Lost Sounds

Removing clicks and ticks from recordings has come a long way in the last 20 years. Digital techniques, along with modern software and advanced algorithms, are a far cry from the manual process we used to suffer! As a young recording engineer in the 1970s part of my training involved working alongside one of Decca’s finest classical music recording engineers, Jack Law. Jack had recorded many of the best orchestras, operas and concerts and spent much of his time recording in Vienna. It was Jack who taught me the skilled art of tape editing while following the score, along with the practice he knew I was destined for – declicking! We used a Studer A10 tape machine for the training exercise and simulated the clicks by disconnecting the record amps and reconnecting them – worked a treat. Over the years I have edited out thousands of clicks and ticks from shellac and vinyl records. Readers may be interested to know that even some new material from the States was issued in Britain having been dubbed from discs. The early release of the Righteous Brothers “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” was issued this way because the tape hadn’t arrived from Decca in New York. I also remember dubbing a complete Chi-Lites album to tape for the same reason. Having copied a disc onto tape, this ancient method of declicking involved lining the tape up so that any click was precisely on the replay head, spooling by hand from left to right you could be spot on. A chinagraph line was then marked on the back of the tape, but only on the top half  (if the piece had to go back in you knew which was top and which was bottom). About 2-3 mm of tape was removed and the tape spliced back together. With the tape running at 15 ips (38.1cm per second) removing this small piece of tape amounted to approximately 8 milliseconds of recorded material – the size would vary depending on the intensity of the click, tick or thump. I always edited at 45 degrees and never vertically as this latter method could introduce further unwanted thumps. Most of the time the edit would work without any affect on the recorded material; however it did depend upon the type of material. I remember having great trouble with Gracie Fields singing Ava Maria – those long sustained notes don’t lend themselves to having clicks removed from them! On another occasion we were putting together a new album of the singing trio, the Boswell Sisters. The album was virtually complete and then Geoff, the Producer, was able to borrow a rare 78rpm shellac single with the group singing “I Found A Million Dollar Baby” (E 36826 recorded 25^th May 1931) and “Sing A Little Jingle” (E36825 also recorded 25^th May 1931). The disc was in very bad condition with clicks throughout. I removed about 400 clicks from each side which took me the best part of a week to complete. With the album finished it was issued in 1975 as Sweet Harmony – Hot Rhythm on the Decca Vocalion label (VLP 5). I kept all the clicks and still have them to this day.

A friend of Geoff’s, a musician and keen restorer of recorded music himself designed and built a devise which would clamp the tape down, and instead of editing out the click, this devise had a scraping mechanism. A needle point would scrape the oxide from off the plastic backing tape producing a small dropout. I never heard any of the results from using this procedure but Geoff Milne was very impressed with it. The concept is not unlike early electronic declickers which could detect a click and immediately mute the signal. What actually happened was the high energy of the click would initiate a very sharp fade out, mute and then a fade in. This fading/muting process would be only a few milliseconds and although it succeeded in making loud clicks less obtrusive, it failed to retain and restore the wanted signal. That was still some years away.

For years now the debate has been raging over the difference in sound quality between a vinyl record and a CD – one analogue, the other digital (16 bit/44.1kHz). Many mastering engineers and record producers take the debate so seriously that even though they are working in the digital domain, they include, in the final mix down chain, an analogue tape machine running at either 15 ips or 30 ips to give their mix that magic analogue “warm sound”. French hip-hop artist Wax Tailor who’s latest release “In the Mood for Life” has addressed the problem by producing his material on a disc which is a CD on one side and vinyl the other so fans can have the best of both worlds! What amazes me these days is that I have spent years taking clicks and crackle out of worn records; I have a studio stacked with expensive equipment and software specifically for improving the sound quality of old records and then I hear a new release on the radio or TV, where the producer has added some artificial clicks and crackle to give the material that “vinyl sound” – strange world