Category: Faith

Found Sound: “May The Road Rise” – 1978.

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It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything. Life has been busy. But today’s ‘Found Sound’ takes us back to 1978 once again by a very special request.

The TEAC 2340SX Machine in 1978. Shiny – about a year old.

After semi-refurbishing the ol’ TEAC 2340SX 4-track Reel-to-Reel machine in 2016, I have been attempting to digitize most of the catalog of Reel-to-Reel recordings we made over the years dating back to at least 1975. I’ve counted over 40 reels of 1/4″ marvelous magnetic media that is laden with snapshots of history from many, many long hours of musical and other sounds, much of which has now been converted to binary audio data.

It’s been a time consuming process. One reason is the fact that in order to properly transfer from analog to digital, that tape has to play in ‘real time‘. A 7″ reel typically was 1800ft of tape. If it was recorded at the highest speed that most of the tape decks we had access to at the time could run, 7-1/2 IPS (Inches Per Second) you would have roughly 48 minutes of recording time. If you were recording 2-tracks (stereo) you could flip the tape over and record 2-tracks in the opposite direction. If you ran the machine at the slower speed of 3-3/4 IPS you could achieve 1hr 36min per pass. For those reels where the recording speed was 3-3/4″ IPS, I did experiment with running the capture at the higher speed and then digitally converting the sample rate down so the pitch was ‘normal’ but I found the frequency response suffered noticeably. So it was back to ‘real time’ capture for the optimal quality. I did discover one time saving trick. If the tape was recorded in stereo (2-tracks) in both directions, I could capture all 4-tracks in one pass (two tracks sounding backwards) in real time. Then I could digitally reverse the two backwards tracks without any sound degradation. That helped some.

Maxell Reel tape box with very ‘limited’ program notes.

Now the other thing to mention is that we weren’t always very good at keeping ‘session and program notes’. So for instance, despite a box having a label of “Jim O’Dell Jr. At Severn Bapt Ch” it may have no detail on the actual recording contents therein. (That one didn’t even have a recording date!)  If I was ‘monitoring’ the capture running in real time, I would try to take notes on the nuggets of audio history found. But often once I was relatively sure the tape was all one speed, I’d start the capture, set the timer on my iPhone for the expected run time, and walk away to do other things until the timer sounded and I’d run back to the computer to stop the completed capture.

I’ve written in the past about the singing group I had the pleasure to work with in my younger years called “The Instruments of Peace” which accounted for quite a bit of the audio recordings over those years. Not only did we occasionally record the concerts which the group presented, but we also produced many of our own Instrumental Accompaniment tracks.

Well, a few months ago, I received a Facebook message from one of the members of the “Instruments of Peace” (IOP), Jenny:

Amy, Jenny’s sister and also a member of IOP, passed away unexpectedly in Nov 2016.

Well, I truly hoped that I could deliver something for my friend in memory of Amy.  Did I remember hearing that song being sung somewhere in the archives? I think so…but on which reel and from which concert I could not remember and the lack of detailed ‘session notes’ on the back of the boxes wasn’t helping. Thank goodness I had already captured most of the reels because ‘scrubbing’ through digital audio files was SO much easier than it would have been to thread the many reels of audio tape that may possibly contain the ‘needle in the haystack’.

The first ‘find’ I came across for “May the Road Rise” was actually one of the sessions for the recording of the instrumental accompaniment track we arranged for the song. But there were NO Vocals.

I found one concert recording of the group at a church of which I cannot remember the name, but we didn’t close that concert with that ‘Irish Blessing’ song. I kept searching. Then I found a recording labeled “Instruments of Peace, Ridgecrest 1978 Student Ministries” and lo and behold — “May the Road Rise” was the last song.

I queued up the recording from the beginning and sat back to have a listen. The voices sounded sweet, the performance spot on, and it sounded so good. But you could barely hear the accompaniment — which happened to be the instrumental track that we had produced. Since it was just two tracks, there was no way to bring up the levels of just the accompaniment.

“Hmm,” I said to myself, “since you have the recordings of the original 4-track accompaniment track session — why not merge those tracks with the live recording and do a mixdown? Worth a try…”

So I pulled the 4-tracks from the instrumental session into the two-track Concert recording project. I lined up the tracks to all start at the same time and hit play.

You could now hear the instruments at the intro of the song and the voices came in and I’m tweaking levels as its playing along and then I realize the voices and the instruments are drifting farther and farther apart the longer song played. This is not an uncommon occurrence in the world of old analog recordings. Reel-to-reel machines were almost never ‘perfect’ in their playback and recording speeds. The two recordings were very close to the same speed but just slightly different, not enough to really notice even a difference in pitch but enough to know they weren’t in sync (just slightly more than a second difference over the length of the entire song).

Difference in run speed on tracks by the end of the song

So my Digital Audio Workstation recording platform called Cubase 10 is known for the amazing things it can do with audio files so certainly I should be able to synchronize these tracks that are so close. I started by attempting to calculate the time difference and then tempo-mapping and time signature/measure mapping and hitpoint detection and was getting nowhere closer to a solution. Turns out, I was making this way more complicated than it needed to be. I came across a function Cubase calls ‘AudioWarp’ and could not believe the results. In a nutshell, you basically line up the beginning of the tracks (which I had already done). You then go to the end of the song and find a distinct audio event (like the final chord) which will occur at two different points in time on the different tracks. And then you decide whether you ‘stretch’ the lagging tracks to match the longer or ‘shorten’ the longer tracks to match the shorter. Here we decided to stretch each of the four instrumental tracks. Click and drag! Boom! Repeat 3x! Done! It sounded great.

AudioWarp Magic – A +1.02 seconds stretch

Now that all the tracks lined up, we could mix it.  We could now hear the instruments as well as the vocals. A little EQ here, a little noise reduction there, a touch of reverb and I was quite pleased with the result that I immediately sent to Jenny.  I truly hope that it was a meaningful moment for the family at the wedding.

The final mix is presented below:

Instruments of Peace 1978 – “May the Road Rise” (Lee Turner)
(Instrumental arrangement – D. Jackson/R. Strickland)

Instruments of Peace (at the time of the recording in 1978):

 

Jenny Cheston Soprano
Amy Cheston Alto
Amy Hunter Alto
Richard Strickland Tenor
Tim Lester Bass

Musicians:

Debbie Johnson (?) Piano
John Laube Drums
Don & Jim Harding Trumpets
Jeff Jackson Euphonium
Doug Jackson 12 String Guitar; Electric Bass

Found Sound: Summer of 1978

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IN LOVING MEMORY of
Amy Cheston McMonigle

I was deeply saddened to hear of the untimely passing this week of my friend Amy McMonigle and found myself reminiscing about not only singing with her in the “Instruments of Peace” but also the frequent times we called upon her instrumental talents of playing Cello for various recordings.

This edition of “FOUND SOUND” takes us to the Summer of 1978.

In my youth, I am grateful to have been a part of the Severn Baptist Church Youth Choir, “Phileos,” under the direction of Al Hunter and accompanied by his wife, Margaret.  Each summer the Youth Choir would look forward to going ‘On Tour’ to present Christian music concerts at a number of churches in areas as close as the Eastern Shore of Maryland to as far away as South Carolina.  We would often prepare a program that would include classical Hymns and contemporary Anthems and then often a Musical with orchestrated accompaniment background ‘tracks’.  In 1978, the “Musical” was a collection of ‘Six Contemporary Psalm Settings” by Charles Buffham.  But this collection had no accompaniment tracks available.  My friend Richard Strickland had invested in a TEAC 4-Channel Reel-to-Reel the previous summer and I had the pleasure of engineering many hours of recordings for our musical creative efforts.  This machine had the capabilities of doing overdubs and we had already become proficient in layering instruments, often playing multiple ones ourselves.  I had also been dabbling with some instrumental arranging.  So when Mr. Hunter said we should take a crack at creating our own tracks, we were all in!

One of the Psalm settings was a minor keyed setting of Psalm 13 called “Oh, Why?” and as we were discussing arrangements somebody commented on how good a Cello would sound with it.  Rich and I looked at one another and said “We know somebody that can do that — Amy!”  We knew Amy Cheston through the Baptist Student Union (BSU) and Heritage Baptist Church in Annapolis and had already tapped her Cello playing talents for another recording we had done with my Bro-in-Law, Garry O’Dell, for his song ‘The Legend of the Sanddollar.”

Cello for 'Oh, Why?"
Cello for ‘Oh, Why?’

So I scratched out a Cello part and soon after the basic rhythm tracks were done, we had Amy record it.

All in all, I think our little accompaniment track project turned out pretty well back in ’78.  I can only find recordings of four of the six Psalm settings and I cannot find our ‘Master’ tape of our instrumental tracks.  Oh well.

And so, here is “Oh, Why?”

Found Sound: Summer 1979

Doug 1 Comment

I came across another box of Reel-to-Reel tapes in the basement a few months back. One box titled “Instruments of Peace” (Recording Session) 4-Channel caught my eye.

So this edition of Found Sound takes us back to the Summer of 1979.  At that time, I was part of a singing group called “The Instruments of Peace” (IOP).  Originally formed in 1977 with the encouragement of Dick Bumpass and under the auspices of the Baptist Student Union of the Annapolis area, IOP went through several iterations and I joined the group in the summer of 1978.  We sang at a variety of venues and presented concerts of Christian musical styles from classical to contemporary. We arranged and recorded many of our own accompaniment tracks, but also presented a few selections a capella.  One in particular was an arrangement of the Spiritual “My Lord What A Morning.”

In the summer of 1979, we decided to do a recording of some of the selections in a ‘session’ held at the Glen Burnie Baptist Church.  I recall the sanctuary had pretty nice acoustics and they had just installed a custom built mixing board that was quite advanced at the time.

So, I fired up the ol’ TEAC deck, cleaned the heads, threaded the reel and prepared to transfer the session from 35 years ago to the computer.  It took a couple of tries due to the TEAC acting temperamental, but it’s almost 40 years old!

I was pleasantly surprised with the sound.  So I thought I’d share.

I created a lyric video, partially because I wanted to try my hand at it by learning a new technique with a program called ‘Blender’.  I used some licensed stock sunrise footage and did some custom graphics.

Hope you enjoy.

The Instruments of Peace (at the time of this recording):

  • Jenny (Cheston) Francis – Soprano
  • Amy (Cheston) McMonigle – Alto
  • Amy (Hunter) Stoddard – Alto
  • Richard Strickland – Tenor
  • Doug Jackson – Bass

Farewell for now, Deacon Mike

Doug 1 Comment

On Oct 30, we were notified at church that our good friend and long time permanent Deacon, Rev. Mr. Michael Misulia Sr. had passed away early that morning. He was 93 years old.

Deacon Mike had served the St. Peter’s community for 33 years as a Permanent Deacon.  Although I had known about Deacon Mike for years, having been at St. Peter’s since 1991, it wasn’t until the summer of 2006 that I had the chance to learn more about some of his accomplishments.  In June of 2006, my bro-in-law, Ken Dyer and I embarked on our first video project collaboration and had the pleasure of interviewing Deacon Mike for the “FireStories” project.  We sat with Deacon Mike after the Saturday evening Mass out by the previous location of the statue of St. Peter, the site of the original church building that was built in 1821.

Interviewing for the FireStories Project-2006

Although for the “FireStories” project we edited our interview, I’m going back to the original tape and re-editing.  I’d like to share more of what we learned with others.

You can view the Homily by Fr. Jesse Bolger and Reflections by Msgr John from the Funeral at the St. Peter website.