Batch of 5

Yes, I've been at it again, compiling. Five new comps up for scrutiny. In fact I spend most of my time these days immersed in library music of high sound quality in order to discover and pick out good tunes for comps. It's rather nice. I get to hear a lot of music I wouldn't otherwise bother with, and have made many major personal discoveries. And on the way, I learn to love and like some music I would have shunned in my days as indiepopper and underground rocker. Some big band jazz, some strange electronica, some easy listening orchestral music… But I'm always on the lookout for the catchy tunes and memorable melodies, so my basic background in pop music will probably always shine through in the selections I do for these comps. Which is a good thing, I suppose.  

Some comments:

Vol 1: Ah, I finally finished that one. It took time to get everything right. It belongs together with "Vol 100 – Crime Pace". I have planned a third crime funk comp, but I'm missing some tunes to get it right. It will probably appear later.

Vol 5: This consists of testcard music mostly from CDs, not vinyl. I'm old enough to remember the days when they played that kind of music on daytime telly, before the evening's broadcasts began. I have memories of my mother (RIP) cleaning the house to this kind of music with the telly on.

Vol 65: I have always loved happy and jolly tunes, and this is a collection of some I found on different albums. It's also a celebration of 70's kitsch. The danger with that type of tunes is that they can so easily sound forced, contrived and embarrassing. I hope I have kept to the worthy stuff.

Vol 93: It seemed appropriate to collect some introvert sadness tunes at the same time as I collected the happy ones, so this one belongs together with vol 65, somehow.

Vol 198: This is 60's soulbeat combined with big and small band jazz. I can't find much instrumental music of this kind. It's usually played with vocals, and vocals is taboo in the sound library series (except for some special scat/wordless comps, see vol 152 and 153 below.)

Check the comments.

Get it on with Studio One!

I find 43 Studio One albums listed on Discogs. I must admit that I haven't heard every single one of them, but I have most of the best ones in my collection and have secured high quality vinyl rips of most of the others. I had initially planned only one "best of Studio One" comp, but there are so many equally good tunes on those LPs that I had to ask the master planner himself to extend it to three volumes. Permission was granted. 

Studio One was more of a catalog series than a real label. It was owned by Sonoton (founded in 1965), who also had several other library labels under their umbrella, managed by Berry Music, most notably the Conroy and Programme Production series. The big boss was Gerhard Narholz, an Austrian all-round conductor and composer. Berry had offices in London, but most of the music on Studio One was recorded in Germany by German or Austrian musicians, probably in Trixi Tonstudio in Munich, where the sound engineer Willi Schmidt was an expert in giving it the "fat German sound", as I call it. 

Gerhard Narholz himself composed many tunes for the Studio One series. He used several pseudonyms: Sammy Burdson, Tony Tape, Otto Sieben, Walt Rockman, Mac Prindy, Norman Candler… Other prominent names on Studio One were Hans Ehrlinger (trombone man, aka Juan Erlando when he went latin), Fritz Maldener (aka Maurice Pop and Shorty Malden) and Hammond man Kai Rautenberg. Almost all the Studio One tunes contain a combination of jazzy elements, much brass, occasionally strings, partly old school and partly new beats and soul or rock-based easy-cheesy listening.   

Get it on with Bruton!

I didn't know how and where to begin when I decided to explore the Bruton label. But as a good point of departure I found a place with links to a heap of ripped mp3 albums. The cache I downloaded contained 115 Bruton albums, and I went through all of them in my everlasting search for good library tunes. I soon discovered that albums with certain letter code prefixes contained rather good, accessible and groovy music that appealed to me. The best tunes were on the BRD, BRG and BRH series. So I started buying these and many other Bruton LPs on Discogs and ripped them. On the back covers Bruton had written some clues to the musical moods. BRD = Leisure, Pastoral, Nature, Tenderness, Romance. BRG = Happy, Bright, Open Air, Sport. BRH = Contemporary, Pop, Rock. With a little experience of the library music field, you'll be more or less able to guess what to expect from these clues. But the old saying "never buy a library album unheard" is just as appropriate here as anywhere else. There were lots of hits and misses, since I couldn't find mp3s to preview them all.

I would say that 90 % of the Bruton stuff is hard to listen to with any pleasure. Much of the music is marred by bad use of the synthesizers they had a available around 1980. It sounded cool then, of course, but not nowadays. (I'm aware that some would disagree.) Of the remaining 10 % there are quite a few outstanding library tracks, especially in the funk department, with driving rhythms and great precision playing. Other stuff is just tiresome jingles and some are boring orchestral easy listening tunes or dull, ambient sounds. But if you search through the "production music" dross, you'll find some real treasure and pearls. That's what I've tried to do with these two collections: to pick out the good tunes.   

Almost all the British library giants composed for Bruton. Steve Gray, Brian Bennett (once the drummer in the Shadows), Alan Hawkshaw, Francis Monkman (better known from the group Sky), Johnny Pearson, David Snell (harpist extraordinaire with a knack for crime funk), Frank Ricotti (vibraphone man and percussionist on countless jazz and pop albums), Dave Gold, Frank McDonald & Chris Rae (usually to be found on the De Wolfe label), David Lindup (big band leader), Keith Mansfield, James Clarke, Chris Gunning (composer of the famous "Poirot Theme"), John Cameron, Sam Sklair, Nick Ingman… All well-known names.

I have planned three more Bruton compilations at the moment. They will contain music from the BRD, BRJ, BRK, BRL and BRS series. I will announce them here whenever they're ready. The BRD will be completely different from the two presented here, which has certain characteristics in common and belong together as a perfect pair. There are still some goodies left from the BRG and BRH series which didn't fit in. They will appear on later comps. The folder also includes some essential information about the Bruton label, culled from a Bruton CD comp on Vocalion from 2015. 

To whom it may concern: The Sound Library series

For almost 10 years now I've been interested in the field of music called library music, and also in music related to it, like soundtracks and easy listening. At first I thought I would have enough to listen to if I bought all the CD compilations of that kind of music - the Easy Tempo series, the Soho Lounge, the Sound Gallery, the Jonny Trunk comps, the comps from the Dutton/Vocalion label and other remastered and re-issued stuff that has appeared since the retro easy listening boom of the 90s. But it just wasn't enough. I wanted more. So I took the step back to vinyl, having relied only on CDs for some years. I started buying the original library albums from which the tunes I liked had been taken. And I bought a new turntable and learned to digitize LPs to my PC. I soon found that the problem with library music is that the albums were not made and issued to be listened to in the same way as normal LPs in other fields. They were made to be used for something, not to be listened to as only music, the result being that one album could contain anything from ambient soundscapes or FX to 10-second jingles, or noisy avant-garde experiments alongside the sweetest bossa tunes. So the only thing to do was to start picking out the good tunes and make my private digital compilations out of those old original LPs. (By the way, I don't use the word mixtapes for anything else than physical cassettes, having grown up with real tapes.) 

After a while I started upgrading my equipment to get the best possible sound, and ended up with a Rega Planar 3 turntable with an Elys 2 cartridge, a tube pre-amp called Tube Box S, a NAD converter called PP4 and a PC program called VinylStudio (for those interested in the technical bit.) The sound this set-up gives is really impressive and much better than pure digital sound and in most cases better than re-mastered CD sound. (This is partly a matter of opinion, but my opinions are always the right ones. Trust me, I know what I'm talking about.) In addition to the ripping apparatus I bought a rather expensive record cleaning machine called Okki Nokki (!) that I always use before I rip the LPs, thereby making sure that the vinyl is as clean as possible and don't give off too much crackle, clicks or pops. If there's still some unwanted noise left after cleaning with Okki I use a program in my computer called WavePad, which has an easy-to-use function that makes it possible to isolate most clicks and pops and "manually" remove them without audible distortion of the sound. The final files are usually so clean and clear that they can't be distinguished from professionally issued CDs, except for the dynamics, which is even better than what you usually get on CDs. And the set-up described above also keeps the warmth that is embedded in the vinyl process. I don't use any tools like normalizing or equalizing or any other kind of boosting or so-called enhancing of the sound – the rips are as authentic as vinyl sound gets. I have only adjusted the volumes between the tracks and made appropriate spaces between them, to make the totality as perfect as I'm able to make it.

I apologize for this technical boring stuff; the music is after all the main thing here. I started making compilations out of the best tunes from my library LPs, but I soon discovered that they would be annoying and difficult to listen to if I put the tunes together hodge-podge, with only "library music" as the overriding header. So I started classifying and categorizing the tunes. Each time I heard an outstanding tune, a tune that I really liked and wanted to hear again, I wrote down the title, the name of the artist/group/orchestra, and the source (my rip, someone else's rip, a CD or a download source), and tried to place the tune under an appropriate heading, like "samba", "souljazz", "harpsichord", "crime funk", "happy music"… and soon I had literally hundreds of different compilation headings. I decided to limit each comp to 18 tunes (special label presentations are exceptions), resulting in a playing time of between 40-50 minutes. They are meant to be listened to with pleasure from track 1 to track 18 in one sitting and without interruptions.

My initial plan was to burn CD-Rs of these comps and give them away to interested friends. That's why I started making front and back covers to each of them. One should be able to take print-outs and have accessible tracklists, I thought. But when I discovered that some of my own CD-Rs had started to deteriorate and already had become unplayable after only a few years on a shelf, I decided that that trashy medium is not useful for any storing of good music. So now these comps only exist as folders of digital files in my computer. They are stored both as Flac files and Wave files, in the best possible sound quality (the music ripped and saved uncompressed at 44kHz/16 bit). 

Nevertheless I continued to make cover designs to each comp, and I have decided to present the covers here, both fronts and backs, as condensed information on what I've been doing and what I've been spending most of my time on lately. I claim no artistic originality or credit for the covers; they are only cut-and-paste jobs, put together by stuff found on the web and some scans I've done here at home. I suppose the tracklists would interest some people.

To share all this good music with interested friends and other good people would be a nice thing to do. It has cost me a great deal of money and time to collect the albums, restore the sound and put these compilations together. And music is made to be shared. That's the whole point of it. But I honestly don't know how I can do that without breaking someone's rules and become a target for Big Brother authorities who are eager to limit our freedom. But perhaps there are ways? Of a more private kind? None of these comps are uploaded anywhere. But in fact I feel more like a criminal by NOT sharing all this great music than I would if I shared it… But I have seen too many blogs close down and become quiet because of links that some greedy pleasure killers don't like. So I'm not gonna spend time here and end up wasting it.

There are 23 volumes in the series, presented here by their covers only. No use looking for any download links. They are numbered according to my master plan, not according to the sequence they were made. At the moment I'm working on 23 new ones. They are all in different stages of completion. On my master plan list there are as many as 271 volumes right now. I don't know if I'll ever get that far, but I'm planning to post the covers here when each new one is completed, and maybe also include some comments to each posting. Those who watch will see.  

Any comments and suggestions are welcome.