James Brown - Night Train

David: I have the original 1962 45 (King 5614), and will shoot it out to you over the weekend, so you have an accurate re-creation reference as to its correct speed.

The correct 45 run time is: 3:16

The database indicates "original session recording speed" for the disc that Indy500 mentions. I just listened to a song sample of The Singles Vol 2 on Amazon, and I found something interesting. It has the same tempo as the original, but the key is higher. I wonder if this was a case where the engineer was trying to re-create the single version, but used their software to change the key without changing the tempo.

Anyhow, I don't have the original 45 to compare it with, so can anyone shed some light on this release?

According to the liner notes of the Hip-O release, besides the note that "all songs mastered from the original mono single masters," it mentions that "James (Brown)- or King Records - sped up the tape a half-step." So they were aware of the difference and you can certainly,as aaronk mentions, hear the higher pitch on the Hip-O release.

Edited by Indy500

Hi All,

I was curious on this one, but didn't have the Hip-O Cd so i found it on Rhapsody.

Aaron is quite correct - whoever mastered this for Hip-O made a slight error.
The pitch was changed on the track but not the tempo. Doing this also leaves a digital artifact which I can clearly hear.   The artifact is the same as you'd get if they had taken the sped-up version, and time-stretched it to be 3:30, without changing the pitch.

How can this happen?
Easy, if you're not careful.
There are quite a few options for digital "pro" software out there, i happen to use one called WaveLab.
In my software, when you want to change the pitch, it has 2 different settings you need to adjust, one is the measurement of your pitch-change (in semi-tone percents)...the other is called "length compensation" which by default is set to "100", meaning it will preserve the length of the song. When i want to speed soemthing up, i must remember to change that setting to "0" so it will behave just like speeding it up analog, and *not* preserve the length.

In this case, the engineer did the equivalent of forgetting the change that setting, so you have a higher pitch but the track is now artificially stretched out to be the old tempo and length. Not good.

Now, they may very well have had the 45 master, speed decisions are not always made on the tape, sometimes they are made at cutting, so they might play a tape faster while cutting the disc.
As for this CD, i see they meant well trying to correct the pitch, but no one caught that it wasn't quite there yet.
Good catch, Aaron.

-MM