Thursday 9 November 2023

Now and then...


I find the-recently rebuilt song by The Beatles incredibly sad.

I understand that the latest equipment to separate a voice from an instrumental addition was a huge display of excellence, and full marks go to the people who did this, but listening to John Lennon's voice with some pretty enigmatic chord structures added later, is - to me - a bit disconcerting, and I feel a certain amount of melancholy creeping in when I hear it all. 

I love the song - it hits a spot which is so similar to the way they used to produce songs like 'Girl', 'It's just another day', 'Things we said today' and many others. I wonder if there are any more, because there was a pretty good re-structured rendition of 'Free as a bird', which I still love, and like many artists who recorded their music whenever they could, there have to be a few tapes lurking somewhere dusty...

Some years ago, when I was clearing out my dad's office after he died. I found a small Dictaphone tape from one of his talks about hop-picking for Guinness, back in the 'sixties. It's quite a long piece, and is the only recording I have of his voice! By chance, my office used to use these machines to write letters for the typists, (pre-email this), so I can still listen to a friendly family voice from all those years ago, and I should really record it onto something else, in case the machine breaks down...

2 comments:

Doonhamer said...

Audacity is a very good free to download program, or, as we now seem to call them, app for recording live or from any other source of audio signal.
You can save your recording in any ( or all)of multiple sound formats as well as edit.
Just Duckduckgargoyle Audacity. .
Have used it to record church services, as well as elderly relatives' recollections of youth and life.
You then have it for ever and can distribute amongst others.

Scrobs. said...

Many thanks, Dooners!

I like Audacity and moved on to Music Studio and others, but the cable I use between my iPad and the guitar seems to have failed, so Ebay, here I come!