Olly Oakley as you will have never heard him.

[thereallyniceman]

We have had several discussions in the past regarding the pitch and speed of early recordings. I realize that we will never know for sure whether, over the years, speeds have been changed accidentally, or on purpose for effect, but have a listen to these MP3 versions of Mr Oakley.

My anonymous friend, the audio geek!, has run several of my hissy, sizzly, scratchy, clicky and poppy Oakley tracks through his magic software and produced some very good and clear recordings for us.

 

He has also corrected the pitch and corresponding tempo, as per the score, to give an indication of how Olly’s playing would have sounded.

Here is the recording as heard on the site JUKEBOX:

POPPIES AND WHEAT original recording

 and here is the cleaned up version:

Olly Oakley playing POPPIES AND WHEAT

I have several tracks to add over the next few days.

Oakley was quite a player, despite a few bum notes ;-)

 

[Trapdoor2]

How cool...

Might be neat to have the original recording to listen to as a comparison.

Thanks, Ian!

[thereallyniceman]

Your wish is my command ;-)

For this one I have added my recording that features on the site JUKEBOX. For the rest you will have to search them out  :-)

[Jody Stecher]

This is an excellent job of cleaning up. The noise is gone but not the music as well. But for this to be a reliable indication  of how OO really sounded we would have to believe that all microphones are equal, and that all recording processes and recording devices are equal. But that is not the case. Clean unscratched copies of OO recordings do exist and the sound of these differs according to the room, the microphone placement, the type of microphone, the age of the strings, the tightness of the vellum. etc.  On the other hand this cleaned up version of P & W sounds very much like some of these relatively noise-free discs. So I'd say that the cleaning process is excellent. But does it tell us how Olly Oakley sounded? Maybe.

[Richard Bugdal]

Amazing what software will do. Wonderful that old music was preserved, by folks like you, in original form with all the scratchies, clikys and poppies. After listening to both I miss a bit of the scratchies in the cleaned up version as it was almost flawless. Thanks for posting.