CRACKING HOLD ON
Identifying all takes and the correct sessions’ order in HMC’s ‘Hold On’ appears impossible
, as impeccably described by Mike:
”
The entire session recorded on September 30, 1970 is available but had a numbering criterion without much control: some false starts or incomplete versions were counted in with a take number but others were totally ignored by engineer John Leckie; warm-ups or in between-takes rehearsals were not registered, the announcement of each take was lost at some point (between 7 and 22, and resumed until 23; 24 is announced twice, etc). It can be seen in the notes of the tape box that several take numbers were crossed out, so in the end there were more than the 32 takes officially registered, plus 3 improvisations (Jams) and a couple of rehearsals: “Look at Me” and “Glad All Over”.
Having failed all my previous attempts calculation-based, this time I focused on ‘visual search /comparison’
that permitted easier and quicker search and comparing (or to formulate and/or reject lots of possible tracks sequences)
Another key point (this time) was to give maximum attention to in-between takes /undocumented ‘blank’ segments (
signaled in red in figures and tabs), often hiding ‘something’, or crucial to make ends meet.
Majority of
Hold On takes are not announced (one is even wrong), POB 50th tracks offer little help and
Hold On's mastertape boxes are awfully written and much confusing, with many mistakes and often with greatly ‘rounded’ or wrong takes’ timing, (I got bad pictures, but even if they were legible, I bet the situation wouldn’t get any better
) thus hard searching for a split-second precision and corrispondence is a waste of time and a can be a hindrance
.
One more thing to take into account is the predictable discrepancies in defining
‘takes borders’
, between Mastertape notes,
HMC tracks indexing and what is observed in waveforms
But in the end, using this new approach, there have been some results, and more than I would have hoped (for example, I did not had to ‘displace’ any track in HMC’s track order
) :
E99700
Contains a pre-take segment and two ‘in-between takes’
HMC presents correct numbering and the complete (Hold On) recordings content of this reel’s
(to be accurate, a further minute of ‘pre-take’ may be missing at the beginning)
E99701
Looks like the most confused mastertape notes ever
Contains a pre-take segment and several in-between undocumented segments: HMC’s track 12, track 16 (the ‘Jam-BD-Are We on‘ fragments),
track 17 (the ‘
Look at Me’ Jam).
Also greater part of HMC’s track 23 is an undocumented dialog/testing.
The second part of the reel is puzzling.
At first i considered the idea of displacing track 25 to the following reel as ‘real take 21’ (track24 followed by 26 sounded great), but in the end the correct place of this fragment is between the little Jam1 and JAM 2.
Also the ‘real’ Take 19 is followed by an undocumented long dialog/test.
Rather surprisingly, -and despite the Jams ‘new infos’ exposed by
POB 50th, -HMC still offers the correct sequence,
although with a complete wrong numbering. The evidence is that, also for this reel, HMC released the complete content (33:06)
E99702
The material recorded at the beginning of this reel ( more than two minutes): ‘End of JAM 3' and ‘real Take 21’,
is missing
Some undocumented sections are present; track 38 is another of these.
After the end of Take 24, in a undocumented segment, there’s a wrong “twentyfour!’’ take call
Except for a couple of tracks, HMC's numbering is correct, and apart from the first two minutes, the content of this Reel seems complete
SIMPLIFIED COMPARISON AND CONVERSION TABLE