Christopher Eddy from Sun Ra Arkive: What
is your working process with Michael Anderson and how are you approaching the
remastering? What are each of your unique perspectives and roles in regards to
what you are listening for and trying to achieve sonically? Also what is your
signal chain? How are you transferring the tapes and what tools your are using?
Irwin Chusid, Exclusive Administrator for
Sun Ra LLC: I can’t speak for Michael. I hope he consents
to being interviewed about the process.
Michael produces the transfers from source
tapes. He has a battery of vintage open-reel decks with various head
configurations and speeds, and he knows how to service them. I honestly don’t
know what adjustments he makes to the digital files. He works alone, he’s been
doing this for decades, and I’m not going to second-guess his methodology. He
sends me his processed wav files, and I undertake a meticulous restoration
pass. He focuses on macro, I delve into the micro. I remove transients,
occasionally boost midrange or high-end a smidge, reduce noise in selected
passages, shave hiss, squelch distortion, de-ess, correct momentary speed
irregularities, repair dropouts, balance volume disparities, and remove spikes
that will sound like vinyl clicks in the end product. This process can take
hours for one track because I’m a perfectionist—which with Sun Ra recordings is
a fool’s errand. They can’t be perfected. You don’t want them perfect. Making
them “perfect” would strip away layers of soul. You’ve heard of “garage rock”?
This is Garage Jazz.
I’ve been doing digital restoration for ten
years but confess that I don’t have sophisticated ears. I’ve never owned a
high-end audio system. I own cheap consumer speakers, which I rarely upgrade.
My bedroom has a pair of Lafayette speakers I purchased in 1969, just out of
high school. Lafayette went out of business in 1981. These speakers sound fine,
but I don’t crank them because it would disturb the neighbors. Connected to my
iMac, on which I do audio restoration in Adobe CS5.5, I have a pair of desktop
Bose Companion 2 Series II multimedia speakers. (I had to flip one over to find
the model. Fancy gear doesn’t interest me—I just want my toys to work.) I
have never taken an engineering course, don’t read audiophile magazines, don’t
follow trends in acoustic advances, have never attended an audio convention. As
Raymond Scott once claimed about himself, I have a degree in “primitive
engineering.” You could say there’s a component of voodoo in my approach, but
it seems to work for restoring Sun Ra’s recordings, and it’s worked for any
number of previous restoration projects, particularly a lot of vintage calypso.
This lack of technical expertise notwithstanding, I’m friends with numerous
engineers, and often turn to them for problem-solving. I’m the beneficiary of
their sound education.
I’m not trying to horrify prospective—and
skeptical—buyers. I labor exhaustively over these audio files. There’s much
trial and error. Some fixes sound fake. I reject those. There’s usually a
trade-off: filter out one flaw, you inadvertently filter out part of the signal
you’d prefer to keep. It’s a balancing act. But in some senses, the quality of
my work is best judged by what you don’t hear.
I have not used compression or reverb on any
track. I want something that to my ears sounds natural, that reflects the
soulful-but-not-always-optimum settings in which these performances were
captured. These recordings were not made in a Miles Davis studio with a Dave
Brubeck budget.
My expectation is that I will please people
like me—ordinary Joes and Josies who just love the music—and disappoint
audiophiles. But that’s a small minority of Sun Ra fans, and pleasing the
high-end crowd is above my pay grade. If we do please them, I feel lucky—but
that might have more to do with Michael’s initial transfer process.
Christopher Eddy from Sun Ra Arkive: Well
Irwin, as one of those picky audiophiles, who's never bought an album from
iTunes because I want the highest quality sound possible, I can tell you that
your work holds up to scrutiny and didn't disappoint me at all. I did extensive a-b testing between your new MFiT
remasters and all of the previous issues of the music—from Saturn,
Impulse!, Evidence, Scorpio LP reissues, etc.—and I can say the across the
board, your new remasters are the best quality versions of the music released
to date. There is a natural tone and acoustic realism to the new remasters that
has rarely been heard from previous Sun Ra releases, many of which utilized
multi-generation tapes, excessive EQ, or noise reduction to "clean
up" the recordings. The end product was music that sounded distant and
flat, while the new remasters sound almost three dimensional in comparison!
It's a pretty stunning difference for a fan like myself who has heard these
albums many, many times. I applaud you for the musical, tasteful choices you
and Michael made when approaching your remastering work. For anyone interested
in learning more about what Mastered For iTunes really means, here's a great primer.
© 2001-2017 Sun Ra Arkive.
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