BETTER OFF TED

Spinning Cylinders, created entirely from antique cylinder recordings imported into Logic Pro. The source material was recorded between 1899-1919. 

The earliest of the three selections, “Angel’s Serenade” by the Columbia Orchestra was recorded in 1899 by “The Columbia Phonograph Company of New York and Paris” and appears to have heavy surface noise around the beginning of the song. I used the song’s spoken introduction, along with the surface noise to create a number of different elements for this week’s submission, first at the beginning of the song, right before the drop and again at the end.

The piano, xylophone and saxophone samples are taken from 1919’s “Shimmee Town” by The All Star Trio, a bit of the early foxtrot sound you’d have heard at the Ziegfield Follies around that time. Foxtrot was the most popular uptempo dance music style from the late teens well into the 1940’s, so I pay tribute to that here by incorporating the samples into a more modern dance beat. 

Indestructable Concert Band’s 1908 recording of “Rainbow Medley” is where most of my percussion and bass sounds come from in this track. The baseline and midrange LFO nonsense started as a sample taken from the clean vocals in the middle of the arrangement. A few trips through Logic’s AutoFilter and a hundred year old thick syrupy bass. There is a very prominent clack sound throughout this recording, which I used in my track to create a number of the hits in the drum kit. 

Besides the stock Logic audio units, I also used  each one plugin from Massey, Soundhack and PSP. 

All audio selected from these antique cylinder recordings:

“Angel’s Serenade” by the Columbia Orchestra (1899): http://www.archive.org/details/colnyp-15132

“Shimmee Town” by The All Star Trio (1899): http://www.archive.org/details/edba-3871

“Rainbow Medley” by Indestructable Concert Band (1908): http://www.archive.org/details/ind-986

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto”