In the comment section of last week’s White Label Wednesday column on ABC, Ted lamented that I didn’t beat mix the songs together. Today, he gets his wish.
I made roughly 15 to 20 beat mixes during my time as a DJ in college (1987-1991). I didn’t own any gear, so I either made the mixes after hours at the clubs where I worked or I used the gear of a fellow DJ friend, who was brave enough to have his gear in his dorm room. Since the mixes were all recorded on cassette, very few have made the jump to the digital realm. Easy CD Creator had an add-on earlier in the decade that enabled people to input analog sources into their computer, and it would record the tracks and break them down. The program was clearly designed for vinyl, thinking that it would create a new file whenever a song ended or faded out. With beat mixes, this was a little more complicated, since the idea is for there to never be a break. I’d end up with one 12-minute file, and then 15 ten-second files. I would then take this .wav file editor and put the songs back together. Wheee.
The worst thing about uploading the tapes was that the digital recording was really quiet, so I would have to amplify the tracks exponentially, which of course amplified the tape hiss as well. You don’t really hear it when things are jumping, but when a song got quiet…whoooooosh! I should just break down and get one of those USB turntables that can convert vinyl and cassettes, but there is just one problem: I have no money, and with two kids, no time. So most of my tapes are still tapes. (more…)
Sometimes Oak, sometimes Oak & Rick Pinette, sometimes Rick Pinette & Oak and even sometimes Oak & the Rick Pinette Band, this multinamed crew will always have a place in my musical heart. Their #36 hit earlier in 1980, “King of the Hill,” was easily the hardest of the all the top 40 songs to find and the first time I really had to dig to find a track. I searched high and low for that self-titled debut album for years with no luck, until I found not only a copy, but an autographed one at that (surely adding about 63 cents in value to it.) Their second hit, “Set the Night on Fire,” was from the album of the same name, which I still don’t own. I settled for the 45 which was also quite a pain in the ass to acquire. This was back in the day where I was excited to listen to the rarer stuff and almost forced myself to enjoy it based on the amount of work I put in. It was only later on that I realized most of these tough-to-find tracks are rare for good reason. But Oak and now-and-then Rick Pinette, you have avoided my wrath.
God, I hate the Oak Ridge Boys. “So Fine” is such a poor song. I know it was a cover of a tune by the Fiestas and I’ve never heard that version, but it can’t be any better ‘cause it’s just poorly written to begin with. Obviously, the Oak Ridge Boys didn’t think so and my taste in music is suspect anyway. But that opening two seconds of keyboards sounds exactly like an ‘80s sitcom theme song (someone tell me which one though!) Maybe the biggest problem I have with the Oak Ridge Boys is very evident on “American Made” which is that bass vocalist Richard Sterban just sounds so out of place with the other vocalists on a lot of tracks. The other problem that I have is that every time I run to the record store I have to weed through 10,000 copies of Oak Ridge Boys records and I swear that every time I find ones I’ve never seen before. They put out 16 damn albums in the decade. No one needs 16 albums in 10 years.
