Bing Crosby and the FIRST Tape Recorded and Edited Radio Show in America (1947) [NOW in DYNA-STEREO]

Musical Highlights from the first tape-recorded transcribed radio show airing October 1, 1947, on the ABC radio network. Featuring John Scott Trotter and The Rhythmaires... READ MORE...

NOTE: This is the transcription disc recording that actually was broadcast of the tape-recorded master. If you use a search engine, you will also find on the Bing Crosby estate's website the ACTUAL AMPEX MASTER in PURE HIGH FIDELITY. Of course, I wish I could present that, but THAT is not publically available (read: copyright protected).

From John T. Mullin: (High Fidelity, April 1976)

"In June 1947, before Ampex really got involved, I was invited to give another demonstration — this time for Bing Crosby. He had been with NBC until 1946 doing the live Kraft Music Hall. He’s a very casual person, and he resented the regimentation imposed by live broadcasts. Some weeks he wasn’t in the mood and hated doing a broadcast. At other times he was ready to do two or three at a crack. He didn’t like having to keep an eye on the clock and being directed to speed things up or draw them out.

The obvious solution was to record the shows. But NBC had told Crosby flatly that it wouldn’t air a recorded show on the network: It never had, and it wasn’t about to start. So Crosby took a year off, and when he returned it was with Philco Radio Time. ABC and Philco had agreed to let him record. But because the process involved recording and re-recording on discs, the quality did suffer. Crosby’s voice didn’t always sound very good after two or three transfers.

During the 1946-47 season ABC’s engineers recorded each show in its entirety on 16-inch transcription discs at 33 rpm. If everything went perfectly, there was no problem — they simply would air it as transcribed — but that seldom happened. Almost invariably, there was editing to be done. That meant copying some discs onto new ones, making adjustments as they went, maybe substituting a song that had gone better in rehearsal for the final take. Since they recorded everything in rehearsal as well as what took place before the audience, there were plenty of bits and pieces to work with. The final record, therefore, might be two or three generations removed from the original.

When I taped that first broadcast, they asked me to stay right there after the show and edit the tape, to see if I could make a program out of it. I did, and they seemed to like what they heard. Once the Crosby people bought the idea, they had to find a place for me to work. The American Broadcasting Company had been the Blue Network of NBC until, a short time before this, the government ordered NBC to sell it. NBC and ABC were still in the same building at Sunset and Vine in Hollywood.

Crosby broadcast from what had been one of the major NBC studios. Prior to the breakup, there had been what they called a standby studio, scarcely larger than a hotel room, with two little control rooms at one end. One was the Blue control room, and the other was for the NBC Red Network. There was nothing in this studio but a piano, a table, and two microphones. If one of the networks lost its feed from the East, as they did once in a while, somebody could dash into the standby studio to play the piano. An engineer would run into the control room for whichever network was out, and it was on the air again with local programming.

Murdo McKenzie was a very meticulous man. It was his responsibility to make sure that a studio was available, that the musicians would be there, and that Morrow would have the script. After the show was recorded, it was Murdo’s responsibility to satisfy Bill that his script had been handled properly. And if there was anything at all that indicated where I had made a cut, I would have to rework it until it was inaudible — either that or abandon it. Sometimes it would take me a whole week to put a show together after Bing had performed it.

I had two German Magnetophon recorders and fifty rolls of tape to work with. With those fifty rolls, I was able to do twenty-six Crosby shows-splicing, erasing, and recording over the splices. There were no textbooks on tape editing in 1947, so I had to develop my own techniques.

We continued to record all of the material from the afternoon rehearsals. Crosby didn’t always know his songs very well, and he might start one and blow it. John Scott Trotter, the music director, would play the tune on the piano. When Bing got it, we would record two or three takes. In the evening, Crosby did the whole show before an audience. If he muffed a song then, the audience loved it — thought it was very funny — but we would have to take out the show version and put in one of the rehearsal takes. Sometimes, if Crosby was having fun with a song and not really working at it, we had to make it up out of two or three parts. This ad-lib way of working is commonplace in recording studios today, but it was all new to us."

#bingcrosby #philco #remastered

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