Last year Gillian Welch’s 2011 album, the Grammy-nominated The Harrow & The Harvest, described by the Washington Post as “Welch…at her haunting, heart-aching best,” was released for the first time ever on reel-to-reel tape via her own Acony Records (which she co-owns with long-time collaborator David Rawlings). It’s long been a favourite album of mine (more on the reasons for which shortly) so I got my pre-order straight in as soon as the announcement was made – not least because it was billed as being a limited release so I wasn’t taking any chances!
Judging from the PR that was released at the time, the impetus for the tape release seemed to come from David Rawlings.
Rawlings said at the time, “As someone who spends a lot of time listening to analog tape, I’ve been a big fan of the reel-to-reel culture that has slowly grown over the past decade. So, given a window of time waiting for the construction of a new top-notch pressing plant (that’s another story), technician Brent Bishop and I decided to develop our dream duplication system for making peerless reel-to-reel tapes. Gillian and I are particularly proud that this release of The Harrow & The Harvest is, from the writing, recording and final reel-to-reel, completely homegrown.”
As soon as I listened to the tape (which I’ll expound about below in my usual rambling fashion), I found myself being very intrigued by what Rawlings had said about a ‘dream system’ and a ‘homegrown’ process. The sound quality is truly astonishing – even for someone like me who has the good fortune to listen to a shedload of excellent quality sound – so I was curious to find out more about what was behind that system and process. I imagined myself having a chat with Rawlings to chew it all over. Then I thought, well I guess I could always contact their media folks and ask, what’ve I got to lose? And then, blow me, David Rawlings called me!
It was a captivating conversation, and a real inspiration to chat with an artist of his calibre who is also totally hands-on and ‘on it’ when it comes to curating the quality of his own recorded sound. He’s also a really nice guy, refreshingly open, endlessly enthusiastic and reassuringly easy to talk to. Our ‘phone call was more of a conversation than an interview as such, but I did manage to scrawl down some notes so I’ll weave in some of the main points along the way here.
Anyway, in true ‘rambler’ style, let’s kick off with a bit of a rewind and a scene-set, with the back-story of my discovery of Gillian Welch and how The Harrow & The Harvest became such an important album in my audiophile-leaning collection.
My Gillian Welch ‘discovery’
My first ‘heads-up’ about Gillian Welch was around 20 years ago, when I caught her performing on some BBC TV coverage – maybe it was the 2004 Cambridge Folk Festival, or possibly the BBC Folk Awards of the same year… I don’t recall exactly, but at the time her most recent albums were 2001’s Time (The Revelator) and 2003’s Soul Journey. Right off the bat, it was Time (The Revelator) that hit me hardest in the gut. Which kinda surprised me, since I wasn’t massively into the whole folk revival that was going on at the time. I obviously wasn’t alone in my fandom, though, as the album had already been nominated for the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album in 2002.
By pure coincidence, around about the same time I’d seen the brilliant Coen brothers’ film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? and enjoyed the soundtrack. It was only later that I discovered (thank you Google) that Gillian Welch had been involved in creating that soundtrack, both as a singer and associate producer, that she’d won a bunch of awards for it, and that she’d even made a cameo appearance in the film!
Anyway, long story short, I got really into her. I bought copies of her earlier albums including
the 1996 debut Revival (also Grammy-nominated) and the 1998 follow-up Hell Among The Yearlings. They were both great but it was Time (The Revelator) that still remained my personal favourite. Then again, 2003’s Soul Journey soon became my next favourite and over the years it would jostle for first place with Time (The Revelator). One huge aspect of the Gillian Welch ‘experience’ was, for me, the utterly wonderful harmony between Welch and her guitar-sparring partner David Rawlings. The way they play together is magnificent and their vocal harmonisation is nothing short of magical: think Simon & Garfunkel in their heyday (yep, it’s that good).
Then you add in the sound quality, which is impeccable. I mean, seriously impressive and way beyond the usual. Through a bit of album-sleeve reading and Googling I learned that Rawlings had produced all of Welch’s work since 2001’s Time (The Revelator), as well as co-writing much of the music. For me this was a pretty cool discovery that made Welch and Rawlings a really exciting duo with a pretty outstanding track record already. And definitely one to watch, to see where they’d take it next….
Before I move onto that ‘next’, a couple of things that hadn’t occurred to me before struck me as being kind of interesting while I was writing this blog. In 2005, HiFi News & Record Review magazine invited me to do a ‘Top Ten Albums’ feature, and my list (which is of course always a very moveable feast) included Time (The Revelator). Looking back at the rest of my list is quite revealing in terms of what I must’ve been mostly listening to at the time. Of my Top Ten, only one was a female artist (Welch), only one was a contemporary album (Welch), and only one was an album that had only ever been released on CD (Welch). So, I guess I was mainly listening to pre-1970s male artists, and I know I was definitely listening almost exclusively on vinyl. And yet here was this artist, this album, this CD, that made it into my Top Ten – that’s quite something, right?
I mean, the CD thing is what stands out for me here. Why? Because I know myself! I’ve been an unrelenting advocate (obsessive) of high-end analogue sound for as long as I can remember and so it was pretty rare for me to even like, let alone to keep coming back to, anything on CD. Seriously, over the past 20 or 30 years, a period during which many albums were only released on CD, there have been just a handful that I’ve gotten really into: The Imagined Village’s three albums, Tori Amos’ Scarlet’s Walk and The Beekeeper, and the Gillian Welch albums. For sure I bought and own plenty of other albums on CD, but there are very few that I’ve continued to play regularly over the years.
The pertinent point here for our purposes is that there’s a reason why the Welch albums sound so good, even on CD: they’re all-analogue recordings of the very highest quality – specifically, that particular ‘homegrown’ quality that Rawlings referred to. The only digital aspect was the consumer media i.e. the release on CD. We’ll come back to this, particularly the ‘homegrown’ aspect, as this was obviously something I took the opportunity to talk to David Rawlings about in more detail.
What came next: The Harrow & The Harvest (CD, tour and a later vinyl release)
Eight years after Soul Journey, The Harrow & The Harvest was released in June 2011. It was nominated for two Grammy awards, for Best Contemporary Folk Album and Best Engineered Album. The album came with a tour so I jumped at the chance to check out Welch and Rawlings live in November that year, and I wasn’t disappointed.
The Harrow & The Harvest is another superb album and soon enough my existing pair of Welch/Rawlings favourites were joined by a third. Now, all three albums jostled for the ‘top favourite’ position at various points in time. Then in 2017 something interesting happened…
Acony Records (Welch and Rawlings’ label) announced that they were releasing The Harrow & The Harvest on vinyl. This was, to my knowledge, the first analogue release of anything from the duo and so I was straight in with my order. And yet, back in 2017 I wasn’t too enthusiastic about modern pressings. Generally, my feeling was that the original was the best version of most titles and so while I’d happily spend big bucks on a 50 or 60 year-old piece of vinyl, it was rare that I bought anything ‘new’. But at that point I’d never even heard of Quality Record Pressings (QRP).
When the The Harrow & The Harvest vinyl LP arrived, I was seriously blown away on several counts. First there was the cover. While the CD’s cover image was a beautiful black ink line drawing on a yellow-buff ground, the vinyl album cover was exquisitely coloured-in (and of course significantly bigger than the CD version). What’s more, it was printed on the stiffest textured card stock that I’d probably come across at that point in time. Then there was the physical record, which I could ‘feel’ was different as soon as I slid it out of the inner. It was thick, flat and just oozed quality. This was in fact the first QRP-pressed record I’d come across and boy, was I impressed. Even better was the sound. To this day, that vinyl issue of The Harrow & The Harvest remains one of the best-sounding LP records in my collection. On vinyl you can hear more than ever why this was Grammy-nominated for Best Engineered Album.
If you’re not up for buying the tape, then do seek out the vinyl. You won’t be disappointed. But if you want to take things to the next level (and it really is another level, again largely for those ‘homegrown’ reasons), read on…
Sitting down with the 2023 tape release
Before we get down to it, here’s what you’re buying (the text is taken from the tape’s press release).
“Housed in a deluxe slipcase and custom tape boxes beautifully made by Stoughton Printing and featuring the original artwork by John Dyer Baizley, each reel-to-reel set is personally produced by David Rawlings at Woodland Studios in Nashville, TN and hand leadered on two ¼” archival quality SM911 tapes. The set also includes a complete song lyric sheet as well as an exclusive photo print by Mark Seliger, hand printed by the artist himself, and autographed by Mark Seliger, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.
These 1/4″ two track 15ips one-to-one duplicates are produced in real time from an original 30ips 1/2″ master tape on meticulously calibrated ATR 102 tape machines through a custom distribution system [more on which later] providing proper impedance matching and the most direct path for the highest possible fidelity.
Showcasing this remarkable album in a way you’ve never experienced it before, this ultimate package brings outstanding sonic fidelity and clarity to The Harrow & The Harvest, heralded as Welch’s greatest achievement to date.”
Did y’all get that – the tapes that you buy are hand-made (three-at-a-time) by David Rawlings himself. Now that’s what I call ‘homegrown’!
I started my first listening session by playing through the whole of the vinyl LP, to set the scene and to remind myself just how superb this recording is in any format, and particularly on vinyl. Rawlings’ magical finger-picked 1936 Epiphone Olympic archtop guitar is positioned on the left channel, while the two voices blend in perfect harmony in the centre, and Welch’s 1956 Gibson J-50 is on the right.
Then I put the tape on and something unimaginable happens. I say ‘unimaginable’ because before I hear the tape I can’t really appreciate how the sound of this particular vinyl LP could possibly be improved on. But it can and it most certainly is! The guitars are visceral, even more immediate and more dynamic. And when I say dynamic, I really mean it. There’s no vinyl LP in the world that can touch the immediacy and dynamism of this tape recording.
The resolution here is in another league, but please don’t imagine for a moment that there’s anything remotely analytical or unforgiving about it. It’s the very essence of deep musicality. The voices are so much more ‘there’ in the room and every single sound is ‘reach-out-and-touch’ real. The whole studio sound is there: raw, natural, true and life-sized. You hear every foot tap, every squeak of finger-on-string, every movement of hand on guitar body, and every slap of thigh. It’s utterly entrancing. As each song ends, the sound of the last guitar note decays effortlessly to a perfect close, leaving me in a state of consciousness that I rarely feel listening to any recorded music. I can only describe it as feeling ‘held’ by the way that each song ends so naturally, so gently, as if everything is exactly as it should be and all is alright in the world. I’m left sitting on my sofa, taking a deep, contemplative inhale of what I’m almost convinced is the very air in the studio.
This feeling of intimacy is, I think, created by a delicious combination of the both sound / recording quality and the performers themselves. The vocal harmonies and the perfect synchronisation of the two guitars is incredible. Welch plays rhythm, Rawlings lead, and the way the two combine and entwine is really up there. Again, I’m casting my mind back to the early days of Simon & Garfunkel, it’s that kind of magic at play here. The pair seem to know and feel intuitively and exactly where the other is, where they’re going and how they fit together. I sit there glued to the speakers, jaw hanging open, even eyes welling with tears at times. Track after track, I’m held, captivated and very much moved.
A chat with David Rawlings
It was an absolute privilege and pleasure to get to talk to David Rawlings about this tape release, about his and Gillian’s work, and about music and all things analogue in general. What came across more strongly than anything else was his (and Gillian’s) absolute passion for recording their music in the purest, most high-quality and faithful way possible. He very much struck me as one of those people who does what he does with love, curiosity, openness and a sense of constant exploration, with that almost child-like fascination for a process, and for endless learning and discovery. But don’t imagine for a second that the ‘homegrown’ aspect of their production has anything remotely amateurish about it. All you need to do is hear it to know that nothing could be further from the truth. In contrast, it’s built around a total, near-obsessive attention to quality and detail at every single step of the process. Plus some seriously impressive kit!
As a result of that total attention (and kit), Rawlings tells me that his recording / mix of the original album required almost no ‘mastering’ at all – just a few gain adjustments for the CD. It was, of course, recorded all-analogue. Rawlings was using 2” tape at the time on a 16-track Studer A800 Mk3 at 30ips. “For years that was my standard format,” he says. He then adds that The Harrow & The Harvest was all mixed onto ¼” tape on an ATR102 deck, except for the track ‘Tennessee’, which he preferred on ½” tape, which gave it “a little more, a different kind of size” to the rest of the record.
As mentioned earlier, Rawlings makes all of the tape copies himself (yes, the tape you buy will have been hand-made by him, three at a time). On the subject of kit, he even has a custom-designed all-tube distribution amplifier to ensure that the copies are absolutely the best. He tells me, “I can monitor the three machines as they’re playing back, so as they’re being recorded, as it’s going down, I’m constantly toggling between them to make sure everything sounds the way we want it to.” Now that’s what I call hands-on!
And by the way, he mentions, his preferred playback machine – a Studer A820 with custom tube electronics – was previously owned by mastering engineer Stephen Marcussen, who told Rawlings that the transport (Studer A820) was originally in Willi Studer’s office i.e. the A820 that Mr Studer had himself! “It’s an incredibly beautiful transport and paired with the custom tube electronics I really hear everything that’s on a tape, so it’s an essential piece of equipment,” says Rawlings. No kidding!
I ask him if he call tell me a bit more about the system. He says that ‘we’ (which I think was Rawlings and his tech guy) built the distribution system for making the tapes that you buy “because I wanted it to be cleaner than you’d get from just daisy-chaining a number of tape machines together”. So the custom distribution amp that they built takes the signal direct from the playback machine’s audio output cards and feeds it direct to the input cards of the recorders. This approach avoids all the transformers and electronics of the ATR 102 playback machine’s output and the ATR 102 recorders’ input circuitry. “This was the cleanest path that I could envision,” he explains. “We were also very clever and set it up so that the distribution box also starts all the machines and stops them so you can run it all from there.”
Even with the CD and vinyl LP, Rawlings and his team used more than one R2R playback machine (the highly modified Studer A820 and the ½” Ampex ATR 102) rather than using these to create an ‘equalized master’. In other words, they cut out a production step to avoid the extra ‘generation’ and its associated losses. And for the tape, they even managed to go back one step further – David did his gain adjustments on the playback machine – so the tape is a generation ‘younger’ than the master that was used to produce the CDs and LPs.
During our conversation Rawlings reflects on the fact that there’s something good about being in independent music, not ‘blockbuster music’, and the fact of being self-supporting to a degree. “Imagine if you’re Willie Nelson,” he says at one point and muses about having made a record that suddenly starts selling like hotcakes so they have to “keep cutting lacquers” in huge quantities. His point is that when things get onto that scale, there’s no way you can continue to ‘have your hands in the clay’ in the way that Welch and Rawlings still do, and Rawlings seems to definitely prefer doing things that are ‘kind of one-off’ but being able to do them as well as they possibly can, without too much external interference. (I also get the impression that this extends to not bothering too much about costs and income at times, which must be very rare in any recording artist. At one point he acknowledges that it feels good when a recording is later enjoyed and appreciated after he’s thrown himself into it “cost be damned”, such is the focus on doing something as well as he’s able to, for the pure artistry and experience of it.)
When I tell him how “there in the room” the tape feels to me (and also the vinyl, and even the CD to an extent), he tells me that this is a sound he and Welch have “always gravitated to and always worked towards”, and to that end they’re “endlessly modifying” the equipment they use. He also employs a full-time technician, to support the process of helping to achieve the sound they want.
On the subject of equipment again, he says that even the equipment that many people consider to be the ‘holy grail’ may not ultimately give you the sound you want in the end, since a lot of it would have been made and calibrated for specific purposes and audiences at the time – for example not just studio people but also, say, radio stations. He gives the example of certain Neve consoles, adding that he has one and loves it, but that “you don’t realise until you get deeper into it” that they had high-frequency and low bass filters built in, in case “someone at a radio station didn’t know what they were doing” and kept turning up the treble or whatever. “But if you know what you’re doing you can tailor how you use the kit for professional high-end use and take it to another level.”
After that we get into a fascinating discussion about the pros and cons of mixing and mastering processes. Now, if you’ve been following this blog over time, you’ll know that this is a subject in which I’ve shifted my perspective somewhat over time, thanks to several eye-opening conversations with various music pros. I started out with the classic ‘hi-fi world’ view (or tunnel) where you think that least adorned thing is always the best thing, but of course there are plenty of seminal records where that’s plainly not the case. So we end up in agreement that, to a certain extent, “the gear and all the stuff that’s happening” can be what’s ultimately key to making the record a classic.
But again, what makes the difference here is that it’s Rawlings and Welch who are doing “all the stuff” and choosing “all the gear”, and so it’s all part of their artistic process, rather than something that’s done ‘after the fact’ by some or other commercial studio people. And Rawlings wouldn’t have it any other way.
“What I think is so fun is that we all have this idea, this holy grail, of the ‘finished thing’ that we want to get to before the sound is locked into this final form. So you’re chasing that and you go down this journey. It’s like trying to find that spot, where you keep working at it and it just sounds better and better to you and then you kind of reach the pinnacle. That’s where you want your recording to get to, the point where it’s at its best sound. Which is why you don’t want it to have to then go through four more generations of tapes before anyone can hear it!”
I admit to Rawlings that I was amazed by how good Time (The Revelator) sounded on CD, and he talked a bit more about the recording. He said that the album presented some challenges to record because of the way it’s highly dynamic i.e. it moves fast and has a lot of peaks. It was also the first thing that Rawlings produced by himself. He was working with an engineer, Matt Andrews, (who he still works with) and this was their first project together. Rawlings had moved all of his ‘gear’ into RCA Studio B, “but really we were recording things very naturally, there’s very little processing, compression or anything else going on” which he says was “partially just because we didn’t know any better!”.
Otherwise, he says, “none of the stuff [that they were doing] would’ve flown because any engineer would’ve known that you have to limit things in order to get it onto a disc, whether vinyl or digital. You have to make compromises, there’s so much that you have to take away. So if you can get back that extra dynamic range from the master tape then for sure you’re gonna be happy”.
What Rawlings is saying here, and it’s a really important point, especially for those of us investing in master tape copies, is that to get the best possible sound – in any format – you need to start with a master tape that’s recorded in the best possible, no-compromise way. For example, if you take an album that came out in the heyday of vinyl, even though it may have been an all-analogue recording made to master tape, there’s a fair chance that it may have been recorded in such a way that it wouldn’t later stretch the boundaries of what a vinyl record can contain, before you even get into all the subsequent mixing, mastering and compression across multiple copies (generations) of tape. “Right there, from the beginning, compromises have been made,” says Rawlings, “and that’s what we try to avoid in how we record our albums in the first place.” No wonder their albums sound so incredible, even on CD.
I’m about to ask whether there’s any chance that we might some day see Time (The Revelator) coming out on tape, when (totally unprompted) he gives a very strong hint that he’s going to be working on a vinyl release of it, which I’m now very excited about! Then we get onto something else – like some seminal albums by other bands with big dynamic ranges that need lots of headroom and get “turned to mush” by production compromises.
Eventually, I remember to ask Rawlings if he has plans to make any more tapes. Interestingly, he starts off by telling me that this one came about almost by accident. “Part of what precipitated the whole project was that we’ve been working on setting up a new audiophile-grade pressing plant in Denver called Vinyl Media Pressing. [Rawlings has been appointed Chief Groove Officer for the plant]. So there was going to be this interim when we weren’t gonna be able to have our records in stock or pressed, so I thought it’d be fun to do something that we could make ourselves. Also I thought it could be really interesting to do everything end-to-end – from the writing of the songs, to the recording, to the mastering, to every step of this process – and I’d literally be making the end-product that we’d send out to people. Obviously you can’t do that much for everything but it seemed like a good challenge and I wanted to think about how one could do this whole thing, with every single job done as well as I could conceive of it.”
Amazing! So, has he got the bit between his teeth now and can we hope for more? “I would like to, yeah,” he says reassuringly. But there are no firm plans right now since he and Welch are waiting to see how this first one does. And then they’ve “got to get some new music out and then once we’ve done that, and maybe gotten a couple more things out on vinyl, I could turn my attention back to it. The nice thing is that the system to do it is built, and we know how to do it now. It’s just a question of figuring out which project I might want to do next. So let’s hope some folks come out of the woodwork and enjoy this thing and talk about it….” Let’s hope so indeed, as I’d REALLY LOVE to hear my other favourite Welch / Rawlings albums on tape!
So you know what you gotta do folks, if you want to hear more (and trust me, when you hear this, you’ll want to hear more). Here’s the link: https://store.aconyrecords.com/collections/gillian-welch/reel-to-reel.
P.S. I also made a short video with visuals and chat – here it is:
P.S.#2: I later learned that Acony Records is run from Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville. Welch and Rawlings bought the Studios around 2001. Woodland Sound was built in the 1920s as a cinema and converted to a recording studio in 1967, hosting recordings by many of the all-time greats including Johnny Cash, Neil Diamond, Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Elton John, Lynyrd Skynyrd, John Mellencamp, Willie Nelson, Robert Plant, Bob Seger, Dusty Springfield, Shania Twain and Neil Young. Seriously, these guys are dedicated to their art!
Dave Denyer: The Reel-to-Reel Rambler 