Re: ooops! (was 78s)

[Tim Rose <tim.rose@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

tom ball wrote:
> 
> My apologies for that last (irrelevant) post -- that was meant to be 
> sent to the Yahoo Post-War Blues group and got accidently sent to 
> Harp-L....
> 

Perhaps I can add a little harp content to this...

My father-in-law owns "Swaggie", a small jazz label based in Australia. 
  He has, with the help of John R. T. Davies, re-mastered and 
re-released a lot of old 78 material.  Most of it's trad jazz (that's 
his bent), but he's also done two albums of Sleepy John Estes, which 
features Hammie Nixon on quite a few tracks.

Listening to that music forced me into buying both an E *and* an Eb 
harmonica, to try to deal with the pitch variations.  I assume the 
tracks were actually performed in B, but some of them were definitely 
nearer to Bb, and (dammit!) some were annoyingly in-between.

When I asked him about it, he acknowleged that there was a lot of 
variation in the "recording speed" of those early recordings, but it was 
something that he didn't feel obliged to "fix".  He (and John R. T.) 
were a lot more concerned about getting the sound as clearly and 
accurately off the old and fragile recordings, than worrying about 
making them "concert pitch".

- --Tim Rose.