Karen Carpenter on the radio in 1979

Karen Carpenter's album was largely recorded in 1979. Let's use a thought experiment with some audio reinforcement to help out.

Fans have often wondered how Karen's solo album would have been received back in 1979-1980 had it been released and properly promoted, so lets go back to that time period and we're going to "release" the song "If I Had You", as it was recorded for that album, as a single.

1979 was at the tail end of the dominance of AM radio. Some markets still had some pretty powerful AM radio stations, so while we're inventing imaginary singles, let's put our single on an AM radio station. The station I've chosen was actually a real station in Richmond, Virginia, called WRNL at the time. (Today it's a sports station). The jingle you'll hear was a jingle package created by Pepper-Tanner and was a demo jingle. I don't believe it was used on the station, but I didn't listen, so I really don't know. According to the web, WRNL was a CBS radio affiliate, so at the top of the hour, we would hear the famous CBS News radio sounder.

Since this was an AM station, there had to be some audio processing done to simulate that sound. First, I took the stereo single and used some audio processing to reduce it to a semi-proper mono mix. Next I ran the song through a compression algorithm in order to make it sound like it would have on a station processor. Then I used an EQ filter to chop off the extreme highs and lows, just the way it would have sounded on an AM station.

We take you now back to 1979. Your AM radio is tuned to 910 AM in Richmond, VA. It's about four minutes before the hour...

Видео Karen Carpenter on the radio in 1979 канала TheHGN2001