My grandfather Wendell, who passed away a few years ago, had given me a Sony TC-530 reel-to-reel machine quite a few years back, but I had no idea what to do with it. It didn't work up to snuff for recording purposes, but there was a stack of his tapes that came along with it.
I have no ideas when the recordings were made (I imagine late 70's) but they were made at my grandfather's house in Marshalltown, Iowa. I'm just in the stages of researching, but I believe it was a three piece combo consisting of my grandfather on banjo and occasional vocals, and two other gentlemen on guitar and fiddle.
Sorry, my grandfather can't hear you over the sound of how awesome he is....
I posted the first recording I digitized on the player to your right, "The Girl I Left in Sunny Tennessee." I chose this particular recording because it features my grandfather on vocals, which is rare as he usually just played banjo without singing.
I have no idea whether this is a "good" version of the song according to them. There aren't really any notes on the tapes about which take is which or whether it's a good one. I haven't even listened to all the tapes, so there could be a much better version of the song on a different tape.
I just wanted to start somewhere, so I started there.
So listen and enjoy!
p.s. Nerdy info = I sent the audio out from the reel-to-reel into my Tascam FW-1804 through the line input, then used the Tascam to convert it to digital as it has a Firewire output. I captured the audio in Garageband on my G4 MDD PowerMac. I then had to send the .aiff of the recording to Audacity to speed up the recording. Based on the fact that the song is traditionally done in the key of G, I sped the audio up 17%, bringing the guitar and banjo into G. Then I reimported in Garageband, doubled up the track, panned them for mock-stereo, and did some equalization to eliminate some hiss. Then I sent it to iTunes as an .aiff, and converted it there to .mp3 for the web. Whew!
6 comments:
Good work on the nerdy stuff. Gram-pa rocks!!!
I'm not a Willard, just a music lover, but I've gotta say, Grandpa is surprisingly good! The first recording really reminds me (and is of equal quality to) familiar field recordings and the like. The John Prine cover isn't bad either. This is quite a treasure. Whoever converted this to digital: my hat's off to you!
Thanks for the kind words! It's very encouraging to hear when I've got a stack of random tapes to go through.
Roy: I'm Mark Willard, Wendell's grandson. I converted the reel-to-reel with the above process in the tiny second bedroom of my tiny apartment. I live in Minneapolis.
Diane forwarded me the email from Julie. Been listening to Grampa for about an hour now. It really brings tears to my eyes. I may ask for a hard copy of all his songs when everything is all said and done. Keep up the good work Mark....and Wendell....keep rockin' up there in heaven.
your grandpa was awesome. i love it.
Thanks for listening Karime!
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