I routinely transfer home recordings for “average” people. I
do this as inexpensively as I can (the end result usually works out to be much
less than minimum wage). It is the main focus of my website – to hopefully
impress upon and educate the average non-collector, the importance of preserving
any family history they may have on any type of medium.
I have been experimenting with a method to flatten some of
those old Wilcox Gay/Recordio vinyl laminated cardboard discs. I have had some encouraging
results but I could use more “subject” discs for experimentation, so if any
list members have any old “throwaways”, please contact me off-list.
Cheers!
Corey
Corey Bailey Audio Engineering
http://www.baileyzone.net
________________________________
From: Patrick Feaster <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Thursday, March 21, 2013 7:36 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Wicox-Gay Recordio / home recording in general
Mike Biel wrote:--
Patrick Feaster, where are you???? If he is not on the list I'll
> forward this thread to him and he will probably have a heart attack over
> some of the dustbin comments.....
>
I've been reading the thread about home recordings with interest but
haven't had a free moment to sit down and contribute anything to it until
now. Yes, I wholeheartedly agree -- home recordings are important
historical artifacts. They were created by regular people who made
sound-recording equipment a part of their own leisure activities and
performance practices among family and friends, unconstrained by the
recording industry's goal of making money or by the scope of an
ethnographic fieldworker's research interests. The ways in which they're
introduced and framed can also provide rare insights into how individuals
at different times have understood recorded sound and the act of
record-making. I'd originally planned to write my dissertation about them,
and I'm still convinced we stand to learn a great deal from them if we ask
the right questions of enough examples. Overall, these recordings are
surely as worthy of attention and preservation as the amateur films
celebrated on Home Movie Day (http://www.homemovieday.com/), and for many
of the same reasons.
Unfortunately, home recordings face perils other than the dustbin. Uncle
Dave Lewis suggests that home-recorded cylinders are valued among
collectors more than home-recorded lacquers are, and there's some truth to
that, but it doesn't necessarily do them any favors. Even today, it's a
common occurrence for phonograph enthusiasts to shave a century-old
cylinder home recording in order to use the blank for making a new
recording. You wouldn't need to watch eBay for very long to turn up an
instance of a unique home-recorded cylinder being offered for sale as a
"shaver." I don't know how many actually end up being shaved, and I
probably don't want to know.
Fortunately, a few collectors have recognized the historical and cultural
value of these recordings and have worked aggressively to save them from
the shaving knife. Last week, I finished digitizing David Giovannoni's
remarkable collection of five hundred amateur cylinder recordings, which
must be the largest and most comprehensive collection of its kind anywhere
-- anthropologist Don Hill first began assembling it in the 1970s and
1980s, and David has since expanded it to its current size. Highlights (in
my opinion) include what appear to be the oldest known recordings of
vernacular fiddle music; autobiographical statements by people born as
early as the 1810s; commemorative speeches recorded on January 1, 1900;
recordings of church bells, real farmyard animals, and a crying baby; a
"trick" sound-on-sound recording in which a man whistles a duet with
himself; talks introducing guests to "Mister Graphophone"; people calling
their dogs via phonograph; "indecent" stories and rhymes; a real quack
medicine pitch; recordings in various languages, including a comic dialog
in Jèrriais ("Jersey French") and a talk about the phonograph in Afrikaans
(I think) recorded in 1893 -- the list goes on and on. Home recordings
haven't generally received the respect or attention they deserve relative
to commercial or field recordings, but once the material in David's
collection becomes readily available, I think their richness will become a
lot harder to ignore.
- Patrick Feaster
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