A Nice Advertising Demo Reel, A Not-So-Nice Novel, The Return of Australian Shortwave and More!

Howdy, good people! I've got a good variety of material for you today!

Let's start with what I'll guess will be the most popular of the offerings. What I have here is a single reel containing two demo presentations from 1969, from a then-leading voice in radio and television advertising, Chicago's own Bernie Saber Musical Productions, Inc.

This reel actually has two presentations from approximately the same period spliced together, with the details of their contents taped to either side of the tape box.  The first segment, which is about a third of the entire tape, and runs just under five minutes, is summed up this way on the box:

And the second set, running almost ten minutes, is summarized on the other side of the box. This section starts with a spoken introduction by Bernie himself, wherein he plugs his new arranger, Jerry Zervic (who is also mentioned on the box, which looks like this:

By now, I have no doubt you're champing at the bit to hear what all this sounds like. I do not believe you'll be disappointed. Here are both segments, back to back, as heard on the tape:

Download: Bernie Saber Musical Productions, Inc - 1969 Commercial Demo Reel
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Staying for a moment with the theme of advertising, here's the other end of the production of a commercial - the multiple attempts to get it right. I don't know who this is (maybe someone will recognize the voice), or when this is from, or why they needed to do so very many takes sounding almost exactly the same, but regardless, here is... someone... from some point... recording multiple takes of what I believe may have been a radio promo, for CBS Television News.

Download: Unknown - Recording a CBS TV News Promo
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Switching gears fairly significantly, now it's time to revisit something I have on several reels, for some reason, almost certainly a batch of reels that were all bought together, but got separated at some point, as I keep coming across this stuff.

Anyway, it's more Australian Shortwave, and specifically, more "Australian Mailbag". This nearly 28 minute tape seems to be made up of one complete episode, from the very end of March, 1974, then portions of two other episodes. It would appear that the first episode heard here was erasing part of the second one, and that the second one was in turn erasing part of the third one, so that we're hearing the most newly recorded episode (and only complete one) first.

In addition, the (very short segment of the) second episode was recorded on a faulty machine, and the speaker's voice was slowed down unnaturally. The opposite was true of the third episode, which ran abnormally fast. I have attempted to adjust these segments to approximate the correct speed and tone, but I'm sure I wasn't perfect in doing so.

Also, I will note the first, full episode has mediocre sound quality, and that the other two segments have even poorer quality sound.

Download: Australian Mailbag, March 1974 and Two Other Segments
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And now, something fairly peculiar, in both content and sound. Here is a man reading from part of what I assume to be a novel. I found this 16 1/2 minute recording on a three inch reel of tape.

And here's a thing I've found, repeatedly, about some three inch reels of tape - some of the tiny machines built to only handle this size reel must have been extraordinarily crappy. Because I find the same problem recurs time and time again with a subset of three inch reels - speech fluctuation. And it's always the same fluctuation - a tape will play with what is clearly a "sped up" sound at first, and the tone of the speakers' voices will gradually approach a more normal tone, then pass that normal tone right by and continue to gradually lower into an artificially "slowed down" sound. I don't believe that certain of these small recorders were capable of recording at a consistent speed, and went too fast or too slow depending on how much drag there was on the left-hand reel.

I've made no attempt to correct that here - the process for doing so would be fairly complicated. Besides, I think it adds an extra odd, at times creepy vibe to what he's reading, which, as I've telegraphed in my headline, is "not-so-nice". Not that it's out of the mainstream of boilerplate fiction, it certainly isn't. But I found it jarring anyway - I mean, why record this for 15 minutes, from what clearly is the middle of a longer work?

Download: Unknown - A Man Reads Part of a Novel
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And finally, as always, here's our very short reel for today's post. In this case, what you'll hear below is all that there was on a small reel of tape. I don't speak French, so if anyone would like to translate this 36 second recording, by all means, please do, and I'll include it in an update of this post.

Au revoir.

Download: Unknown - A Very Short Reel in French
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