The Dial Tones

[Ian Alexander]

Hey Dave,

I gaped at my computer when this stuff came on this morning. It sounds great! One of the things I really like about SS Radio is the variety. Well, you just added a whole new dimension.

I was very disappointed when the story of the track disappeared as the next song started. Can you post the text here, please.

Also, is this stuff available?

Thanks,

[Dave Labrecque]

Hi Ian,

Hey, thanks for asking. I had the same problem, too -- reading the text before the songs end is a challenge. Short songs! :) The text is below.

As for the CD -- yes, it's available. Let me talk to my buddy, Neil, and see how he'd like to handle it.

These guys (The Dial Tones) were truly amazing. It was an honor to have been there with the two surviving members as we put up the master tape for the first time more than 40 years after they'd recorded it. And they were beaming after we restored it in SAWStudio and made the CDs.

More, soon...

Here are the complete SSRN notes. Many more details of the story are available in the liner notes with the CD.

******************

Three members of The Dial Tones quartet met while working at the telephone company in eastern Massachusetts in the late 1950s. For six years they performed around the state, on television, even on commercials. They never formerly did go "pro".

In 1959 a local audio hobbyist heard one of their performances and asked if they'd allow him to record some of their rehearsals. As it turned out, he owned an Ampex 300 tape machine and a pair of Sony C37 tube mics. Pretty much state-of-the-art for the day.

At the time each member was given a mono acetate cutting of the tape recordings; that’s the only way they could listen to the recordings in their homes. After a few plays these discs were in very bad shape. But that’s all they had… until 2003. In 2003 a local Tucson friend of mine (whose father turns out to be one of the Dial Tones) brought me a tape recording of one of the original acetates — a tape he’d had for years — asking if I’d like to take a crack at restoration. He’d actually done some work on the tape with analog processes years before, but thought we could do better. After some work with the Sonic Foundry Noise Reduction package in SAWStudio, we were able to cut the scratches, clicks, pops and surface noise back quite a bit. The result was still far from great, but suddenly he could hear overtones and details of the performances he’d never heard before. He and his dad were pretty happy.

Then, they found the original master tapes.

The other surviving member of the quartet, now living in Florida, had been so inspired by our restoration work that he started calling people around their old stomping grounds in Massachusetts. Soon he was in touch with the original recording engineer (the “audio hobbyist” in 1959), who said he had hundreds of reels of archival tape in his basement, and we were welcome to have a look.

Soon thereafter a few of those reels were playing back on my Tascam BR-20T deck, directly into SAWStudio, which simultaneously tracked spontaneous commentary as the two remaining members of the Dial Tones added their personal reactions and recollections upon hearing the tapes for the first time. We were all overjoyed at the quality, which appeared to be as good as the day the performances were printed.

15 IPS, stereo-mic’d (75-degree, 3-foot separation), direct-to-two-track. Wanting to remain faithful to the original recordings, I limited my efforts to simple editing and normalizing in SAW, strapping a Levelizer across the output to minimally limit peaks.

These songs were recorded in an informal rehearsal setting in a local club — in some of the songs you can hear doors closing, people shuffling about — in some of the quieter passages you can even hear the tape scraping the reel flange with each rotation on the nearby Ampex machine. In fact we heard the same scraping simultaneously in the studio during playback some 44 years later. Kinda weird.

[Dave Labrecque]

Ian,

Yes, this stuff is available. If you want the whole shebang -- 15 tracks plus detailed liner notes and cover art -- it's $5 plus shipping. If you just want a few more tracks, we can send 'em to you electronically.

[Ian Alexander]

Just PM'd you. Thanks.