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Life in the Faster Lane
One of my favorite
songs of 2007 was Melissa Etheridge’s “Message to Myself.”
There is – for me, anyway - one problem with that recording:
it drags when played at normal speed. But when pitched up to
+3.5 on a digital player, the hooks really shine. Crazy,
right?
I admit, I was a teenage chipmunk: a child – more accurately,
a bratty adolescent - of the Q format. During the 1970s, many
Top 40 stations sped up records for reasons I’ve never been
able to discern. Was it to “brighten” the sound, especially to
punch up the ballads and make the station sound different from
its competitors? Or to keep a “more minutes of music” promise
even while keeping the commercial load consistent each hour?
Perhaps programmers thought most listeners woudn’t be able to
hear a difference, but I sure did. Overall, I thought it was
for the better, no matter what the purists say. With pitching,
a song like Rick Derringer’s “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo” went
from being just another album rock jam to being a ‘dashboard
smasher.’ It made the Ohio Players’ “Love Rollercoaster” a
more thrilling ride, if you will.
During that era, there was just one thing I didn’t like about
speeding up records: I couldn’t do it at home. As far as I
could tell, pitch wasn’t yet available on anything but
professional turntables. But in 1977, someone I worked for
gave me his old Garrard, and wouldn’t you know it, it played
45s just that much faster. That’s probably why he gave it to
me. Now I was able to re-create that sound, except for one
minor detail and probably the other reason he gave it to me:
the tone arm refused to go past a certain point on any record,
so singles didn’t fade as much as they kept playing a line
near the end over – click! - and over – click! – and over.
This was, of course, not good enough. When it came to
turntables, I needed a pitcher, not a vinyl-itcher. By the
time I was running my own little DJ business, I felt I was
entitled to a Technics and in 1982 I took the plunge. And it
was good. But it still wasn’t enough: I needed to be able to
play everything that much faster, to replace my other
turntable with a pitching model. So a year’s worth of gigs
later I found a decent Audio Technica at the old Brothers
chain.
Now I was officially
in heaven: all hype, all the time. Thing is, by this point,
the Q format was officially in Top 40 heaven. It seemed as if
the only person speeding up records was me.
Then I moved to New York, where, upon crossing the Tappan Zee
for the first time, I punched in WPLJ. I knew New York City
was supposed to be fast-paced, but…yeow. I’d never dared pitch
either of my turntables that high. Half-expecting to hear a
helium-assisted DJ come out of Foreigner’s “I Want to Know
What Love Is,” I was pleasantly surprised by the soothing
tones of a gentleman name of Pat St. John. Lesson? You’re
allowed to have songs at a faster speed played by a DJ who’s
on regular speed, or songs at regular speed played by a jock
with a sped-up delivery, but you can’t have fast + fast or
slow + slow, at least not anymore.
Once in New York, my little DJ business gradually became a
pre-recorded party or customized tape business. Using
tape-originated material, such as pop culture sound bites,
meant that I often needed to adjust the speed of those given
the varying quality of the source material. When I went to
find a tape deck with pitch control, I wasn’t sure such a
thing existed, but it did: the JVC double-deck I picked up at
the now-long-gone 47th St. Photo still works like a charm
twenty years later. By the ‘90s, consumer versions of CD
players with bells ‘n whistles like pitch showed up, and I
grabbed two beauties, one with a vocal reduction (otherwise
known as ‘karaoke’) feature.
I know most people could care less about pitch, which sadly
may explain why it’s so hard to get here in the digital age.
In 2000, I chose the now-defunct Sonique as my digital player
because it was (and, far as I can tell, still is) the only
free player offering pitch. None of today’s most popular
digital players – iTunes, Windows Media, Winamp or RealPlayer
– have a variable speed option, which to me represents a
backwards move technologically. Were electronics manufacturers
still in this game, it would no doubt be there. Yes, I realize
I could toss out a few hundred bucks and buy a DJ program, but
most of us shouldn’t have to.
One thing’s for certain: whenever I play my 45, tape, CD, MP3
or who-knows-what-format’s-next of Marvin Gaye’s “You’re a
Wonderful One,” I’ll keep making it, as Marvin sings, “a
little bit brighter.”
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