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Here’s a follow-up to the JL tape debacle that I discussed in a previous post. The nutshell was that I after a mishap with my Fostex R8 reel-to-reel tape machine, I needed to find someone to convert a bunch of 20 year old master tapes so I can continue working on the Jesters Longevity archive project.
After tapping my network and sniffing around the internet for a few days with no luck, I came across a website for a recording studio and digital conversion service in Lebanon, TN (just east of Nashville) called The Tape Farm which seemed very reasonable. I reached out to the owner, Keith Leedham, to get a quote and inquire about a timeline. Keith was very responsive, offered a nice bulk discount for 15 reel-to-reel masters and let me know that his timeline right now is about 7-10 days out. Sounded perfect to me.
So on Monday, April 27, I boxed up the tapes and shipped them off to my old stomping grounds in Middle Tennessee, ironically very close to the place where I originally purchased the Fostex R8 that I used to record the tapes, and likely where I bought the actual tapes that I used for these projects.
During my time in Nashville in the early ‘90s I did some recording with a guy I met through The Nashville Scene classifieds named Mark Weisman. Mark had a home studio set up in his basement in Hermitage, TN and was working on some pop and dance music production. We connected around my experience sequencing beats and synths on an Ensoniq KS-32 (which I used for all of the Jesters Longevity catalog). His studio was built around a Fostex R8 reel-to-reel recorder. A few years later, I bought it from Mark and used it in my own home studio for a couple of years until it stopped working sometime around 2001. So, the tapes recorded on that machine have traveled full circle back to Tennessee, only about 20 miles from where I first worked with that machine back in 1994.
Keith from The Tape Farm let me know that the tapes were received on Friday, May 1 and the process of conversion has begun. He’s anticipating that they’ll be complete in about a week from then! I’m getting really excited to start working with that audio again and keeping my fingers crossed that the rest of the conversion process is completed with no issues.