Tangleweed had a chance to record a tune on an early 20th century Edison wax cylinder recording rig. Martin Fisher, audio archivist at Middle Tennessee State University, set up the acoustic recording studio at last week’s Folk Alliance conference in Memphis

This being a pre-electric recording studio, the band was gathered around a single horn, which was connected directly to a lathe that etched the sounds into a blank wax cylinder. Each cylinder blank could hold two minutes, so we had to tweak the arrangement and push the tempo a bit to get it in under the maximum time. We recorded two takes. It’s all live to mono, so there’s no ‘fixing in the mix’, as it were.

The tune is a Tangleweed medley called ‘The Logan Square Dance’.

We will have audio of the cylinder itself soon.

This is a repost of a post I wrote three years ago. Enjoy, while I take the rest of the day off.

Santa is Real, the Christmas record my old band the Kennett Brothers put together, is long out-of-print, and, thanks to the efforts of obsessive Wilco completists, prohibitively expensive on the second-hand market. In the spirit of the season, I’m posting an MP3 of one of the tracks, our cover of the Louvin Brothers song ‘A Shutin at Christmas‘.

(download link below the jump)

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Today’s post is more reposty goodness for the holiday season. Enjoy

Here’s another song from the Kennett Brothers’ long out of print and now ridiculously pricey Xmas CD, Santa is Real. This time, it’s the Kennett’s performance of the Marty Robbins tune, ‘One of You in Every Size‘.

The lineup as best I remember:
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This is a repost of a post I wrote two years ago. Enjoy, while I take the rest of the day off.

Santa is Real, the Christmas record my old band the Kennett Brothers put together, is long out-of-print, and, thanks to the efforts of obsessive Wilco completists, prohibitively expensive on the second-hand market. In the spirit of the season, I’m posting an MP3 of one of the tracks, our cover of the Louvin Brothers song ‘A Shutin at Christmas‘.

(download link below the jump)

(more…)

It’s difficult to convey with words the excitement of listening to your new record 37 times in a row and deciding whether the break between the first and second tracks should be an eighth of a second longer. This picture will have to suffice.

We finished mastering the new CD tonight. Billy, Paul, and I worked with Mike Hagler to sequence the album and burn the master. The masters sound natural, not the headache-inducing square-wave distorted stuff that’s the norm nowadays. Must sleep now.

I stumbled across this last night while preparing to attend tonight’s mastering session for our 3rd CD, Most Folk Heroes Started as Criminals. We like Bob Weston a lot. He engineered our first CD, and has recently opened a mastering studio in Chicago. Bob’s engineering style eschews the slick and synthetic in favor of naturalistic sounds. The same sensibility informs his mastering work:

…[A]nother reason we wanted to open the place was to be part of the solution to the insane loudness war thing. We want to educate our clients and try to get CDs sounding good again. There are so many now that just sound loud, but not good. I think a lot of younger guys and girls in bands think that mastering simply means making it really loud.

Read the full article at bouncetodisk.com

…Most Folk Heroes Started Out as Criminals

We’re mastering it tomorrow (Thursday) night with Mike Hagler at King Size in Chicago. Unless something changes over the next 24 hours, here’s the track list and sequence:

Side 1:

1. Sandy River Belle
2. California
3. Short Life of Trouble
4. The Logjam
5. Mississippi Trashboat
6. Pick Poor Robin
7. British Army

Side 2:

1. Lay Down My Old Guitar
2. Takeup Reel / Cold Frosty / *Grey Eagle
3. Little Sadie
4. Pain in My Heart
5. Trishenku’s Heaven
6. Dead Flowers
7. Listen to the Mockingbird

*As a recovering Ohioan, I should point out that the correct spelling is ‘gray’.