Skip to main content

How to Digitise 78 Records - Phil Seamen "Britain's Greatest Jazz Drummer" - Ronnie Scott

We were priviledged to work with Peter Dawn, a Jazz journalist and historian who commissioned our company to digitise his companies complete archive of rare shellac and pathe records, into National Archive Standard digital files, preserving the music for future listening.

Our audio engineering services offered Broadcast WAV files with MP3 asset files for online listening. Audio restoration using Isotope standards were gently applied to ensure the outcome was a pure record sound.

Talking to Peter about this fascinating and specialist archive revealed that over twenty years  he has researched to write a book about the legendary Phil Seamen, Britains greatest Jazz drummer, and this collection of rare vinyl is part of this amazing story. 

Peter, in his own words highlights: 

"The Parnell band’s minor riot, Billie Holiday at the Royal Albert Hall, West Side Story’s ‘Dinner is Served’ episode, Phil being stopped from going to America, the start of European Free Form jazz, thirty of his drum exercises are all included, and LOTS more. It’s nearly fifty years since Phil died and you finally have the definitive biography. Welcome to the life of Britain’s greatest jazz drummer.

I decided to Self-Publish Phil’s autobiography and the books first edition is 500 hardback copies. It can only be purchased direct from the author and how to do this is on the Book section of this site.

I have made available for download over one hundred recordings that Phil played on that can be viewed on the ‘Phil’s Music’ section of this site. You can listen to him playing as you read his Story. More recordings will be added, some of which have not previously been issued.

There is also a section containing over twenty other rare ‘British Modern Jazz’ recordings available for download. It is intended to progressively add to this section."

FUTURE PLANS FOR THE DOWNLOAD SITE

Records that we have digitised for Peter, include a large collection of early British Traditional Jazz, particularly by Ken Colyer that includes recordings that have not previously been issued. These will be made available on a separate download section in the future on their website.

There are also plans to release on Limited Edition Vinyl unissued recordings that Phil Seamen and Tubby Hayes played on, together with other club sessions.

SO, PLEASE, WATCH THIS SPACE!

https://www.oxfordduplicationcentre.com/broadcast-audio-tape-collections.html

Labels

Labels:
Location: 29 Banbury Rd, Kidlington OX5 1AQ, UK

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Onion Skin Archive Book Scanning - What is this and how do we process the pages?

CURRENT BOOK SCANNNING PROJECT.  We are currently working on a very large archive of old books that require HQ scanning to Archival TIFF images.  Once processed, these images will be prepared to PDF with OCR (optical character recognition) for a complete searchable output.   The difficulty in this order, is the books are prepared using a medium called Onion Skin Paper. Whilst we are very confident in preparing this type of medium, it is very important to be aware that there are risks with scanning, given the sometimes-fragile nature of the paper.   Tears and rips can occur, so a very gentle white glove approach is required. Equally, with the nature of onion skin, the paper is very translucent which requires a sheet of white paper to be placed under each page before scanning. This then grants a very good HQ image that we can work with.   WHAT IS ONION SKIN PAPER? Onion skin paper is a type of very light weight, almost translucent paper that ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Repair Shop - How To Spot A Ferrotype Camera 1855-1940s

After watching The Repair Shop on BBC1 restore a beautiful and rather rare ferrotype camera I thought a blog on the process would be interesting. Not only did they repair but they managed to have the camera working, taking photographs. This was very inspirational given the age of the camera. ABOUT FERROTYPE PROCESS Ferrotypes first appeared in America in the 1850s, but didn’t become popular in Britain until the 1870s. They were still being made by while-you-wait street photographers as late as the 1950s. The ferrotype process was a variation of the collodion positive, and used a similar process to  wet plate photography . A very underexposed negative image was produced on a thin iron plate. It was blackened by painting, lacquering or enamelling, and coated with a collodion photographic emulsion. The dark background gave the resulting image the appearance of a positive. Unlike collodion positives, ferrotypes did not need mounting in a case to produce a positi...
1 comment
Read more

Audio Recording Through the Ages – Oxford Duplication Centre

Audio Recording Through the Ages – Oxford Duplication Centre The late 19 th and 20 th centuries brought with them a huge range of exciting technological developments, including everything from the advent of electrification to railways, telecommunications and engines.  However, an often overlooked breakthrough was the development of audio recording technology – before 1877, there was no way to record and play back sound and music. It’s mindblowing to consider this, especially as today we can digitally encode audio and store thousands of songs on a smartphone! So how did we get to this stage? The 20 th century brought rapid developments to the world of audio, with new technologies transforming formats and production methods every few decades. For example, the earliest technology that could reproduce sound – Thomas Edison’s phonograph – used wax cylinders to store the resulting audio, but the end result was often low quality and with poor fidelity. The ...
Post a Comment
Read more