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Steve had corrected the speed with his variable pitch turntable so that the platters turned at exactly 78 RPMs. This produced slower tempos and pitch, resulting in Johnson having a deeper voice and, in my opinion, it gave the songs (especially the uptempo ones like "Preachin' Blues" and "32-20 Blues") a better groove. The 1996 version of the Columbia CD set basically reflects these corrections.

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I was just listening to the Columbia collection over my lunch hour, and I did notice there was a clarity to the recordings (compared to some other stuff that some one taped for me) Prior to this, I had heard mostly stuff from that original 60's re-issue set.

I know I sounded lighter when i was 18-21 years old! I wonder what Charley Patton might have sounded like at that age!~

Things are a bit confusing here as the version you are referring to in the 2-CD jewel box is in fact the second issue of the complete recordings that was issued on Columbia 64916 around 1996 even though the date on the back says 1990. I'm not sure of the reason for the dating - I assume it has something to with copyright. This is certainly the one to get as the sound is a big improvement over the original issue 46222. The original issue is still available and if you can afford it it's worth getting both since the first edition came in a handsome box with a nice large booklet - you can take out the CDs from the original and replace them with the remastered CDs from the later issue.

Frank Scott
Roots & Rhythm

Also, Bob, I just read a similar statement in a thread discussing this same issue on another board, but they added the info that the reason the engineers set the speed at 80 RPM (using an oscilliscope BTW) was that the drag of the cutter would cause a reduction in the speed by about 2 RPM, achieving an actual speed of 78 RPM. Of course, the oscilliscope could be affected by heat, plus or minus an RPM or two. But again, nothing like 20%
All for now.
John C.

"I've been thinkin' on this topic a little bit.
What I have found is how the the old portable record cutters kept time.
They used a built in oscillator and a neon lamp as a strobascope. They
would set the turntable to 80 rpm. Then, while recording, "cutting", the
friction would reduce the rpms approximately 2% to 78 rpms.
I know oscillators at the time were fairly sensitive to hot or cold conditions.
So this raises the question. How far off could the oscillator have been?
Though I don't think it would be over 5% tops.
5% would be a variance of 3.9 rpms, or from 74.1 to 81.9
Would that make that much differance on a 78 rpm record.????"

It doesn't really say how they calibrated the instrument. But it made me wonder about the rest of the process, i.e. how were the actual 78's created from the original recording. My uneducated belief is that they made a negative cast of the original and used that to press the final product. This would mean there was no rerecording of the side during which it could be sped up. Hence, if we follow the assumpton that all RJ's works have been sped up by some percentage greater than 10% say, on purpose, this decision would have had to have been made before his first recording of Kind Hearted Women, so that they could slow down the recording devise, speeding up the final product. I can just hear the Devil whispering in the producers ear, "Sure, this guy's good, but if we speed him up by 10 to 20% he'll sell millions." It sort of lends credence to the story of the woman asking RJ on the street if he could play Terraplane Blues like the Robert Johnson record, and him exclaiming, "That's my record!" She probably didn't think it sounded like him at all. I guess that's when he knew the Devil was gonna get his due. Kidding aside, the thing that bothers me about this theory is that it would have had to have been a conscious choice, spanning two different multiple day recording sessions, with different engineers, and with all the variances due to temperature being too inconsistent for it to have been accidental. And, as I pointed out earlier, Bob would probably have had to have been a participant in the scheme.
Anyway..... if you want to contact the original poster his logon is Deadeye and you can find the post under a similarly labeled thread in the prewar section of DMF.
And Dave, I will try to find that article. I was heading to the San Francisco Library this week to try to find a copy of Calt's Patton Bio, which is now going for close to $200, used.
All for now.
John C.

Since it is so easy to put these recordings on the hard drive and adjust the pitch, I tried slowing them down 5%, 10%, 15%, and 20%. To my admittedly untrained ears, the slower speeds sound much more natural than my 1990 box set cd's.

Those are a couple of interesting points.

I have a feeling you are not a guitar player. If you were, you wouldn't look at your first point, pertaining to RJ's ear, the way you do. A guitar player doesn't hear pitches as such, but he hears the chord forms and licks that are being used, regardless of pitch. A player may be capoed or tuned up or tuned down an arbitrary amount, yet a C chord form sounds the same. Rj's guitar, while perfectly in tune with itself could have been pitched anywhere and capoed or not. From RJ's repertoir we can tell that he learned a great deal from records, being part of the first generation of blues players to do so, and could have been very skilled at hearing what was being played, not what the notes were.

The Johnson who "threw his voice up" was probably Tommy Johnson. See Canned Heat Blues or Cool Drink of Water Blues, among others.

Perhaps I should be welcoming you to the vast world of prewar blues beyond Robert Johnson as well.

BTW, I agree the most recent releases have the key pretty much where he sang it. And thanks for the tip on Kind of Blue, one of my all time favs.

All for now.
John C.

Jerry said that guitar blues players used to tuned below the pitch (generaly 1/2 step or sometimes more)Tuning to the pitch is something that came from the 60' revival and much more folky that bluesy.
Demonstrating tuning below the pitch I must confess that it sounds much more bluesy.
Try it by yourself.

[This message has been edited by Delphicjazz (edited 10-21-2006).]

..
(hey i KNEW he replicated skip's tunin on that one ... )

surely th devil still gets his dues at this days

((and..yes, i read it all the way thru))

[This message has been edited by georgeguitar (edited 10-21-2006).]

I still think you are being a bit romantic about poor Bob, with your belief that he likely had perfect pitch. I have never heard any evidence to support that, and indeed, according to the Hal Leanord book of transcriptions (And David Rubin, who posted earlier on this thread was one of the transcribers) in one of his recording sessions, the guitar tuning tends to gradually slip down more than a half tone as Bob retunes from Spanish to Standard and back several times. Still contending that the recording engineers were much more sophisticated by the time Bob was recorded (as opposed say to the earlier recordings from the '20s) I think we can believe this fluctuation in tuning had more to do with Bob's lack of perfect pitch than with erratic engineering.

I still think you should have realized that Law was talking about Tommy Johnson. This did seem to be a slightly naive faux pas for someone with your deep interest in the blues. You may remember that RJ was reported to have stated that he was one of the "Johnson brothers". Tommy was far more well known at the time, and Lonnie (no relation to either) was even moreso.

Interestingly, Law remembered Tommy for his singing, not his guitar playing. This points out an interesting phenomena which is that most today revere these players for their guitar playing where as they saw themselves more as singers, as did the A&R guys who worked with them. I've posted here or in another of the several threads on this topic that you will notice that in the second take of Kindhearted Woman, Bob opts to cut the break and sing the final verse, which he didn't have time for in the first take. I think this is a strong indication of his preference. As this was the first song he recorded, he may have decided not to record any instrumentals from that point on so that he could get in as many of his vocals as possible. But the fact that the vocals were really more important to the players and the producers is another strong reason to doubt that they would have sped up the recordings to make him sound like a better player to the detriment of his vocals. I think we can assume that he sounded pretty much like the records.

Well, I'm glad my misassumption about your interests motivated you to give a more proper introduction of yourself and your music.

All for now.
John C.

In my study of Lead Belly's music, I found that most of the material that was produced and engineered by Alan Lomax is pitched too high when reproduced at 78 rpm. This bothers me because so much of the Library of Congress material was engineered by Alan Lomax. Curiuously, the recordings engineered by his father, John Lomax, were most likely pitched correctly.

I wonder if Alan chose to record the session at a slower speed so that he would have more recording time per disc. For various reasons, I don't think he meant it to be a musical/artistic choice.

I also believe that early recordings of Willie McTell were recorded at a slow speed for artistic/music reasons. Would the original version of Statesboro Blues sound as sweet to the ear at its true pitch?

Also, over the years, various copies of original 78s have become pitched incorrectly. For instance a Document recording of Lead Belly's "Gallis Pole" originally engineered by Musiccraft, was originally played by Lead Belly in the key of B. But the Document copy of this had it pitched in C.

I don't want to get too technical, so I will stop there, but I appreciate some serious research done by thohse in the previous links.

But I have an observation and a question about the basic assumption that for me, lingers over the whole project.

Regarding "A Revolutionary Critique of Robert Johnson"(the article that Adrian references in his first post):

http://www.touched.co.uk/press/rjnote.html

The author states the following:

"...This means lowering the key by three semitones, a quarter of an octave – which means slowing the recordings to 80 per cent of the speed at which they normally play. (I accomplished this by playing my old King of the Delta Blues Singers LPs with the pitch control on the turntable turned as low as it would go and taping them with the pitch control on the cassette deck turned as high as it would go, then turning the pitch control down slightly while I dubbed it to another cassette deck. The end result was the equivalent of a 33-1/3-rpm record playing at 26-2/3-rpm.)"

But when I used my computer to accomplish the same thing - slowing the recording to 80% of original speed - my result is MUCH slower than the RJ samples found at the bottom of the link. At 80% speed, the music sounds ridiculous - like a 45 played at 33RPM.

Through some further experimentation, I find that the samples are actually slowed down to only about 92% of the CD speed (I used the Columbia "Complete Recordings" CD dated 1990).

Given the writer's (John Gibbens?)methodology, i.e., ping-ponging two cassette decks with pitch control tweaking, an error is certainly understandable.

So, here are two questions for the forum:

First, has anyone else run into the same issue in creating a new "80%" disc for yourself? (I used Acid Music, and then Adobe Premiere; both with the same result.) But maybe I'm doing something wrong...

Second, what are the pitch and guitar tuning implications of the recording being slowed to only 92%? [In fact, 91.67% would be 11/12ths - which I think works nicely as one semi-tone, but I'm no expert in math or music theory.]

Your thoughts and corrections are welcome!

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Originally posted by deltacaster:
Has anyone read this months guitar world acoustic?
They have an article on Roberts playing style and also touch on the fact that half of his recordings were sped up.I also learned he played a Gibson KG-11. I wonder how they verified that.
A little off the subject but did anyone read Claptons comments about Son House? Claptons playing can barely touch what Son was doing......I just find what he said a little ignorant.....

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Just a question that hinted at methodology to look for anything that might be interpreted as a consistent pattern across the recordings of different musicians done made on the same equipment at the same time and place. I know that there are a lot of assumptions, variables, and general slop involved, but sometimes you get lucky and some good info.

The confusion comes from his tuning which was lower than normal. His guitar is often tuned like open G tuning but down to E, leaving the lower string relatively slack, and with a G-string for a B-string (tuned to G#).

Therefore: B-E-B-E-G#-E. (He used a capo on the 3rd fret to get normal open G.)

If the recordings are too fast, this would mean the lower strings were even slacker than they were.
It is possible that Johnson's guitar was tuned a little higher than E to increase tension to the strings, but I doubt more than a tone. Try slowing down a little to decrease the pitch by between a semitone and a tone.

Also, Johnson is said to have been a small man of medium-slight build, so the idea about his voice being deeper doesn’t necessarily follow.

Regards,

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Originally posted by R. C. Sotorrio:

...I’m absolutely certain that the recordings aren’t supposed to be played this slowly. The precise pitch is debateable and probably matched Johnson’s harmonica, but not only do the recordings sound unnatural, his tunings and strings also wouldn’t allow it. Johnson didn’t use as many tunings as people think, and the Hal Leonard books are incorrect as they often are. (This is the problem with academics making assumptions.)

The confusion comes from his tuning which was lower than normal. His guitar is often tuned like open G tuning but down to E, leaving the lower string relatively slack, and with a G-string for a B-string (tuned to G#).

Therefore: B-E-B-E-G#-E. (He used a capo on the 3rd fret to get normal open G.)

If the recordings are too fast, this would mean the lower strings were even slacker than they were.
It is possible that Johnson's guitar was tuned a little higher than E to increase tension to the strings, but I doubt more than a tone. Try slowing down a little to decrease the pitch by between a semitone and a tone.

Also, Johnson is said to have been a small man of medium-slight build, so the idea about his voice being deeper doesn’t necessarily follow.

Regards,

R. C. Sotorrio

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Originally posted by R. C. Sotorrio:

The confusion comes from his tuning which was lower than normal. His guitar is often tuned like open G tuning but down to E, leaving the lower string relatively slack, and with a G-string for a B-string (tuned to G#).

Therefore: B-E-B-E-G#-E. (He used a capo on the 3rd fret to get normal open G.)

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