© 2021 Condé Nast. Sabrina Carpenter dropped a new song, and fans think it’s about Olivia Rodrigo, “I’m happy and you hate it,” Sabrina Carpenter sings in her new track, “Skin,” which seems to be a response to Olivia Rodrigo’s hit single “Drivers License.”, Young L.A. ‘vaccine chasers’ crowd unofficial standby lines in hopes of a shot. Record companies planned to sell specific genres to regional audiences: Cajun music in Louisiana, bluegrass records in West Virginia, and so forth. Then MacMahon met Nicholas Bergh, who had rebuilt one. Country star Dolly Parton says her brother and singing partner Randy Parton has died of cancer. Back then, recorded music was written by professional composers, recorded by professional singers, and marketed to wealthy audiences. In July, So Cal indie label Burger Records shut down after female fans and musicians accused some of bands of sexual misconduct. The final hours of Kobe Bryant’s life: An oral history. Instead of hiring professional songwriters and musicians, they leased portable recording gear from Western Electric and dispatched "song-catchers" to travel the country. Bergh, an ethnomusicology student at UCLA from 1998 to 2002, was fascinated with the means by which early recordings he was studying were created. In 2000, he started a hunt for any pieces of the original technology. Go inside one of the greatest-ever untold stories: how the ordinary people of America were given the opportunity to make records for the first time. "There was no known film footage of it working, or photographs of it," he says. The recording equipment presented unique challenges to artists accustomed to ProTools and compressors. Much like iTunes and streaming, the lathe democratized music. Not only that but his motives seem fairly pure. Recording engineer Nicholas Bergh has a working recording system from the 1920s made by Western Electric. Epic Records is an American record label owned by Sony Music Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America, the North American division of Japanese conglomerate Sony.The label was founded predominantly as a jazz and classical music label in 1953, but later expanded its scope to include a more diverse range of genres, including pop, R&B, rock, and hip hop. Announcer: 'American Epic' told the story of how technology, talent, and invention produced the DNA of America's music. The lathes recorded gospel, Delta blues, and bluegrass for the first time. Record companies leasing the machines from Western Electric paid a royalty on each record sold, prompting them to design their own recording lathes in the early 1930s. "It was a very elitist thing, music," says Bernard MacMahon, director of American Epic, a three-part documentary about the early days of audio recording that premiered last night on PBS. Randy Rainbow, Wynton Marsalis and Elvis Costello support a storied jazz club. When MacMahon started researching American Epic, he discovered that the original electric lathes---as many as 20 of them---had been lost. It was, in a very real way, the first time America truly heard herself. The three-part historical documentary follows the trail of record company talent scouts from the late 1920s as they toured America with a recording machine to capture the raw expression of an emerging culture whose recordings would lead to the development of the Blues, Country, Gospel, Hawaiian, Cajun, and Folk music. Today, Bergh spends most of his time working on restorations of vintage film soundtracks. The lathe requires limited electricity, which is needed for an electromagnet that operates the cutting head, as well as to power a strobe that allows the engineer to monitor the turntable’s speed. And some said it provided a connection to the musicians who influenced them. Miami Sound Machine - Dr. ‘American Epic: The Collection’ and ‘American Epic: The Soundtrack’ are out now on Legacy Recordings; ‘American Epic: The Sessions’ will be released on June 9 by Columbia Records. For The American Epic Sessions, a PBS program airing June 6 and a CD landing June 9, ... Record companies leasing the machines from Western Electric paid a royalty on each record … He’s preparing it for a modern-day studio session with bluesy rocker Jack White and several cohorts when an inch-wide band of fabric attached to a 100-pound weight that drives the contraption snaps. "These records were the basis of folk and blues music in the ‘50s and ‘60s for Dylan, for Clapton, for all of us," says Burnett. This unique device used a 100 pound weight on a pulley to turn the platter. “For the first time, this technology allowed everybody to be recorded,” she said, “and it democratized American music.”, For Classic Rock coverage, join us on Facebook, How the Flaming Lips pulled off COVID-distancing space bubble shows. Jimmie Rodgers, singer of ‘Honeycomb’ and other hits, dies at 87. It’s almost entirely mechanical, driven by the previously referenced 100-pound weight. With new music and partnerships on the horizon, BIA continues to show that 2020 is her year. This ingenuity, resourcefulness and creative engineering exemplify a key theme of “American Epic,” the ambitious four-part BBC-PBS collaboration that reveals how technological and cultural changes intersected in the mid-1920s to revolutionize the nascent recording industry. The Scully lathe itself is a marvel of early 20th century engineering. But the records proved immensely popular. He’s a postman no more: Nathan Evans, whose “Wellerman” rendition birthed the sea-shanty TikTok sensation, says he’s been signed by Polydor Records. The recording sessions fill a separate two-hour PBS documentary – The American Epic Sessions – which is just wonderful. I tried to Google it and found nothing. Steve Lacy is a pretty big deal. So the industry went looking for artists who would attract new listeners, and invested in the technology needed to record them outside of New York studios. To experience the recording process, this reporter brought his clarinet to Bergh’s lab and played “Petite Fleur,” an old New Orleans jazz standard associated with Sidney Bechet. Bergh, an audio engineer who specializes in restoring old soundtracks, has long been fascinated with the Western Electric system, which recorded the sound for The Jazz Singer and other early talkies. CBS bought a small Long Island TV station for $55 million. "Record sales were centered in the big cities, to people with money." Musical fans are invited to a “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” watch party. People eager to get the COVID-19 vaccine ahead of schedule have flocked to some L.A. clinics, spending hours in an unofficial standby line for doses left over at the end of the day. ", The portable electrical system allowed people to record directly onto a 78 record and quickly share their music with a huge audience. Columbia Records and Victor Talking Machine Company targeted listeners in rural America who could afford hand-crank record players but not electric radios. Beat - Epic - 12" JavaScript scheint in Ihrem Browser deaktiviert zu sein. (It’s no coincidence that this is a standard song length.) After his sea shanty sparked a viral craze, this TikTok star now has a record deal. The system allowed record labels to make field recordings. One revelation in assembling “American Epic” was the evidence of just how good the early recording equipment was — and still is today. The lathe democratized music production and distribution, just as mixtapes, file-sharing, streaming services, and platforms like Bandcamp did. The producers spent nearly a decade rebuilding an original 1920s recording system - now the only one left in the world - timed by a weight … Those companies sent teams of talent scouts out into the hinterlands to record regional styles of music, hoping to make up plummeting record sales by marketing to audiences they had largely ignored and which were not being served by radio stations either. "For the first time, America suddenly heard herself—and began to communicate with herself—through music. For The American Epic Sessions, the filmmakers have re-assembled the recording machine that allowed America to first hear itself. The lathe is very much a precursor to people sharing something on SoundCloud immediately after they’ve captured it. AMERICAN EPIC. Sound familiar? Watch the music video HERE. Because the head doesn’t move, the turntable carriage also has to move laterally beneath that cutting head as it etches a groove from the outside perimeter of the disc toward the center. “It was like putting together a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle — without the picture on the box to guide you,” “American Epic” director Bernard MacMahon told The Times recently. It took a decade, but he eventually built a weight-driven lathe, microphone, and a six-foot amplifier rack with parts used in those early recording sessions. In the feature-length companion film American Epic: The Sessions, Bergh has a chance to take a Western Electric recording machine and Scully Lathe into a studio and use them to record, produce and cut shellac records of performances by a whole host of contemporary artists, including Elton John, Willie Nelson, Jack White, Beck, the rapper Nas, and Taj Mahal. A collection of texts, radio communications, quotes and scenes from the last hours of Kobe Bryant’s life before the fatal helicopter crash in Calabasas. He's part of the band The Internet, he's a producer for J. Cole and Kendrick Lamar, and he just put out his first solo album which he made on his iPhone. "There was that one keyhole into the past.". It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. Director Bernard MacMahon and Engineer Nicholas Bergh recording on the very first electrical sound recording system from the 1920s, the only one in the world. Adam Savage tells the story behind American Epic, the culmination of a two-decade-long project to reassemble a one-of-a-kind 1920s recording system and the exhausting restoration of hundreds of the era’s forgotten musical works. Almost a century later, 20 of today's great artists used one of those systems, reassembled from original parts, to make an album. The film was directed and co-written by Bernard MacMahon and stars Nas, Alabama Shakes, Elton John, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Jack White, Taj Mahal, Ana Gabriel, Pokey LaFarge, Beck, Ashley Monroe, Los Lobos, The A… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRK8Rqe6z0k&feature=youtu.be. During the acoustic era from the late 1800s until the mid-1920s, such lathes were connected to large horn sound collectors — early microphones — that required musicians to sing and play at maximum volume to create enough energy to physically move the sound horn diaphragm and the attached cutting head. There was that one keyhole into the past. 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