I have been sent a couple of shows recently in the hopes I can do something with them and I am always happy to receive gigs (or even requests for gigs) but sometimes the quality in the recordings I find or receive is just a bit too variable. The show is all about rescuing old recordings and making them as good as possible but they need to be rescuable and to be listenable to begin with.
So, for the new season I've set myself a few rules to save some time and to ensure the series is as good as possible. So these are all now out of contention, unfortunately:-
- Audience recordings
- recordings that vary widely in quality from song to song (eg muffled sound/bright sound or pitch variations
- any recordings with distortion
- any with more than 1 song that's cut short
- any recordings which are less than 75% of the gig (hour long old FM recordings are fine but 6 or 7 songs from a set are not)
Does mean I'll have to forego some great gigs - more than 1 early Human League set for example; a great gig by The Jam from 1979 for another - but ultimately I want the quality to be there week after week and not to have to make excuses ("it sounds a bit rough but its a rare gig so wanted to do it anyway" etc).