Killing the Undesirables
The Anatomy of a Pop
Last week in this space, we discussed the cleaning of vinyl records, and I shared my DIY record-cleaning solution, which has given me terrific results. You can hear those results every week on the show. We talked about the many contaminants that might be found on records, especially records of the age that we normally play. I have washed everything from Pepsi and decades-old gravy to mold and tobacco juice off of records, all just to get down to the sweet, sweet music underneath. Sometimes it's been worth the effort. other times not so much.
Of course, it's nice to play a clean record; but what we find underneath all that muck and mire is still a coin-toss. If we're lucky, we will find that we had a record that was dirty but undamaged. Records can get damaged in a lot of ways, but the most common damage to records is simple wear. Ever notice that popular records of great music often sound terrible, while records of stuff nobody wants to hear are pristine? Well, of course they do. I can't tell you how many times I've looked at a 50-year-old polka album and thought, "How about that...no wear on it at all..." Well, duh! The really good stuff's been played to a frazzle!
Soooo...now that we have a nice clean record to work with, all we have to worry about is actual groove damage. And this can be very time-consuming and tedious to overcome. I've had lots of people come to me over the years with an album or a stack of albums that belonged to their mom and dad, and they want to hear them again for old times' sake, but they sound scratchy or skip all over the place and they want to know if I can clean them up for them. Maybe burn them to a CD or a flash drive..? The first thing I always do is go to eBay and Amazon and see if the album is available on CD. If so, game over. Buy the CD for $10 plus shipping, and you'll save me 20 hours of high-concentration restoration work. I must admit, it's been tempting on a few occasions to just buy the CDs, burn them a copy, and let them marvel at the amazing job I did on their old records. But I would never do that.
So, let's get down to specifics. I promised last week that I would spill the beans on the cartridge and stylus I prefer, and the software I use to accomplish these tasks. Let's start with the cartridge and stylus. I'm in love with the Shure M-55, a cartridge with origins in the early 1960s that's been refined and improved through the years. I especially like this cartridge for a couple of specific reasons: (1) The Sound. It has a "dated" sound characterized by a solid mid-range and a very smooth top end. It has a warmth and creaminess because of full, firm bass response coupled with the absence of the super-bright top end favored by many audiophiles today. Remember, I'm re-processing LP audio from the late 1940s through the mid-1960s for the most part. Even after the advent of Hi Fi, it was rare to find much of anything but noise on a record above 11 or 12 kHz. On many, the ceiling is much lower. That's the first reason: I think the sound of the Shure M-55 suits the material I'm working on to a "T."
Reason (2): The Styli. Last time I checked, Shure made about 8 different styli for the M-55 (the N-44 Stylus Series). They made conical styli, elliptical styli, high-tracking-force styli, mono styli, a 78 stylus, and a few others. Most of these are still readily available as NOS. In addition, several manufacturers are still making a variety of high quality knockoffs which perform very well. Old LPs come with a mix-N-match set of problems, and this arsenal of stylus choices offers appropriate paths to success for most of them.
Now, let's devote a little attention to software. Again, there are many choices available, and the greatest difference between most of them seems to be ease of use, rather than raw capability. I have a couple of favorites that I dearly love. One is Wave Corrector, made by Ganymede Test & Measurement in the UK. I paid $45 for this software 20 years ago, and have added every update as it was introduced. I think the most recent update was made in 2011. It's a free download now for Windows machines. WavCor is an open-ended digital recorder. By that I mean it will start recording when you hit the red button, and it will continue recording until you tell it to stop. No initializing of a blank file to record on. See the picture at the top of this blog? that's a screen shot of the main screen of WavCor. In the center is a nice, big, fat, juicy pop. WavCor kills them dead, dead, dead, without a trace. It has an automated sweep feature, and it's extremely simple to manually kill a pop that the auto sweep misses. It also has some noise filtering that works well for certain types of surface noise and tape hiss.
Sometimes, a record is covered with a certain type of pop that is better removed by the Auto pop & click removal feature of Adobe Audition. I have version 1.5, and its pop & click elimination and surface noise reduction features are very effective. Of course, there is a learning curve, but you learn to predict which records will give the best results with WavCor and which with Audition.
And then there is Goldwave. I love this program for easy and quick manicuring of music files. Once the file is clean, I use Goldwave to adjust the EQ curve, add compression or expansion, manicure the beginning and end of the file, and set the peak volume level (normalization).
These are the methods and tools I've used on LP records to clean and prep over 40,000 music files from the World's Greatest Record Library over the last 20 years or so. Next week, we start revealing the secrets of restoring audio from 78 records.
As for this week's show, we kick off Hour 1 with our first-ever feature on the Metronome All Star Band. This band was a Dream Team of Jazz whose members were selected according to the results of Metronome magazine's annual Readers' Poll. This band only played together once, for a recording session held in January of each year. Generally, the band laid down two sides for posterity. Different record labels did the sessions from year to year, and the proceeds were donated to the AFM Pension Fund. As you might imagine, the musicians selected and the sound of the band evolved tremendously over the years, sometimes with stark differences in sound and approach from one year to the next. We'll take a listen to the All-Stars from 1939 (the first year), 1941, 1944, 1947, 1950 and 1953. You will be amazed at the evolution in Jazz represented by these records.
Hour 2 begins with a loving look back at some of the best records made by the Stan Kenton band. We concentrate on the band's "hit years" between 1941 and 1950. This big, brash, bombastic band was so brass-heavy with 5 and sometimes 6 trumpets and 4 or 5 trombones, it had trouble really swinging a lot of the time, although some of the members, like singer Anita O'Day, worked hard to overcome that. But swinging was never as important to Stan as making progressive sounds with new and unusual shadings and harmonies. His was the first progressive band to gain national prominence, and it paved the way for Herman's Herds of the 1940s and for the wide acceptance of Bop just a couple of years later. We'll hear a good representative sampling of the band's output from that period.
In addition, we will enjoy the sounds of Artie Shaw, Casa Loma, Will Bradley, the Benny Goodman Sextet. Earl Hines, and many more. Count Basie will tickle the ivories, the Andrews Sisters will harmonize, Gene Krupa will beat some skins, and the one and only Helen Kane will bring us the original recording of her signature song from 1929 in this week's Wayback feature. All told, a show not to be missed!
Remember to contact a young musician or band student and invite them to listen to the show with you this week. They need to hear this music, and they need to know that you support their musical dreams.
As always, we'd love to hear from you with a comment or request, either here or on our Facebook page. Be kind to one another this week, and above all,
Keep Swinging!
Scott
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