Coping with the Shitstorm #8

For a High-Speed Sunday Morning

Paul Altman commented on YouTube:

Lennie had the bass and drums recorded, and then using the reel-to-reel technology of that time, slowed them down to half speed, and then recorded the solo as an overdub an octave lower and at 1/2 of the speed released here. Then he sped the whole thing back up by 2X so that the bass and drums returned to their original recorded pitch and speed, but his piano solo was now twice as fast, and an octave higher, than he recorded it at. If you doubt this, you can somewhat replicate it by taking any piano solo and raising it an octave with modern software tools, and you’ll hear a similar timbre. Or you can lower the Lineup solo by an octave (and it wouldn’t hurt to slow it to half speed), and you’ll hear it restored to a natural piano sound. In any case, the heart of the supposed controversy over this seems to be that Lennie would have been “cheating” if he did all of this–despite his demonstrated ability to play quite fast in other settings. But if that’s the way you feel, then listen to it at 1/2 speed, or even 1/2 speed plus dropped an octave so you can hear the actual original piano recording of the performance. I often do. Frankly, I don’t see anything less amazing, virtuosic, or musical, about the reverse engineered version of this recording using this method, so you can hear the original solo as it was performed in the studio. Still knocks my socks off, every bit as much if not more. So I’m not sure what all the fuss is about. Maybe some people assume that mediocre playing can be made to sound superlative by merely doubling the speed. But it doesn’t work that way. It just ends up sounding like fast, mediocre music. Try it for yourself and you’ll see.