ending up (before the Big Bust) as Music Director with several of my own shows on the air. But on that first visit I was all eyes and ears, especially for one thing I had never imagined: Not one but two giant, professional turntables in every studio, side by side, and switches and faders to mix with mikes.
Commonplace, of course, even then.
But who outside of the business ever saw such things? What hit me in a flash was the range of experiments I could do, the sounds I could put together, with two interlinked tables instead of one. That possibility had never occurred to me. I think began to sense my destiny that very day. Sound working! This was it--or could be.
Downstairs in the duplex apartment that had been converted for radio was the Director, a woman who understood things. She was unbelievable. An experienced radio hand from Chicago, a musician who had worked with James Petrillo of the musicians' union, she was strictly a union lady. (Ask your daddies who Petrillo was-they'll know.) How she got to New York and into FM I do not know, but I have a feeling she was related to Paul De Mars, an early FM big shot whom many oldsters will remember. Anita De Mars was perfect for wartime FM-experimental radio, on the make, minus audience (maybe 400 sets?), minus profit, but full of ambition and forging into new sonic territory in the new hi-fi medium. Her ears were wide open to any ideas floating around. She had been quietly moseying about as we rehearsed that student show, and I think she saw my excitement. She was near by when I got into difficulties with her engineer over which music I wanted to play. Trifling or no, by the end of that broadcast I was so worked up I was almost hysterical, what with all the hi-fi blossoming around me and the business of actually putting a show out on the fabulous FM air.
As I came down the stairs from "Studio A" (the ex-penthouse living room), about to leave the station forever, De Mars took me aside. "Eddie," she said (she never called me anything else), "how'd you like to try a show yourself?" I gulped. I reeled, the world whirled around me. Would I? "Okay," said she, matter-of-factly. "You have 25 minutes and an engineer to do the records while you talk about the music. Write me a script, anything you want. Make a copy for the engineer with the music cues on it. [Oh boy, was that going to give me trouble.] Come back in two weeks and let me see what you have." What a talent scout, that Anita De Mars! My "talent" was no more than a glint in the eye and maybe a feverish look. But she got the idea even so.
I can come to a quick conclusion on this episode. Disaster. I worked until I was dizzy for those two weeks and came back with a fine script and lots and lots of music, on many pounds of 78 discs. After an hour of futile rehearsal, the union engineer blew her top. It was awful. What did I think she was, an octopus? A circus acrobat? How many records did I think she could hold in only two hands? This show is impossible!! said she, departing.
De Mars was hovering nearby, as usual. She had seen it all. I had set up approximately 34 classical cues, off the middles of as many fragile 78 discs, for some 25 minutes of air time! On paper it was a good show-with 28 turntables and 16 working engineers we could have had it on the air that very day.
De Mars was not flapped. "Eddie," she said quietly, "you have another week. Just go home and use a little common sense, if you have any. Come back next week and we'll try again." Cool as a cucumber. Then, I suppose, she went out to placate her ruffled engineer. She succeeded; later on we were great friends and made a good broadcast team.
The next week that show went on the air. I tell you, I never worked harder nor earned so much. It was my practical introduction to real sound working. I did it on radio for decades thereafter and for long years before tape editing appeared-we worked "live" from records (two turntables) right on the air.
When the tricks didn't work, I would casually apologize-we'd better try hat one again-while my engineer sweated buckets but usually did it right on the second try.
Noble efforts! Those guys (and gals) got so they could do incredible tricks with music, foreshadowing the things DJs have been doing in more recent times. One of my assistants was Edgar Schuller, younger brother of Gunther Schuller, Third Stream musicman, top man at the New England Conservatory as well as a prolific composer and traveling conductor. His brother was a whiz, with a splendid ear. Another was Jac Holzman, who had to leave me to found his Elektra Records and, later, Nonesuch. A third was John McClure, who graduated to CBS and rose to the very top of the record pile, where he still operates. So you see that the early art of sound working, even in this corner, has been in very good hands.
(adapted from Audio magazine, Aug. 1985; EDWARD TATNALL CANBY)
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