As part of the church ‘Time and Talents’ fund-raising drive, I got a request to transfer four cassette tapes to CD for a member of the congregation.<\/p>\n
This inevitably doesn’t produce as good results as transferring LPs: you don’t have clicks to deal with, but there is background hiss that can’t be totally eradicated, and I find that any stretching is much more annoying when you hear it on a CD. There is also the problem of my tape deck sometimes stopping and winding forwards or backwards a little. Backwards winding just means making a cut when editing the result, forwards requires re-recording which usually works as the problem doesn’t always appear in exactly the same place, unlike LP clicks.<\/p>\n
The tapes were of choral music, including the choir of St Alphege Greenwich (just before a friend of mine took over there), Bath Camerata, and a choir from Namibia which sang European and African repertoire. Two recordings were unseasonally Christmas ones; one had no printed liner so I had to identify pieces by their texts (Bath Camerata’s diction was good enough I could do this even for less well-known ones). The Greenwich recording showed how tastes have changed over the years in Christmas material. Walford Davies’ setting of O Little Town<\/i> doesn’t get many outings these days which is a pity. On the other hand I don’t miss Macpherson’s The Shepherds’ Cradle Song<\/i> (also on a Bath Camerata tape) – I remember a bass dropping out of a carol service because of it ‘I couldn’t face those lambkins!’ (Not a piece that would survive modernising ‘thou’ to ‘you’, either. Think about it.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As part of the church ‘Time and Talents’ fund-raising drive, I got a request to transfer four cassette tapes to CD for a member of the congregation. This inevitably doesn’t produce as good results as transferring LPs: you don’t have … Continue reading