Slightly out of tune....

This morning, I played my old 45 of Carole King's "It Might As Well Rain Until September" (Dimension #2000). A great song; one of my favorite records, and a song that I've been attempting to sing myself. Somehow, I can't seem to find the right key... which, oddly enough, points to another odd thing about this record, a phenomenon I've noticed on a couple other records.

The fun started this morning as I played the song. I was playing chords from a fake sheet that I downloaded from the internet, and (big surprise) a couple of those chords didn't seem quite right... so I listened to the record a couple times and then sat down at the DX7 and attempted to play along...

...and that was when I noticed that the record itself was maybe a 1/4 step higher in pitch than the key on the fake sheet! (C major) The tonic of the key the record is in falls somewhere between C and C sharp. If I bent the keyboard's pitch UP slightly, my keyboard was in key.

Well... since the turntable is fine (spinning at a true and steady 45 rpm according to the strobe indicator on the side of the platter), I figured the problem was with my keyboard... so... I went to an online chromatic tuner in an attempt to get a "true middle C" (dreading that the next step would be digging around online to find a master tuning guide for a DX7) and guess what? My keyboard is fine.

So... the record is "out of tune" !!!!

The master tape, apparently, went out of skew somewhere in the process of making the record... OR it was deliberately sped up slightly to make the tempo a little more brisk and in the process, of course, the whole record also went up in pitch a quarter step.

Like I said, I've noticed this with a couple other old vinyls I have, where the whole thing sounded "out of key" by any objective reference (a tuned instrument) yet the tuning is internally consistent.

I know that Brian Wilson "sped up" the master tape of "Caroline No" to bump up the pitch and tempo slightly (I think he sped it up so that the record was a half step higher than the original master; I'm not sure; I don't have the booklet or disc here) and that the finished master take of the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever" was a splice of two takes. Originally the Beatles tried the song in two different keys, with the tonics a step apart, and in the finished master, one of the takes was speeded up so that it was a half step higher, and one of the takes was slowed down so that it was a half-step lower... and they met in the middle. That's why John's voice sounds slightly slow and drugged in the verses, and slightly fast in the refrains.

I have noticed this phenomenon enough to wonder if it was deliberate. In the pre-digital age, there was no way to slow down or speed up a track without changing the pitch. As long as they're speeding up the whole track, like I said, if it's internally consistent, you can miss it. BUT when you try to play a tuned instrument along to the track as I did today... like I said, you can really tell.

By the way... I just played "It Might As Well Rain Until September" off a digital source (the compilation EARLY GIRLS VOLUME ONE) and, on that, the master is "in tune." So... was it just a poor mastering job on the 45, or deliberate? Hmmmmmm....

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This is my first post on this blog in quite some time. I've been, shall we say, away from my music. Nice to be back. I'm getting acclimated; more here as developments warrant updates.