http://www.pristineclassical.com/LargeWorks/Vocal/PABL001.php

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The Pristine version does indeed bring out nuances, both in the vocal and in the guitar, that I did not catch in the Columbia. It sounds much more immediate.

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Overall I am amazed how much more vocal nuance they managed to dig out. There is a disturbing
bathroom reverb quallity to some of the tracks and a grainy edge that annoyingly kicks in and out especially during the higher bottleneck vibratos, but the relief from the surface noise and pops and clicks is great.
If you want to transcribe some of RJ's nuances you want to start from this version.
As for the playback speed, well that's another can of worms.

p.s. The overall illusion that RJ is in the room with you is probably the best part of this mastering.

Of course if you have the audio restoration software, EQ fingerprint software (both are widely available), the Clapton CD's for an EQ reference and one of the earlier Robert Johnson CDs, you could have a crack at producing your own versions.

On their site it says -
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Pristine Audio recordings: All the Pristine Audio music offered for sale or download at Pristine Classical is newly copyrighted material derived from public domain recordings. The buyer is entitled to make copies for personal use only, as with any other copyright recording.

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It sounds like they are simply taking recordings of public domain material, processing it and re-releasing it, while claiming copyright to the re-released, processed material.

i'm listenin to the sample right now, and there's no doubt that's a beauty
yes somehow a few high bottleneck riffs lose that "dense piercing sound quality " ( that nobody could exactly recreat , since it just was a lo fi recording effect-lol!!as all practictioner already knew)
and
obviously they used some tech that not evrybody got home...hey did any of the maniacs round here check the speed and pitch of all of the songs already?
but,now what really interests me in those old time recordings,is how to get those guitar licks out when they are sunk in those many hollering loud voice spots
but it seems like the "remix" intends more to add some ambient-like atmosphere (as someone here said: "it seems he's in the room with you" now that spells like "irrelevant cosmetics" to me tho i understand and appreciate the fact that it may - if there still was such need today- help younger generations to get in touch with this wonderful art tnx to an overall more modern sound.but psichoacoustic aren't the point for me
now not that i don't appreciate the effort , BUT it is useless for someone who -like many folks here , i guess - couldn't get a single note more clearly outlined at a closer scrutiny,
i don't have internet home these days , so i can't match things, but i can appreciate a difference whatever it is, it is somehow really clearer indeed...-listenin as i write-also depending and varying from track to track...
not to mention the fact that we all were caught by johnson spell in spite of ( or... thanks to?! ) the concentration needed to "crack" those worn out old recordings
apologies for my english
what i (from a player perspective) meant to ask is :do these new works improve clarity for the transcriber ?
indeed to feel the difference in sound as a " listener" (nothin diminishin in the term)doesn't necessarily mean (talkin from experience) that you may detect more underlayin harmony notes and such)and believe me last week was really painful about that...it rejuvenated me of a couple of decades...
also agreeing with the "do it yourself" suggestion obviously ;) as i expressed somewhere on these pages before...but we probably don't have the same tech as the producers of this new rj release ...
not to mention how many other great names- dear folks at Pristine-tho less rewarding on the market- may benefit of such a approach:
patton , jefferson, willie johnson and so on....uhm...what about those wonderful 1917 j r morton piano solos...
oh well...
so it' is a 1)positive comment on my side , an 2) unsolved question as to would it help to transcribe a few songs i'm crazy about since looong...

(on the other side what delights me is that tryin to find out what's really happenin i usually end up with pages and pages of-more or less plausible-in/out variations !
oh well...the fest is on friday, so...

ciao!

gone rehearsin

Legendary Blues Volume Two

Best regards

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Originally posted by Waspman:
Sound is pretty good, but the recording speed is too fast.

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Wherever possible in preparing Volume Two I used the residual traces of electrical mains hum in order to make corrections to the recording speeds of these tracks. In many cases I was able to detect and analyse harmonics of the 60Hz mains hum at 120Hz and 180Hz.

This of course makes assumptions:

1 - That the frequency was steady

2 - That the frequency was reasonably accurately maintained

Both are pretty big assumptions, I agree - all that can be shown now is that the frequency was steady. However, given the lack of any other reference this seemed at as good a technique as any other. If the cutting lathe ran fast or slow becomes irrelevant if you can retune to a reference tone.

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I'm interested to know what your future plans are. I see that your site is more dedicated to Classical music than blues, and I'm also aware that the market for vintage Classical ain't much bigger than that for vintage blues. I'm guessing you did the RJ CDs (the one mass market artist in all of prewar blues) as a fund raiser to support more Classical remasterings. I hope I'm wrong and that you will tell us that Patton is next on the list and that you plan to work your way through the prewar blues pantheon? Thanks for any revelations you can give us.

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The "XR" techniques I've used in remastering the Robert Johnson recordings were developed and refined as a result of my work in the classical music field - the initial breakthrough was made about a year ago and has been built on with several major developments since. I won't go into the technicalities here - there's a rough outline on the website, though I do keep a few aspects of it under wraps.

What I recently decided to do was to see how far the technique might be pushed in other directions, and what I might learn from this when coming back to my classical work. Robert Johnson has long been a favourite as well as someone whose recordings, I felt, might readily benefit from this kind of quite invasive remastering. (Of course I'm aware that there will always be those who detest this kind of meddling - though the nay-sayers seem thinner on the ground than they initially were in the classical world! It helps that other 'takes' on Johnson are widely available - in doing this I'm not denying anyone their preference, sound-wise, just offering an alternative perspective.)

I have had a number of enthusiastic requests for Patton - more than enough to make him a priority for early next year. What I don't want to do is get too sidetracked from my original intentions with RJ - which was for my own experimentation and education, made all the more pleasurable by picking and choosing some of my own favourite non-classical recordings to work on. If others like it (and wish to buy it) as well then that's a bonus!

With that in mind I've spent much of today working on the immortal recording 'Charlie Parker with Strings'. It may have been an LP rather than 78s, recorded onto tape rather than disc and in something more akin to 'hi-fi' sound, but in fact it really is pretty crap, sonically speaking! Yet, as with the earlier Johnson recording, there's a huge amount of musical information buried in this recording as well - and when you tease it out the results are often quite astonishing. There's a wonderful stage in all of this where I switch the changes in and out and hear how much of a difference is being made - in the Parker as with the Johnson it's a marvellous moment!

I can't thank you enough for the work you are doing. For guys like me, every step toward hearing the early bluesmen in a sonically more informative form, is a dream come true. I am also really happy to hear that you already have Charley Patton on your radar for a future project. If I could add to the wish list, I hope you can complete the holy trinity by doing the same with the Son House recordings from 1928 to 1930. Thanks again!

Thanks so much for your informative post. First of all for solving a long time, uh, debate on the this forum, referred to, in jest, by Mr. Waspman's post. Pages of vitriol have been spilled here due to a website by a misguided individual who based his logic on his assumption that all guitarist who use the alternate tuning some call Spanish, tuned to G and that therefore all Robert Johnson's recordings had to have been sped up by 15-20% or the equivalent of 3 semitones?!? His rerecordings at that speed convinced many of his theory. Our Administrator, a professor of New Music (sorry Adrian, can't think of your proper title) at Berkeley has often stated that the best test might be to find the 60 Hz hum, which you have done (bravo!). Also, your remastering gives RJ's voice a more human quality at the pitches you chose, within a few percent of the 78s, I assume.

Secondly, I am glad to hear of your plan to go forward with Patton and other pre-war blues recordings, as well as those in other genre. I will pass this info on to my friends at Weenie Campbell, a site dedicated to pre-war blues, who have also been discussing your remasterings. My sentiment would be to concentrate on the catalogue of Paramount records, who had contracts with many of the best recording artists, Patton, Blind Lemon, Son House, yet had some of the worst recordings, technically, pressing their records in a furniture factory full of floating dust!!?

Thanks again.

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Originally posted by hoodadoo:
Charley Patton may be public domain, I'm not sure. Robert Johnson does have an estate that controls his recordings. I believe Steve Lamere(sp) had to relinquish his rights to a living relation to Robert Johnson. So my question would be if you are selling these are you paying any of the money you receive to the Robert Johnson Estate? Just curious.

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In terms of how does one find it - it's actually quite simple. Most audio editing software these days can switch from a straightforward view of the waveform to a spectral view (based on an FFT analysis of the waveform) which separates out visually all of the component frequencies. It's then possible simply to zoom in on screen to the area between 20Hz and, say, 500Hz and look for any hint of a continuous straight line at or around any of the likely hum harmonic frequencies.

Actually, if any collectors are reading this in the the UK or France, and you have an RJ 78RPM (an original not a reissued one) can you please post a smallish fragment (or the whole thing) as a .wav or aiff file?

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Originally posted by Nina:
Andrew, you wouldn't happen to be using Macs to do this remastering? Just curious.

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Originally posted by Adrian Freed:
Thanks. I have considered the same approach but I am not as confident as you that the various transfers are independent of each other.

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Originally posted by Adrian Freed:
Charley Paton is important of course, but a lot of folk think that Blind Lemon Jefferson may be more important historically and his tracks are really buried in the noise.

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It's totally capable now. You can run Windows natively or use virtualization software, your choice. I was just asking since I write customer profiles for them and would have recommended you for a profile. I think what you're doing is wonderful and I hope you do expand to other blues artists. I think I'd probably faint dead away to hear a remastered version of Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.

And actually, I'm editing this to add that I'd love to see you remaster some of the great early Hawaiian music as well. There are decent remastered CDs of them out there, but nothing quite in the league of what you're doing. I know you'll probably be inundated with ideas and requests for what's next, but I hope you'll consider this genre as well.

I would suggest that the Parker with Strings material would be less interesting to committed Parker fans than his earlier work, particularly the Dial and Savoy material from '45 to '49. Many would agree with me that that stuff is the holy grail of all music, from all time, in all styles--as sublime as it gets. Which is not to say that if you put out an album of Parker with Strings, I won't happily download the flac.

My main objective is to work on material which will help me develop various aspects of the remastering technology outside of its previous classical-only environment. This means working in different musical settings in order to get the broadest possible understanding as to why some approaches work so much better than others, rather than necessarily working for the marketplace right now.

With the initial Robert Johnson release, for example, I really had no idea what the response was likely to be. Unlike much of our classical catalogue, the Johnson has been readily available, and at budget price, for decades - in a wide variety of transfers. I didn't know whether any of our regular classical buyers would be interested, nor what the response to it of the blues lovers would be. I decided to release it (on a classical website!) simply in the hope that one or two sales would at least bring me some feedback and help fund continued experimentation in this direction. The quick follow-up of Volume Two (none of which I had as source material when Vol 1 was issued) was largely down to wanting to continue with some ideas I'd put together whilst working on Volume One (i.e. before I forgot them!). I also wanted to maintain a dialogue with those who'd shown an interest in the first issue, rather than come back in six months saying "you may not remember me, but..."!

As I write this I'm playing back some French recordings made c.1950 by the French crooner Jean Sablon, someone even the French seem to have forgotten, as my neighbours here in our small village have proved over and over! As such it's not chasing a market and I don't expect many sales if and when I put it out. On the other hand, one never knows in which direction it might take me.

What it's already done though is cement a few theories which started to gel during the Parker remastering, as well as setting me new challenges - I have a 10" LP which forms the centrepiece of the release that was recorded in the US in around 1951 (from memory - I did the transfer 3 years ago and I've not looked at the details since) which is around 22 and a half minutes long. I intend to pair it with some of his classic 30s recording, which I'd like to raise in quality to the extent that they'll sit alongside each other comfortably.

By the time I've finished this I'll be ready to come back to the Charlies Patton and Parker with new ideas and experience. Every restoration always adds to the sum of knowledge, and however many thousands I've done, commercial or otherwise, I've never stopped learning or questioning the way I work.