TROPICAL HIBISCUS
Alright, it’s been a good minute, but I’m still digging through, cleaning and learning how to rip these vinyls proper. I switched from Audacity to Adobe Audition (formerly Cool Edit) and the sound of the rips are notably better–sound quality still needs improvement though. Next step up is ProTools or Ableton Live, I guess.
Here’s a sweet little pleasurable song from a rather obscure American funk/R&B group. Members of this band used to be songwriters and musicians for Motown, as part of the in-house production team in the 1960s. This song appears on the B-side to their most popular hit “I Can Understand It” from 1972. It’s funny, but this tune is strange and familiar at the same time. It reminds me of a Maxi Priest song, and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.
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The New Birth – Oh, Baby, I Love The Way
We are still in 1972, but let’s get away from Detroit and visit the Makossa Man, Manu Dibango in Yaounde. His album “O Boso” is recommended for warm, beautiful Summer nights, with smoke, steam and sweat –several counties in the tri-state area are under severe thunderstorm watch. Anyway, among all my parents 7 and 12″‘s I was able to get my grubby hands on (and actually listened to), this is one of the most surprising, varied, and unique 12 inches.
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“…we are playing a music whose unity has it’s roots deep in African earth, but whose harmony and construction reflect the influence of all the branches which have grown in the common three century old tree of music.” – M. Dibango, 1972
July 23rd, 2008. african, american, everything, funky, optimism, rnb, soul, tropical | 5 comments »
July 24th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
That Manu D track was later sampled in the song Clap Your Hands on the Frankie Cutlass album…
If your black, spanish, white, whatever. EVERYBODY CLAP YA HANDZ!
July 24th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
I may have the name of the track wrong… been a while since i had that on rotation, but form the cutlass album for sure…
July 24th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Hey man, you’re probably going to get the same kind of quality out of Ableton that you would get with Audition (Ableton is more a performance tool where Audition is designed to be a DAW). Try recording at higher and/or bit depth and see how that sounds. Beyond that, you’re probably going to want to look at improving your signal’s path into your computer. If you are using RCA to 1/8″ into your sound card’s line in or mic jack, you may see big improvements in sound quality if you use a dedicated audio interface with high-quality analog-digital converters. M-Audio makes some entry-level ones that might do the job.
Anyway, this stuff is good readin’, keep up the good work.
Paz.
July 24th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
yes, i 2nd what dlab says. The most important stuff in getting good vinyl rips are turntable needle/cartidge and then turntable preamp .. all audio software is ‘end of the line’ stuff and will have same basic recording quality, although you’ll def want to watch your bitrate & other settings; Audacity defaults to mono for one…
July 29th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
its christmas in july when lamin gets to encoding his vinyl