SCA dance music: trip down memory lane
Dec. 21st, 2009 10:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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jducoeur, then
edited by me and Dani, and then passed along to others.
The newsletter publishes dance reconstructions, and early on the community decided that there needed to be tapes, freely copyable in the SCA, to accompany each volume. The first tape came out in 1991, so this was long before you could just download MP3s off the web, and buying a bunch of commercial CDs for the one or two tracks each that lined up with the dance steps, if in fact any did at all, was expensive. But the SCA is full of musicians, so another plan was hatched.
Later volumes were published on CD, but the first two were published on cassette tape and not (to my knowledge) ever re-issued on CD. So we ripped copies from our cassettes. (We passed along the masters when we passed on the newsletter.)
I was in the Debatable Consort when we recorded for the first tape. We recorded in a classroom (we did hang blankets up on the windows), with actual mics and a four-track recorder (uses all four tracks on a cassette at double speed). We did our best, but, well, it was on the cheap and sound quality suffered. We were not the only group recording under those kinds of circumstances. So while the dance tapes were revolutionary, allowing some dances to be danced in much of the SCA for the first time, they were also kind of noisy. But the SCA dance community was used to noisy dance tapes from all those Nth-generation copies floating around, so most people didn't mind.
Dani and I published the second tape, and by then the first was either out of print or nearly so. The cost of duplication rose only a little bit (relatively speaking) for a longer recording, so we made a longer tape and included many of the tracks from the first tape again. (Some had since been deprecated.) We took the masters from the first tape and all the submissions from the second to the home of the person with the best stereo we knew of, and he graciously applied what noise reduction he could and edited together a master that we could send off to the duplicators. It was an admirable job for which we were (and are) grateful.
This weekend I popped the ripped copy of the first tape into Amadeus Pro and took a new crack at noise reduction. Wow, did those tracks clean up well! I did it the harder (but more correct) way by sampling noise from each track individually and applying it to that track only. since there was plenty of pure noise right before and after each track, this was easy. And clickity-click, as fast as I can do select-sample-select-reduce, it was gone.
Doing this to the second tape, which had already gone through one significant cleanup phase back when it was made, did not work well, by the way. I got better MP3s of the tracks from tape #1 from tape #1 than from the reprints in tape #2. I didn't expect that, but I'm glad I was curious enough to try the experiment instead of just jumping to #2.
The tapes sounded good to us when they were made, tape hiss and all. Some really excellent music groups contributed recordings to this project, and now I can listen to them again without all the noise! I have my commuting music for the next few days now.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-22 04:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-22 04:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-22 01:47 pm (UTC)