Converting the 24 Track Tape to Stems #

Right at around the same time it occured to me that I could find someone here in Los Angeles that could digitize the tracks off of the 2 inch 24 track tape that I have been hauling around with me to every place I have lived since about 1984. These recordings were from the work we did at Round Table Studios. I paid for everything on this project and made sure I could keep the raw 24 track tape. My idea was that I could fix some of the arrangement flaws that I saw in these recordings.

Back at this time in my life I was really into quarter note triplets and although they sound and felt cool, gave an element of complexity and professional playing, they are impossible to dance to especially when they would just pop in the middle of the song like they did. The audience of today had moved into danceable music. If you don’t believe me just check out the number of dance videos that there are out there. I had an idea that I could put a more house driven beat to the song and pull in steams like the guitar and saxophone solos.

I did find a guy in Long Beach that did exactly this kind of work. He was restoring old tape machines and knew how to deal with old fragile tape like mine. They first have to bake the tape for a time so that the tape does not fall apart as it runs across the heads. You have to realize that this tape was never stored in ideal conditions. He did a great job and I noticed how the tempo never stayed the same.

In the end, I only used the solos from the original recordings. I rewrote and played all the melody parts of the song. Because, I now had all the saxophones of the world available to me I also reworked this how I really wanted to record this but did not have enough saxophone players. There was a part in the second half of the song where I got the two guitars to add additional harmony to the two saxophones that were driving the melody. This was part of a trick I learned from Grant MacEwan when I was in their music program. They had way more guitar players than horn players so they made these guitar bands and when they played these really tight harmonies they sounded just like a saxophone section. In this remake I added two tenor saxophones and a baritone saxophone to the mix.