Buddy Holly From The Original Master Tapes Rar
Oleta Blaylock
On your website, you specify your title as "audiophile music restoration specialist" instead of, say, "mastering engineer." Can you tell me what you think the difference is, and what you feel your job is?
I always like to use the word "audiophile" in there because nowadays a "mastering engineer" is someone who mangles the sound to the lowest common denominator. In other words, so that their CD is just as loud as everybody else's out there. Sort of the old "my radio station is louder than your radio station" thing. My personal opinion is that there has to be a bastion of good sound out there and many of my jobs entail much more than mastering. There are all different kinds of restoration, from old records to old tapes to this and that. I didn't want to be lumped in with the mass of guys out there who just follow orders now and compress the hell out of everything.
I couldn't help but ask Steve to comment on some of my favorite DCC releases. This is by no means a "best of" list, and I'm sure most people aren't going to rate Sammy Davis Jr. over Miles Davis, but I simply found this to be a good way to get into some of Steve's experiences and techniques.
I always liked that album, and that was one of the first ones we [DCC] wanted to do. We used the master tape. It was mixed over at A&M, very solid-state sounding. I eased down that solid-state "blanched" sound a little bit by running it through one or two layers of tubes, just so her voice would get a little "bloom" in it. It still sounds a bit flat, but I didn't want to add too many layers of rose-colored glasses on there, because after a while you can't see anymore. I just helped it a little bit... hit the record button and let her play all the way through, and I thought it came out great.
I love those guys. Totally under-rated. I wanted to do the Zombies because I had their album on Parrot. And it sounded terrible. I mean, really bad! I just thought, "It can't sound this bad in real life." So we contacted the owner of the Zombies stuff in England, and we said, "Can we do a Zombies disc over here in the states?" And they said, "Join the club, there's like five Zombies Greatest hits out there." And I said, "Yeah, but ours will sound better." They gave us what we needed, and I went through all the mono and stereo mixes and chose the ones I thought were best for each. No layer of tubes on there at all. Pretty much a flat transfer. All that stuff was recorded with valves in England. I didn't see the need to add any more. That was an Ampex ATR100 transfer directly to the A/D converter via my Massenburg parametric. I dialed in maybe -1 or +1 just to get a little oomph out of it. But that's all I had to do.
It's a flawed recording. The music tracks were all bumped down to one track of an 8-track, and then the voices were added, and there's a lot of distortion and there's a lot of extra bass that they obviously liked. Brian Wilson liked it, they were listening on those Altec monitors. They don't really have that much bass so it sounded just right to them. I tried removing some of it. I tried doing the same thing the Capitol engineers tried to do when they did their CD version of it: add some top end or add some of this or that... and nothing worked. So then one day I was just playing back the tape, and I thought, "It sounds great just like this. I'm going to do it straight." So I just transferred it straight... the only change I did was I made sure that the levels of each song were matching each other, because a lot of them were mixed at a different time. One song had a level peak at +4 and one had a level peak at -3, so I just made the inherent volume of each of the songs closer together. That's all I had to do, but it took months in order to get there! It wasn't one of my favorite albums until I started working on it. Had that album when I was a kid, and it was in fake stereo and I couldn't really hear anything, and it was just weird. I said, "God, this album isn't very good." But when I finally got to hear the tape I said, "This tape sounds like history being made." And if it's history being made, who am I to change history? So I'm just going to run this thing straight. It's not going to have as much top end as the regular CD, it's going to be hissier because they used No Noise and I would never do that. But mine sounds more musical, and I don't care what anybody says.
That came out great! I heard the regular CD of that... was there bass guitar on there? But on the master tape, it's really nice. It sounds really good. But apparently the tape I used was never used to make anything. It was just the original mixes, and they were immediately copied to a more "easy to cut" version for LP, and that was marked as master. The same old story. But that's what has been used all these years to make everything: the CDs, the LPs, the copies for England, all the other countries. So the original master had this nice full sound. It still sounds like Van Halen, but to me it's just more of everything.
I'm lucky because somebody who hires me is interested in getting the best sound they possibly can. Usually that is a record company that has an audiophile leaning. In other words, they are not worried about competing with the loudest CD out there. It's more of, "What sounds the best on a $50,000 stereo?" You'd be surprised at how bad most modern compact discs sound on really good equipment. It'll make your ears fall off after half an hour. When they hire me, they know that I'll keep the dynamic range intact, and try to add my trademark "breath of life" to everything.
I started out in radio broadcasting. Then I made the leap over to working at a record company, compiling greatest-hits albums. Bing Crosby, or The Andrew Sisters, or Buddy Holly... people like that. I was the catalog administrator. I basically dealt with, you know, what the Rhino guys do so well: making interesting packages. Never heard the finished product until it was actually in the stores. I was always appalled at this crappy sound quality on so many of these reissues. I made it my business to become a real pain in the butt amongst the engineering staff, and went out there and learned all I could about tape. There's only one master tape, and everything is made from that. There could be like 25 copies of the same song in the vault, and the guys in the vault have no idea which one is the right one so they just go "eeny meeny miney moe." I discovered that half the battle was right there: find the right tape and you're almost home free. I eventually just wormed my way into that, having had a lot of broadcast engineering experience, working with limiters and compressors and EQ. I wasn't alienated by any of it, so gradually I just demanded that I was the one in charge of remastering as well as compiling. I made a lot of enemies doing that.
Well, the first compact disc I did was an album by Buddy Holly called From the Original Master Tapes. It's an album where the mastering part took about three hours, but actual research, finding the right tapes, took maybe half a year. Spread out all over the place, I found everything, brought them all together. That was 90 percent of the battle. When I mastered that album, I was sitting right there with the mastering engineer, who was a really nice guy, and I said, "Look, all these things sound great just the way they are. Do we have to master them? Can't we just transfer them straight?" And the guy said, "Transfer them straight? Well, I hear a cloud on the bass a little bit here. And I hear this and I hear that..." I said, "Well, if you take the cloud out, his voice just doesn't sound right. Leave the bass cloud in, worry about the voice, and my name's going on it, so if there's a problem I will take the heat." And he said, "Okay, we won't do anything." So I just did it straight, trusted my instincts, and it's the album that I'm most noted for because... [sighs] I had nothing to with the sonics of that album. It was all Norman Petty's engineering back in New Mexico in the '50s. He did it right, and I saw no reason to tamper with it.
Over the years, especially working with Marshall Blonstein and the DCC Compact Classics guys, and now with Audio Fidelity and Analog Productions, we always just want the same thing. Is there a master tape? Is it playable? If so, let us worry about it and we'll take it from there. Record companies understand now what we need. We can't use a production copy, we can't use fake stereo; if that song came out in mono, it's going to stay mono. And they've let us do what we want. Usually.
The thing is, it matters not a hill of beans if something is from the original master tapes if it's been destroyed in mastering. That's my soapbox for this year: Why bother to use the original master tapes if the final product sounds nothing like the original master tapes?
I read an interview where you described the long, hard struggle of getting master tapes for Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited. What were the most difficult master tapes for you to locate?
I'd have to say Jethro Tull's Aqualung. I believe we waited seven years. That was an album that was recorded in one place, then a tape copy was made for America and a tape copy was made for England, and these tape copies are the ones that are marked "master". They've been EQ'ed, and they've been compressed... slightly, in a good way. But, nonetheless, they were not the original masters. They kept sending us all these tapes marked "master". I kept saying to them, very kindly, "No no no, not this, not this, not this..." Finally, we got a hold of Ian Anderson, who said, "Oh yeah, I have those in my garage." That was about five years into the project. At about seven years into it, he finally got around to sending us Aqualung. It was a long struggle, but the project came out nicely. It's not that [the tapes were] lost, it was just that no one there realized that was what we wanted. They couldn't understand. "Well, here's a perfectly good tape that we used to make the LP. Why don't you just use that?" Well we don't want this $30 CD to sound like the LP because, personally, I didn't think the LP sounded that hot!
7fc3f7cf58