[f_minor] Howard Scott

Kpapademas kpapademas at aol.com
Mon Oct 8 18:50:21 MDT 2012


Perhaps they stopped working together because Scott went to work for EMI records in 1961 (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/arts/music/howard-h-scott-a-developer-of-the-lp-dies-at-92.html?_r=0).

K


-----Original Message-----
From: maryellen jensen <maryellenjensen28 at hotmail.com>
To: f_minor <f_minor at glenngould.org>
Sent: Mon, Oct 8, 2012 6:46 pm
Subject: [f_minor] Howard Scott




Herebelow is part of an e-mail sent to someone in early 2009 regarding Howard Scott and the transfer of recorded music from the 78 rpm format to the LP we all know and love (and which sounds better than a cd):


Though most of the serious engineering problems had been solved by 1947, musical and production ones had yet to be resolved. "Lps had to be spliced together from short play masters and safety transcriptions in a way that the customers heard no record breaks and the factory had to turn out high quality discs in large quantity. Goldmark had designed a splicing machine, but it was not sufficiently accurate. Howard Scott, a musician hired to insure musical accuracy, solved the problem. "Scott's job was difficult because the recorded takes on the master safeties had not been calculated for splicing. Scott's task involved tying together separate 78 rpm records often at musically awkward movements. Moreover, Scott had a problem nobody ever anticipated: to keep the surface noise at a steady level, so that listeners would not be conscious of the different levels of the original disc. Together, Bachman and Scott worked out a cuing system for the engineers. Twelve sections were marked on the circumference of the turntable and numbered to guide the engineers in setting down the stylus. Scott would listen to the ends and beginnings of the sections to be spliced and make appropriate notations on the score. When the time came to set the second turntable in motion, he would call, 'Cue point.' When the time came to set down the stylus, he would call, 'Go!' and snap his fingers. Manual controls faded in the new record and faded out the old one to guarantee a smooth splice and steady surface noise without any switching sound.
On listening today, these splices are as good as those that use tape.
(from Journal of Recorded Music)
                    -------------------------------------------------

 As ''the man behind the music of the LP,'' in his words, he was a founding father of the long-playing record. ''The Record That Changed the Music Business.'' The LP, which made 33 1/3 revolutions per minute, produced 20 minutes of music per side, instead of 4 minutes on the old 78 r.p.m.'s. ''They had tried for seven years to connect music on several 78's -- like Humpty Dumpty,'' said Mr. Scott, who figured out how to splice 78's onto 33 1/3 lacquers, or recording disks. Within a decade, the industry went from $2 million to $3 million a year to $2 to $3 billion, he said. - from the N.Y. Times, 1998
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 Glenn Gould had the great good fortune of learning from The Master. No wonder Howard Scott was invited for holidays at Lake Simcoe... What I've been trying to find out is why they stopped working together and when, I still haven't found any documentation explaining this.
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It really is time to remove Gould from the pedestal - "kits" etc. - he really had nothing to do with 
advancing musical recording (technically) at all. As for preferring Streisand and English Rose 
Pet Clark over Dusty, Sandy Shaw, not to mention the black Divas of the mid to late sixties,...sigh...
I suppose it's simply a matter of taste.   

Mary

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