I was shocked (SHOCKED!) to learn from an ancient post that on some of the 20's recordings of Michael Coleman (and therefore presumably Paddy Killoran and James Morrisson as well?) some tunes were artificially speeded up by recording technicians. (I'm sure you will correct me if I've got this wrong.)
I, meanwhile, and presumably some of you, have been artificially slowing them down, in order to stand any chance of playing them! So are we now, almost by accident, playing them more at the speed the great men originally intended? 'The Sligo Maid', as it stands on the recording, is lightning fast, but how much faster than the real PK actually played it?
The guy whose posting commented on the speed-up observed that the raised pitch on the recordings was the giveaway. Does this also mean that anyone learning them by ear has been playing them at a higher pitch than that originally intended?
I assume the speeding up was just a technical convenience to get the tunes onto one side of 78 rpm vinyl, but could there have been other reasons? I think we should be told.
Some of those recordings do sound implausibly fast - not that Coleman wasn't *able* to play at that speed, just that he probably wouldn't have wanted to. But he might equally well have been made to play them faster to fit into the time restrictions. You could always check the pitch - if it is a long way above A=440, and he is playing wih a piano, then the recordings might have been speeded up. Then again, the fiddle might have been tuned a 1/4-tone sharp and the piano, a 1/4-tone flat. How can you tell?
I don't think they were speeded up - all the recordings I have are just about in concert pitch and I would presume that the pianos in recording studios were roughly in concert pitch - they were used for all types of music recording.
Sorry, but they really did play that fast! Just keep practising.....After years of attempting to play along with these recordings, I can now do it (on a good day)
These days you play that fast because you can. In those days you may have played fast for exactly the same reason or because you wanted to get it all on to a four-minute 78rpm side. I find it pretty unedifying whatever the motive, then and today. I have a few classical recordings from that time that are played markedly faster than today's norms and I suspect it often had to do with fitting "sensible chunks" of the music as economically as possible on to 78rpm sides, and the fewer sides used the better.
I don't have the Killoran and Morrison recordings yet, but I do have the two-CD Coleman set. His tempos on reels range from 102 to 126, with 15 reels at 120 or above, 13 reels from 115 to 119, 13 reels from 110 to 114, and four reels below 110. His tempos on reels range from 130 to 157, with three jigs at 150 or higher, six jigs from 145 to 149, eight jigs from 140 to 144, and five jigs below 140.
Other fiddlers in my collection who have reels at 126 or higher are Frankie Gavin, Liz Carroll, Martin Hayes, Sean McGuire, Denis Murphy, and two fiddlers from the Donegal fiddle collection whose names I don't have handy access to right now.
The only bands I have who reach those speeds are Bothy Band, Danu, Solas and the Lahawns. Molloy/Brady/Peoples hits that range, as does the Tap Room Trio, Jackie Daly and (frequently) Joe Derrane.
The picture with the jigs is very different. John Doherty, Johnny O'Leary, and the players on "Fiddle Music of Donegal" are the only players in my collection to play jigs at 140 and up often. Cuig is there twice; Sean McGuire, Joe Derrane, Hugh Gillespie, Molloy/Brady/Peoples, Frankie Gavin, and Tommy Peoples are there once each. It's a rather different cast of characters.
Let's see if I can remember the point I was going to make when I started typing. I guess it's that although Coleman's tempos are at the fast end of the scale, they aren't by any means off the scale. It's very believable that he could have been playing that fast. I've read somewhere that the recording sessions weren't well-documented, so we may never know if the instruments were in concert pitch or if the recordings were doctored (intentionally or not).
hmmmm....was it patrick kelly of cree who is credited with the immortal epigram, something along the lines of michael coleman being the worst thing that ever befell the clare music? perhaps american studio engineering is really the worst thing that ever befell the clare music?
i recently got out my coleman two-cd-er to learn "job o' journeywork" after not listening to it for a long time....he has great swing, but that velocity sounds almost chemically induced....after awhile i had to take it off because my brain was going, no, no, no, no, NOOOOOOOOOO!
In the early days of recording there were classical pianists who complained bitterly that they were required to play Chopin waltzes, for example, at a very unlike-waltz speed so that the piece could be squeezed on to the 78. It's not inherently impossible that could have applied to Coleman, PK and others.
One dead giveaway of a speeded-up recording which couldn't be disguised by the technology of the day is a violinist's vibrato. A speeded-up vibrato sounds unnatural and is unmistakable. I came across an instance (which I discussed in some detail in a post some time ago) where a Supraphon LP from the 1960's had been speeded-up to squeeze a Beethoven quartet onto one side. It wasn't the half-tone rise in pitch that was odd - it was the unnaturally fast vibrato. Did Coleman, PK et al use vibrato in any of their recordings? I don't know, I haven't heard enough of them to judge.
Patrick Kelly was refering to Coleman's influence on Clare fiddling, musicians who might have turned out as nice fiddlers in the local idiom instead devoting a lot of energy and time to become bad "Coleman clones."
According to Reg Hall some of Hugh Gillespie's sides were tuned down, as the guitarist had broke a string tuning up and they were afraid of snapping more...good luck sussing out what speed those are meant to be at.
I don't think the difference in pitch is too drastic with most of these sides - maybe a 1/4 tone sharp. I read that Harry Bradshaw set most of the Coleman at A=440, too. Check all that out if you're curious. They settled on 400 in 1939, after his career was over; A=435 was a popular pitch before then, too. And 453. Even at 435 Coleman obviously could fly along without a slipup.
Some of his sides are at a nice gentle pace, too. Sailor on the Rock/Paddy on the Turnpike. At his last session in 1944 he played everything very gently, too. Keep in mind that if you know the original pitch and set the recording to it, you have the original tempo, which was the case until digital recording. The engineers perhaps set the lathes so that at 78 RPM you'd have a higher pitch/faster tempo.
I read how the Rounder Bill Lamey CD was set at modern concert pitch. Mark Wilson says the piano on that record was actually tuned flat, thus the record is faster than should be.
Vibrato seems to be rare with older fiddlers. James Morrison used a bit with the airs Glen of Aherlow/Master McGrath but you don't hear it in his dance music. Some of the Sliabh Luachra and Donegal fiddlers used it very sparingly in airs.
Off topic, but Sharon mentions playing with Lucy Farr in her bio- what a sweet player she was, and someone who deserves to be far better remembered. http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/farr.htm
Very informative article there, P-K, about Lucy Farr.
In one of the photographs about half way down, showing a London session with Dennis Doody, Tommy Maguire and others, the "unknown" musician just behind Michael Dwyer is surely Kevin Taylor.
Murf, I don't know if this would be of interest, but I came across a TV interview with Lucy somewhere on the 'Ceol' archives on TG4 Web TV (I'm always plugging this- people will think I have shares!).
I think it was with Reg Hall for 'West Along the Road'- you'll have to search a bit, as it's buried among a lot of other clips- on one of the 'Siar an Bothar' programmes I think?- in the middle of it, she plays a tune- wonderful! http://www.tg4.tv/
Whether the recordings were artificially speeded up or whether the tunes were actually played at the speed we hear them at, it might have been done for commercial reasons. Firstly, it gave the listener more for their money (Why play a tune 3 times and fill 2.5 minutes when you can play it faster 4times and fill 3 minutes [or whatever thge maximum recvording time was on a 78]?). Secondly, a fater tempo was probably seen, by the non-Irish-trad-savvy recording industry, at least, as more 'exciting' and thus likely to appeal to a wider audience.
Eileen McNulty, of the McNulty Family, was my mother. They recorded for Decca, Colonial, and Copley. Most of their Decca recordings were at a much slower tempo than their live performances, -- a few of which we have on tape-- and slower than later recordings for Standard/Colonial or Copley. However, I clearly remember my mother on several occasions complaining that a few -- not many-- of the masters had been slightly speeded up to fit them on a side. In particular, she mentioned the quality of the voices, so I assumed she was not referring to instrumentals. For some reason, I have in my mind that she might have been referring to the Coral/Ace of Hearts LP's reissued from the Decca 78 masters: (Irish Dance Party that has one side of McNulty Family and the other side Michael Coleman, and the Irish Showboat ) but that may just have been an assumption on my part. )
Speeded up Coleman recordings
Speeded up Coleman recordings
I was shocked (SHOCKED!) to learn from an ancient post that on some of the 20's recordings of Michael Coleman (and therefore presumably Paddy Killoran and James Morrisson as well?) some tunes were artificially speeded up by recording technicians. (I'm sure you will correct me if I've got this wrong.)
I, meanwhile, and presumably some of you, have been artificially slowing them down, in order to stand any chance of playing them! So are we now, almost by accident, playing them more at the speed the great men originally intended? 'The Sligo Maid', as it stands on the recording, is lightning fast, but how much faster than the real PK actually played it?
The guy whose posting commented on the speed-up observed that the raised pitch on the recordings was the giveaway. Does this also mean that anyone learning them by ear has been playing them at a higher pitch than that originally intended?
I assume the speeding up was just a technical convenience to get the tunes onto one side of 78 rpm vinyl, but could there have been other reasons? I think we should be told.
# Posted on April 23rd 2007 by P-K
Re: Speeded up Coleman recordings
Some of those recordings do sound implausibly fast - not that Coleman wasn't *able* to play at that speed, just that he probably wouldn't have wanted to. But he might equally well have been made to play them faster to fit into the time restrictions. You could always check the pitch - if it is a long way above A=440, and he is playing wih a piano, then the recordings might have been speeded up. Then again, the fiddle might have been tuned a 1/4-tone sharp and the piano, a 1/4-tone flat. How can you tell?
# Posted on April 23rd 2007 by granama
Re: Speeded up Coleman recordings
I don't think they were speeded up - all the recordings I have are just about in concert pitch and I would presume that the pianos in recording studios were roughly in concert pitch - they were used for all types of music recording.
Sorry, but they really did play that fast! Just keep practising.....After years of attempting to play along with these recordings, I can now do it (on a good day)
# Posted on April 23rd 2007 by Sharon the Flute
Re: Speeded up Coleman recordings
These days you play that fast because you can. In those days you may have played fast for exactly the same reason or because you wanted to get it all on to a four-minute 78rpm side. I find it pretty unedifying whatever the motive, then and today. I have a few classical recordings from that time that are played markedly faster than today's norms and I suspect it often had to do with fitting "sensible chunks" of the music as economically as possible on to 78rpm sides, and the fewer sides used the better.
# Posted on April 23rd 2007 by Steve Shaw
Re: Speeded up Coleman recordings
I don't have the Killoran and Morrison recordings yet, but I do have the two-CD Coleman set. His tempos on reels range from 102 to 126, with 15 reels at 120 or above, 13 reels from 115 to 119, 13 reels from 110 to 114, and four reels below 110. His tempos on reels range from 130 to 157, with three jigs at 150 or higher, six jigs from 145 to 149, eight jigs from 140 to 144, and five jigs below 140.
Other fiddlers in my collection who have reels at 126 or higher are Frankie Gavin, Liz Carroll, Martin Hayes, Sean McGuire, Denis Murphy, and two fiddlers from the Donegal fiddle collection whose names I don't have handy access to right now.
The only bands I have who reach those speeds are Bothy Band, Danu, Solas and the Lahawns. Molloy/Brady/Peoples hits that range, as does the Tap Room Trio, Jackie Daly and (frequently) Joe Derrane.
The picture with the jigs is very different. John Doherty, Johnny O'Leary, and the players on "Fiddle Music of Donegal" are the only players in my collection to play jigs at 140 and up often. Cuig is there twice; Sean McGuire, Joe Derrane, Hugh Gillespie, Molloy/Brady/Peoples, Frankie Gavin, and Tommy Peoples are there once each. It's a rather different cast of characters.
Let's see if I can remember the point I was going to make when I started typing. I guess it's that although Coleman's tempos are at the fast end of the scale, they aren't by any means off the scale. It's very believable that he could have been playing that fast. I've read somewhere that the recording sessions weren't well-documented, so we may never know if the instruments were in concert pitch or if the recordings were doctored (intentionally or not).
# Posted on April 23rd 2007 by GaryAMartin
Re: Speeded up Coleman recordings
Oops! Change "reels" to "jigs" in the third sentence.
# Posted on April 23rd 2007 by GaryAMartin
Re: Speeded up Coleman recordings
hmmmm....was it patrick kelly of cree who is credited with the immortal epigram, something along the lines of michael coleman being the worst thing that ever befell the clare music? perhaps american studio engineering is really the worst thing that ever befell the clare music?
i recently got out my coleman two-cd-er to learn "job o' journeywork" after not listening to it for a long time....he has great swing, but that velocity sounds almost chemically induced....after awhile i had to take it off because my brain was going, no, no, no, no, NOOOOOOOOOO!
# Posted on April 24th 2007 by ceemonster
Re: Speeded up Coleman recordings
maybe it went, worst thing to befall the clare fiddling, rather than clare music generally....
# Posted on April 24th 2007 by ceemonster
Re: Speeded up Coleman recordings
In the early days of recording there were classical pianists who complained bitterly that they were required to play Chopin waltzes, for example, at a very unlike-waltz speed so that the piece could be squeezed on to the 78. It's not inherently impossible that could have applied to Coleman, PK and others.
One dead giveaway of a speeded-up recording which couldn't be disguised by the technology of the day is a violinist's vibrato. A speeded-up vibrato sounds unnatural and is unmistakable. I came across an instance (which I discussed in some detail in a post some time ago) where a Supraphon LP from the 1960's had been speeded-up to squeeze a Beethoven quartet onto one side. It wasn't the half-tone rise in pitch that was odd - it was the unnaturally fast vibrato. Did Coleman, PK et al use vibrato in any of their recordings? I don't know, I haven't heard enough of them to judge.
# Posted on April 24th 2007 by lazyhound
Re: Speeded up Coleman recordings
Patrick Kelly was refering to Coleman's influence on Clare fiddling, musicians who might have turned out as nice fiddlers in the local idiom instead devoting a lot of energy and time to become bad "Coleman clones."
According to Reg Hall some of Hugh Gillespie's sides were tuned down, as the guitarist had broke a string tuning up and they were afraid of snapping more...good luck sussing out what speed those are meant to be at.
I don't think the difference in pitch is too drastic with most of these sides - maybe a 1/4 tone sharp. I read that Harry Bradshaw set most of the Coleman at A=440, too. Check all that out if you're curious. They settled on 400 in 1939, after his career was over; A=435 was a popular pitch before then, too. And 453. Even at 435 Coleman obviously could fly along without a slipup.
Some of his sides are at a nice gentle pace, too. Sailor on the Rock/Paddy on the Turnpike. At his last session in 1944 he played everything very gently, too. Keep in mind that if you know the original pitch and set the recording to it, you have the original tempo, which was the case until digital recording. The engineers perhaps set the lathes so that at 78 RPM you'd have a higher pitch/faster tempo.
I read how the Rounder Bill Lamey CD was set at modern concert pitch. Mark Wilson says the piano on that record was actually tuned flat, thus the record is faster than should be.
# Posted on April 24th 2007 by Kevin Rietmann
Re: Speeded up Coleman recordings
Vibrato seems to be rare with older fiddlers. James Morrison used a bit with the airs Glen of Aherlow/Master McGrath but you don't hear it in his dance music. Some of the Sliabh Luachra and Donegal fiddlers used it very sparingly in airs.
# Posted on April 24th 2007 by Kevin Rietmann
Re: Speeded up Coleman recordings
Off topic, but Sharon mentions playing with Lucy Farr in her bio- what a sweet player she was, and someone who deserves to be far better remembered.
http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/farr.htm
# Posted on April 24th 2007 by P-K
Re: Speeded up Coleman recordings
Very informative article there, P-K, about Lucy Farr.
In one of the photographs about half way down, showing a London session with Dennis Doody, Tommy Maguire and others, the "unknown" musician just behind Michael Dwyer is surely Kevin Taylor.
# Posted on April 24th 2007 by murfbox
Re: Speeded up Coleman recordings
Murf, I don't know if this would be of interest, but I came across a TV interview with Lucy somewhere on the 'Ceol' archives on TG4 Web TV (I'm always plugging this- people will think I have shares!).
I think it was with Reg Hall for 'West Along the Road'- you'll have to search a bit, as it's buried among a lot of other clips- on one of the 'Siar an Bothar' programmes I think?- in the middle of it, she plays a tune- wonderful!
http://www.tg4.tv/
# Posted on April 24th 2007 by P-K
Re: Speeded up Coleman recordings
Whether the recordings were artificially speeded up or whether the tunes were actually played at the speed we hear them at, it might have been done for commercial reasons. Firstly, it gave the listener more for their money (Why play a tune 3 times and fill 2.5 minutes when you can play it faster 4times and fill 3 minutes [or whatever thge maximum recvording time was on a 78]?). Secondly, a fater tempo was probably seen, by the non-Irish-trad-savvy recording industry, at least, as more 'exciting' and thus likely to appeal to a wider audience.
# Posted on April 25th 2007 by granama
Re: Speeded up Coleman recordings
You certainly get the impression that virtuosity at speed is the object of the exercise- wonder if people actually danced to those discs?
# Posted on April 25th 2007 by P-K
Re: Speeded up Coleman recordings
Eileen McNulty, of the McNulty Family, was my mother. They recorded for Decca, Colonial, and Copley. Most of their Decca recordings were at a much slower tempo than their live performances, -- a few of which we have on tape-- and slower than later recordings for Standard/Colonial or Copley. However, I clearly remember my mother on several occasions complaining that a few -- not many-- of the masters had been slightly speeded up to fit them on a side. In particular, she mentioned the quality of the voices, so I assumed she was not referring to instrumentals. For some reason, I have in my mind that she might have been referring to the Coral/Ace of Hearts LP's reissued from the Decca 78 masters: (Irish Dance Party that has one side of McNulty Family and the other side Michael Coleman, and the Irish Showboat ) but that may just have been an assumption on my part. )
# Posted on May 6th 2007 by pagrogan