Sunday, March 12, 2017

An Oldies Show For You To Enjoy

I haven't posted in over a week because I've been busy with a lot of different things. One of them is
doing the preparation for an oldies show I'm now going to be doing on a somewhat regular basis.

What makes my show any different from all the other ones? A few things, honestly.

I use professional audio processing, specifically, the "Big Iron" preset in Breakaway One. This preset is designed to make the music sound as though it's being played on an AM radio station in the late 1960s, and believe me, it works.

I take a lot of time to find the best mastering of each record. Every single record I play falls into one of four categories. It is the stock mono single that you would have found in a record store,  or the promotional mono single sent to radio stations, or the stock album, or the promotional album. You will never hear me playing a stereo mix nor a mixed-down version of one.

In other words, as a general rule, I insist on total authenticity. If there is a difference between the U.S. and U.K. mixes of a record, I determine which sounds better, and which was more likely to have been played back in the day. There are some exceptions to this rule, mostly in the form of Beatles records, because many of the U.S. versions were remixed with way too much reverb. Also, there are some records where for the U.S. version, the U.S. mono mix isn't available on compact disc, whereas the U.K. mono version is available.

Do you get the feeling I spend a lot of money on music? Because, I surely do.

I use vintage jingles and commercials. I freely admit that I do use some modern public service announcements, because that's something an actual modern day oldies station generally does. I do live reads of commercials for local businesses that either are no longer in business, or are ones I've made up.

I've decided to post the shows to Mixcloud. That covers licensing, and also allows shows to be posted at a bit rate of 320 kilobytes per second. Most of the streaming services have limits of 128 kps. That rate is often referred to by such services as "CD quality", which is just so not true.

The first show is finished. I'll upload it later today and post a link to it here. I really don't want to post a full list of what records I played here, but Mixcloud does allow you to see such a list.

What I will do here is briefly talk about a few of the records in each show.

For this first show, I tried to have a good mix of records almost any oldies fan will recognize and some more obscure singles.

I played "Let's Stay Together" by Al Green, using the promo mono mix. It's a good mix.

I played "Wasted Days, Wasted Nights" by Sir Douglas Quintet. They cut this in 1972, so it was not an attempt to cash in on the success of Freddy Fender's  hit version, which he cut in 1975. Rather, it's a resurrection of Fender's 1959 fairly obscure original recording. I like it!

I played  "It's Got To Be A Miracle (This Thing Called Love)" by  Four Tops and The Supremes. It's a nice record, but it's not very contemporary sounding at all for its time (it's also from 1972). The Supremes, of course, were down to one original member by that time (Mary Wilson) and two replacements (Cindy Birdsong and Jean Terrell).

I also played another Four Tops single, namely, their recording of "MacArthur Park". Sadly, the mono single version of this that's currently available is mastered much too loudly and is clipped as well. I was able to make it better sounding by running it through a good declipper effect and a vinyl record simulation, but even after all that, it's still a little rough sounding. Just letting you know, before hand.

As I say, I'll have the whole two hours uploaded later today and then I will post a link here on the blog. I hope you have a chance to listen, and that you like what I've done. I can, and will, do requests and dedications so, if you have one, shoot me an e-mail at wtba950@gmail.com and I will do my best. I currently have 2000 records in regular rotation, so there's only a very small chance I don't have the record you want to hear.

I had a lot of fun doing the show, and I think that shows.







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