Dick Gaughan, Les Barker, Jacey Bedford, digitising your vinyl and the Bodleian Library

Originally published in FoT Issue 102: Jan-Mar 2005

Well - what can I say? Bush is back in the White House, Blair thinks he is staying on for another four years (he’s probably right) and by the time you are reading this the Black Watch will all have returned home for Christmas (at the time I am writing it I already know it isn’t possible). In other words we are waist deep in the Big Muddy and the damn fool says push on. Guess who’s been back to Dick Gaughan’s web site for a visit! It’s one of those sites that you can rely on for an enjoyable half an hour or so’s browse, and not just to check his gig list or discography, which is all the information too many artists want to share with us. Most of his songs are there, music and/or text, though for copyright reasons there are some he can’t include. He has a little rant about that. His rants and ramblings always give pause for thought - there is a new and lengthy one about the events that gave rise to his song ‘Ballad of ’84’ - and are almost as provocative and entertaining as he is in performance. Dick made a point of getting into the spirit and the technique of the Web at an early stage in its development - I’ve visited and written about his site many times and no doubt will continue to do so.

I have not written about Les Barker’s site before, though he also takes the Internet seriously, having embraced the medium in a similar way to Dick. Les’s site is a bit like the html equivalent of a compendium if games. If you are acquainted with Les, you will know what to expect. A couple of poems. Photographs of trains. And a comprehensive though quite bizarre list of eateries, usually coffee bars in superstores, mostly conveniently close to motorways, but which enable you to eat and drink around the country while “avoiding motorway service areas”. Useful? Not so sure. Entertaining? You bet.

Jacey Bedford is a name you will often come across if you visit the uk.music.folk newsgroup, to which she regularly contributes. Jacey’s site is of course largely devoted to the a cappella group of which she is a part, Artisan. There are also a few extracts from Jacey’s sci-fi writing, although they tend to end with a message such as “if you want to read on, you’ll have to buy the book”. So it’s all very business-like, about which I am not complaining, because she has to make a living. But it’s not what I surf the Web for.

I’ll come back to the main reason I found my visit to Jacey’s web site invaluable. Can it really be as long ago as ‘Folk on Tap 84’ that I wrote about archiving your record collection? It can. CFB Software has produced a rather useful utility for recording from vinyl into CD audio format. There are usually so many bells and whistles attached to such programs that they can be a bit daunting to the computer newbie. LP Recorder is very basic, so is extremely simple to use. And it’s free. With the program installed on your machine you just need to connect your gramophone - remember those? - to the line input of your PC. Play a loud part of the record to set the record levels and you are away. It checks and covers up for loss of system resources and has an Auto Level feature to avoid distortion. You can’t remove hiss and crackle - for that you have to pay - but if your vinyl collection is in reasonable condition, and you don’t want to get involved in the intricacies of noise reduction and so on, you can transfer it to CD and stick the records in the loft. If you can convert it to MP3 files you’ll be able to get about a dozen LPs on to each CD, but that’s getting technical again. If simplicity is what you are after, LP Recorder is for you.

Finally, a word of advice. Never fail to explore the links page when you visit a site, if there is one. On Jacey’s site I found a very rewarding link. The Bodleian Library’s collection of more than 30,000 ballads has been gathered into a searchable online catalogue, along with a scanned image of each ballad sheet, for the Broadside Ballads Project. It is absolutely fantastic. Many of the ballads are illustrated, usually with woodcuts, and if they include music notation, you can click on a midi version of the tune. The search engine could do with being a bit more user-friendly, but it has obviously been put together with scholars in mind rather than oiks like me who are in a hurry to write a column, or pick a tune to learn for a forthcoming floor-spot. In fact the copyright restrictions are such that you can download images from the library for “private study” or indeed for the purposes of an “academic lecture or seminar”, yet nowhere does it say you are allowed to sing them. So I can only recommend the site, and recommend it I do, for academic purposes. I don’t want any of you getting me into trouble by singing ‘The Bonny Milk Maid’ and knowing all the words.

Seriously though, can you imagine how difficult looking for a ballad would have been 10 or 15 years ago? For a start you would have had to go to Oxford. During opening hours, assuming you had permission, you would have had to rummage through catalogues and boxes full of paper and, if you found what you wanted, write it out. How much easier it is now they have been digitised, to search or browse through them at any time of day or night, wherever you are in the universe. OK, I might be getting a little carried away, but I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - hurrah for Bill Gates! Oh yes, and God bless America. In fact, God bless us every one.