SH Spotlight Distortion free trumpets in the 20s-40s. But BLUE NOTE? WHAT HAPPENED? RVG Evil Neumann mics?

It's nice to know that my ears weren't to blame for hearing it. I couldn't believe that so many albums would have this purposely so I thought my ears were bad.

Someone I know likes his Jazz with extra treble (don't ask) so anytime he'd play me something I thought my ears were seriously damaged.

 

Better yet, go hear some live jazz...

 

Very interesting.

 

Jazz newbie here. Would you say the same for the Blakey Night at Birdland vols 1 & 2? I'm thinking not since it's a live recording, but RVG was involved was he not? Clifford Brown's trumpet sounds decent here, but I haven't listened to it on an audiophile set up.

Also, would you say the same for recorded trumpet at different studios in the 50s? Such as Bob Shad's? Again, newbie here so I don't know if Shad made many recordings with trumpet. (edit: I see your last line again - other studios did the same thing - just wondering if there was an oasis out there)

 

Thank you, Steve! Thank you for the interesting explanation of why many recordings sound that way.

I attend dozens of live performances every year, often in small clubs two or three times in a week. Often I'm not far away from trumpets, and I enjoy them. Then I hear old Blue Note and other recordings, whose music I love, but on which the trumpets sound harsh and wrong to me. Some friends say that's how trumpets sound, but they don't sound that way to me when I hear them live a few feet from my ears.

 

Not just trumpets, saxophones -- like Oliver Nelson's tone on Blues & the Abstract Truth sounds super buzzy to me, and loud drum passages, ....always seemed to me there was lots of distortion on those '50's and early '60s Van Gelder recordings, and everyone loved 'em so much I though I was crazy.

 

Was he doing this with those RVG CD remasters as well?

 

Oh, the music's great, but some of those Oliver Nelson solos one Blues & the Abstract Truth sound like a '70s sawtooth Moog type of patch or something. But it's the drums that bug me. The band is swinging along at X volume, and here comes a big Blakey fill or Tony Williams fill (and Williams in particular was such a dynamic drummer I'm sure he went from very quite to very loud quickly), and it's like fuzz-drums!

 

I gravitate to my old 78's when I'm in the mood for trumpet. Bunny Berigan and Charlie Shavers most recently.

 

I used to listen to some of that stuff and think there was something wrong with my cartridge set up.

 

I agree that ribbon mics are far better choices when recording brass. That being said, even if you had to use a Neumann the use of a pad or other attenuation at the console input wold have eliminated the harmonic distortion. The problem , as you clearly stated, is that studio monitors of the day just did not reproduce the distortion until it was too late. I still cringe when I listen to my 1st big band jazz LP made as a free-lance engineer. I swear I did not hear the distortion on the monitors or see it on the console metering system (an early 70's custom built console with lights, probably "TT" bulbs, for meters. This was in the days just before LED's were used for the same purpose).

Recording Jazz taught me to always pad down the mics at the input to the console.

 

The RCA ribbons wouldn't overload on brass as the Neumanns did. Listen to the Doc Severinsen Command albums Robert Fine engineered--he used the 44 on Doc and the brass. But I also have a Command album of Doc's called THE NEW SOUND OF TODAY'S BIG BAND (RS 917 SD) that George Piros engineered and mastered....there are several instances of severe distortion on Doc's horn worse than I've heard from any Van Gelder recording. A number of the cuts are way worse than this:

 

Who's controlling the volume when recording? The trumpeter by backing off or closing in, blowing harder or softer? Or the engineer manually riding the volume? Both?

 

I like Blue Note a lot and I can tell the trumpets sound distorted too, they are very "hot", it seems to me.

 

Yikes! If this is how all the Blue Note LP's were cut, I think I'd rather settle for a nice EQ console and fix a cheaper and more neutral or flat mastering from later on.

 

Hoedown is one distorted mess. Halfway though the song starting with the alto sax solo, it's gets nasty.

 

Lots of jazz drummers around that time were using 42 strand wires on their snare drums which made everything sound buzzy.
On certain drums, those worked terrible because of the way the snare beds were cut. The snare wires wouldn't make contact with the bottom head and rattled as a result.

 

We're not talking about buzzy snares and rattling, we're talking about full tilt clipping and distortion on the whole kit.

 

On the recordings Norman Granz produced, trumpets always sound beautifully.