On 06/09/2014, Paul Stamler wrote:
> The Lomax-Asch comparison is fascinating; Tom I think you've hit the
> nail on the head. But Asch considered himself a documentarian too --
> he said that Folkways Records was his attempt to document the
> twentieth century in sound. Hence the joke, "Why did the chicken cross
> the road?" "To record 'Sounds of an American Highway' for Folkways."
> And yet his studio recordings were carefully edited.
>
> Still, he made his studio recordings very simply, with few microphones
> and no apparent EQ, in a neutral room, and he reissued lots of
> folklorists' field recordings. He once told an interviewer something
> indicating that he issued those without high-frequency pre-emphasis,
> though the interview was kind of garbled and he may have just meant
> that he didn't add eztra treble boost over and above RIAA. I asked
> Peter Bartok (who cut a lot of discs for Asch) about this, and it
> didn't ring any bells with him -- he didn't remember cutting anything
> without pre-emphasis. So I may have misread the interview. But in any
> case, Asch put out very straightforward LPs.
>
The other person to compare with these two is Hugh Tracey, who recorded
vast amounts of African folk music from the 1930s to the 1970s.
He normally used a single microphone, not on a stand but held in his
hand, and he would move closer to a soloist that he wanted to bring out
in the sound. A different way to record acoustic space.
Most of the CDs that have been released from his tapes are from the
earl;y 1950s. Many LPs also appeared.
Regards
--
Don Cox
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