Accidental or “Accidentally on Purpose”?

[thereallyniceman]

My friend, the audio software expert, commented that the pitch on many Classic Banjo tracks of original artists now available was above concert pitch, and in some cases (including recent Morley and Oakley tracks) considerably sharpened.

 

Last week I posted a recording of Olly Oakley playing Paderewski’s Minuet.

 

MINUET sharp Olly Oakley

 

…and Mike Moss said that he didn’t like the recording commenting:

“The performance just feels aggressive, it lacks any form of subtleness, and that just kills it to my ears.”

 

Here is the recording corrected for concert pitch/tempo and it does have a softer quality to it:

 

MINUET concert pitch Olly Oakley

 

It appears that the recording was off by what is described as around an “ear-jerking” semitone and a bit!

 

He simply explains: Until the digital age, recording and playback devices were analogue machines. When cylinders or discs, encoded with grooves during the recording or pressing are spun, the grooves are tracked by a needle or stylus. The stylus tracking frequencies are amplified to create audible sounds. For analogues, the rate of spin affects both pitch and tempo simultaneously. Increase the spin rate and a recorded voice both speaks faster and rises in pitch. (Magnetic recording tape is another analogue medium having similar properties).

Spin rates on analogue players are not always calibrated correctly. In that event, both pitch and tempo are affected.

 

When digitally correcting recordings from the analogue era, both pitch and tempo should be corrected, in order for the result to accurately represent the original analogue performance. 

 

Now the question

Many, possibly less proficient, modern day bluegrass players, to me, seem to be involved in a race to the end when playing, some even competing on Youtube to see who can play the most notes per minute or play Dueling Banjos the fastest in the world… why???

 

Maybe even original Classic Banjo players were not immune from  idea that playing a piece fast makes you look skillful and more impressive,  just as it seems that modern players seem to? (and not just banjo players either.. listen to 90% of pianists playing Scott Joplin Ragtime… they sound like they are chasing the music …dreadful!)

 

I am sure that the performers were fully aware of the facts and that cranking up the lever on the cylinder recorder or gramophone would make it seem as if they were playing faster???

 

I have heard loads of tracks that play above concert pitch but only noticed the odd recording that seemed to be below concert pitch…  just a coincidence??

 

[Shawn McSweeny]

Here is a little more on pitch history :

High pitch was introduced in Britain for Orchestra, and later for military band use, around 1846. By 1879, Steinway of London was pitching pianos at High pitch, with A=454.7 Hz for Orchestral use. Some piano makers had three standards : Low pitch A=433 Hz for singers, medium pitch A=445 Hz for home use and High pitch A=454 for orchestra pianos.

Medium pitch (non orchestral, home use) was introduced as a reaction against the unsensibly high Orchestral pitch and is probably the appropriate one to look at. In England, between 1850 and 1900, medium pitch ranged between 436 and 446, which averages pretty close to 440Hz. A further clue is provided by a set of c. 1900 reference  tuning forks that turned up in Britain, which are the equivalent of Low=434Hz, Medium pitch=439Hz and High=454Hz.

So using the contemporary A=440 as a reference for pitch editing should actually get us extremely close to the original performance pitch, while also allowing us to remain in tune as we play along with the recording.

[Mike Moss]

Fascinating discussion, Old Joe was certainly a person full of contradictions and undoubtedly a genius at what he did best. Perhaps those recordings that do not exactly correspond to the written versions are just a part of the composition process, that is, experimenting and improving on his ideas until they reached their definitive form?

PS: I like the recording at standard pitch. It's amazing what a single semitone can do. It lacks the jarring "music box" quality of the original.

[Shawn McSweeny]

The aforementioned CD presents most of the Morley recordings a semi tone higher (or more) than their published notation. If Joe is actually playing a semi tone higher on the fingerbd, he has truly remarkable technique, able to fly through pieces like Shuffle Along, RAF's Parade, and many more exactly as published,  only placed a semi tone higher on the neck,  barring all notes at first position that would otherwise be at the nut and unfretted, and no longer having the use of the fifth string as it would be a semitone flat for the key he is playing in. Having perfected the playing of the piece at this elevated key, why would he then drop it a semi-tone and totally rearrange it, making use of open positions and fifth string? Perhaps for publication? To make it more accessible to other players? If that is so then one might expect to hear Palladium Rag, played by others, in C. It is presented pitched in C#.

None of the above makes much sense to me. It seems more likely that from the outset, Joe would have developed his tunes in the banjo's more natural and accessible keys, taking full advantage of open position notes wherever possible.

One is left to wonder whether the CD producers simply adjusted the spin rate of the  cylinders to pitch them with brighter sound and brisker tempos, more to their liking, (typically in tune with modern Ab in lieu of G, modern C# in lieu of C), rather than concerning themselves with the original notation pitches.

[Jody Stecher]

The producer of the CD, Steve Walker seems to be very knowledgeable about the history of recorded music. I think it unlikely that he would have altered the speed and therefore the pitch. Nothing in his liner notes of the various Neophone CDs he produced suggest a preference for fast music. Neither does his repertoire selection. Of course Morley was not fingering a half step high from the expected keys. The liner notes are explicit that Tarrant Bailey Sr. owned several cylinder recorders. I still think that most of the pitch discrepancy is due to the various speeds of these machines rather than to the whim of a record producer decades later. But it did occur to me that when the pitch is a whole step high it may have been deliberate.  This is because it the Blackbird ( a whole step high from the notation) and the Yankee Glide (same pitch as notation) appear to have been recorded on the same occasion.  It is of course possible that different machines were used in sequence on the same occasion and that could account for this anomaly.

[Trapdoor2]

Acoustic recording in the period wasn't an exact science, esp. for home recordings. Edison machines had a lever with which to vary the speed of the cylinder (as did most other machines). I've never seen one where the actual speed was written on the machine. If you needed more space on the cylinder (which was fixed in size), you slowed down the speed...gaining some extra seconds of recording time...but the speed wasn't marked on the cylinder or notated anywhere. This is partially because there was no simple (or cheap) way to measure the rpm and partially because any given setting varied from machine to machine...often widely. Some of the later Victor and Pathe machines actually had a visual speed indicator so that you could set the machine per the instructions on the disc (like Marc's example).

Again, this shows that well into the 1920's, there was no concensus regarding "RPM" for recordings. Flat discs turned best in the 70-80rpm range (Emile Berliner, inventor of the flat disc record, liked 80rpm).

So, some Edison recordings (cylinders) are made at 160rpm, some faster and some slower. Nobody (except those damned with perfect pitch) could tell until quite recently when we began to wash them thru the computer.

I'm wondering what Ol' Joe and OO used as a pitch standard...a pitch pipe or a fork? I recently bought a vintage fork that is marked A=440 (at the base) "Official Pitch A.F of M. 1917" on one tine and "Adopted by U.S. Gov't. 1920" on the other. I also have a very old Kratt pitch pipe (for banjo) that has been identified by the Kratt company (still in existance) as having been made around 1910...and it produces tones (eAEG#B) which fit the A=440 standard (more or less...it is over 100yrs old and the reeds are a tad gritty sounding). 

[marc dalmasso]

Depending where & when ; ...................

Here's an old info ' bout the fork in 1859

You just have to divide by 2 the vibrations to have the value in Hertz