Quality of Modern Rolls
By Robbie Rhodes
I picked up the 'phone today and had a pleasant chat with Bob Berkman, manager of QRS Music Rolls. (We both have scars on the fingers from cutting piano rolls with a dull blade!)
Bob confirmed that old master rolls were seldom preserved more than a year or two before they were destroyed. This practice was the norm in the industry; no masters were kept from the 1920s (the "original QRS" era), and very few from Imperial Industrial era under Max Kortlander.
As a general rule only the first edition production of a new pop song was made from an original master roll (meaning the roll originally created by the artist and edited for 1st-edition publication). Thus my statement, "All of QRS's production of pre-1940s rolls are recuts." Some Ampico and a few Duo-Art production-master rolls still exist in the States, but to my knowledge _no_ other master rolls survive from pre-WW2.
But, Berkman noted, new masters of old songs were often made, which explains part of my confusion and frustration. If a pop song enjoyed a new wave of popularity several years after the original edition, J. Lawrence Cook would make a new master roll -- a new recording, but sounding pretty much like the one he'd made years earlier. Of course, the catalog number wasn't changed, nor the box and roll labels.
Berkman agreed that early QRS Q-series reissues (I guess this is 1960s) had quality problems, but the quality improved as they learned more about re-cutting processes. As an example of improving the Q-series rolls, Berkman cited Q-127, "Way Down Wonder In New Orleans." The first Q-recuts were made by asynchronously copying a borrowed original to make a new production master. But there were noticeable timing problems because the original 12 steps-per-beat music ended up being re-sampled at 11 steps-per-beat.
In later editions of the Q-rolls Bob manually corrected many of the aberrations. Nowadays, he says, the computer is used to verify and correct the "recut masters," especially for the Pianomation Midi disk files, but it's still time-consuming.
Rob DeLand pointed out, and Bob Berkman agrees, that QRS Music Rolls has demands from both the "Mass Media" market and the "Nostalgia" market. The former has the money flowing; seldom is there money remaining to support "Nostalgia".
Robbie Rhodes
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(Message sent Thu 6 Feb 1997, 01:48:09 GMT, from time zone GMT-0800.) |
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