Now I’ve been playing with the Stem Split function in Logic Pro again. This time it’s about a recording that probably never should have been made. I got it as an audio file from a music enthusiast in Värmland many years ago. It was recorded at Sundsta’s youth center in Karlstad probably in the autumn of 1969. Another one of the many pop band competitions of the 60s was held there. This one was organized by Nya Wermlandstidningen (local news-paper) together with some music association (if I remember correctly).
The man who sent me the recording said that he had intended to record one of the other bands in the competition, but as a sound check he also recorded us in The Nazz, since we played just before the band he had intended to record.
We performed Sonny Boy Williamson’s classic “Help Me”, and (of course) we won the competition. We usually did that when we entered such competitions (without any bragging). The first prize was a trip to England and we would have probably taken that trip if we hadn’t been so pitifully poor. Blues musicians have never had it particularly good, you know that, don’t you?
The recording was done with a simple microphone hanging from the ceiling of the venue and the tape recorder was a Bang & Olufsen machine. The audio file I received was probably copied many times with some generational losses as a result and of course it was a mono recording.
Anyway… In Logic I let the Stem separation do its job, and then I had bass, drums, guitar, harmonica and vocals on separate tracks.
By the way, it was Erik Oterrnäs who played bass, Tommy Löwbäck was behind the drums, Dan Karlsson sang and played harmonica and I myself played guitar.
After having the different instruments on separate tracks, all that was needed was a little filtering, compression, reverb and delay and voila, we have a completely new and much fresher recording.
Here you can listen to the end result:
If you want to hear what it sounded like before Logic’s Stem Split feature took over the song, it’s here:
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