We've Been Listening to Robert Johnson at the Wrong Speed
Jon Wilde at the Guardian tells us that we've been listening to Robert Johnson records much faster than they were intended to be heard.
Says Wilde,
And now, nearly 50 years after Columbia first packaged his work as King of the Delta Blues, we discover that we've been listening to these immortal songs at the wrong speed all along. Either the recordings were accidentally speeded up when first committed to 78, or else they were deliberately speeded up to make them sound more exciting. Whatever, the common consensus among musicologists is that we've been listening to Johnson at least 20% too fast. Numerous bloggers have helpfully slowed down Johnson's best-known work and provided samples so that, for the first time, we can hear Johnson as he intended to be heard.
This doesn't surprise me. I always felt that the recordings that I'd heard had a bit of "chipmunk" sound to them. It sounded as if Johnson's voice was thin and above the range I would have envisioned him singing. And the guitar work seemed a bit to rushed at times.
Wilde continues,
If hearing music at the wrong speed is the sort of thing that grills your kippers, then you might want to check out the supremely bonkers back catalogue of Brighton-based Wrong Music. For the rest of us, the right speed will do just fine. Like me, you might be left not a little incredulous to learn that some of the most beloved albums in the canon were released at the wrong speed. As late as 2003, a music professor pointed out that all the early Doors albums, on vinyl and CD, had been slowed down due to a cock-up at the mastering stage. When Kind of Blue was first released on CD it received ecstatic reviews despite the fact that Miles Davis' trumpet was at the wrong speed on half the tracks. There are those who swear blind that the vinyl version of Dylan's Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands from Blonde on Blonde was mastered at the wrong speed as it plays at a quarter-tone below the CD version. Most famously, all the original Rolling Stones ABKCO releases were mastered at the wrong tempo, an error first noticed by Keith Richards when the albums came out on CD.
Does any of this matter? Well, I don't know about you, but I'd prefer to hear an album as it was meant to be heard, rather than a version birthed by a studio muppet flicking the wrong switches as he lights up another jazz woodbine.
Be sure to read the entire article here.
