Analog Surprise from the Garage

The producer initially asked me to make a compilation CD that the 31 kids in the class could use to learn six 1849-era songs. Trouble was, some of the source songs were on CDs, others were on analog cassette tape, and the rest had only lyrics.

Importing songs from the CDs was easy; BIAS Peak has a straightfoward CD-ripping feature. I then edited the songs down to the precise verses and choruses the producer wanted. In some cases, it sounded better to splice the first part of one phrase to the end of another. For example, pairing the first verse with the last chorus gave the excerpt a better flow, because it mated the anticipation of the opening with the finality of the conclusion. In another case, the producer wanted a verse-chorus-verse-chorus excerpt, but the original recording went verse-verse-chorus. So I grabbed a chorus from later in the song and inserted it between the first two verses.

Panning for Oldies

Hitting Google and AltaVista, I tracked down MP3s of the missing songs. (Because I was making brief excerpts for educational use, I believe Fair Use applied, but I included the artists’ names on the final CD so parents could find the original songs if they wanted to buy them.)

AltaVista’s audio search page is handy because it lets you specify the length and format of an audio file. For example, here’s the search string for WAVs, AIFFs, and MP3s of the song “Clementine” that are longer than 60 seconds. As you can see, there are quite a few options. The producer even found some MIDI files, but worried that one instrument was too loud in the mix. The beauty of MIDI files, of course, is that you can remix them, but we decided to go for a version with vocals.

One of my best discoveries was this brilliant parody of “Clementine.” In this live recording, performer Carl Franklin demonstrates how the age-old lyrics map perfectly to melodies by an astonishing range of pop stars. A note on his site says, “Please download and pass on this MP3, and enjoy it for years to come,” so I appended the entire song to the CD. I thought the class parents could use a laugh after listening to the official songs over and over while their kids learned the tunes. It turned out to be a huge hit.

Back to Analog

To transfer songs from the analog tape, I retrieved my old cassette deck from the garage, where it had been moldering for three years. After cleaning it up, I swapped it for the MP3 player in my living room and played a few ’70s and ’80s tapes to test it. Surprise #2: The sound was pretty dang nice. (Except for the parts where the tape had stretched.) I guess I’d become accustomed to the hollow sound of MP3s.

At about this time, the producer asked me to make a sound-effects CD that could play in the auditorium during the performance. One of the effects needed to duplicate the background sounds on one of the songs—a series of quarter-note “clinks” designed to sound like pickaxes hitting rock, followed by a large explosion. In the original recording, by Keith and Rusty McNeil, there was an exposed bar of clinks I could sample and loop, but the explosion was covered by vocals.

I searched the Web in vain for a suitable explosion (surprising, I know), then turned to a poorly documented set of Magix sound-effects CDs I had in a drawer. No explosions there, but I found that transposing a gunshot down three octaves worked nicely. I also added a touch of reverb to the final clink for emphasis. Check it out:

Here are two bars of looped clinks—sampled from cassette tape—layered with an explosion I made by transposing a gunshot down three octaves in Peak. Note the reverberation on the final clink. I processed just the tail of the sound, not the percussive attack. (Click to play 188KB MOV.)

So, once again, technology came to the aid of learning. It’s rather sad to note, though, that I had to do all the editing and CD-burning in my home studio. The school’s computers are ancient and have only the awful built-in speakers.