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So here’s something silly and fun. I rediscovered my MP3 of a tune used for the end-of-year multimedia show at one of my colleges back in 1992. It’s a remix of Madonna’s “Vogue.”
http://stuff.albj.net/VegeVogue.mp3
Background story to come in tweet thread. (Tweetstorm warning)
http://stuff.albj.net/VegeVogue.mp3
Background story to come in tweet thread. (Tweetstorm warning)
Most of the show was a 35mm slide show using a main double wide screen, two standard screens flanking each side of the main screen, and a bunch of programmed slide projectors—I think at least 18, and maybe even 24.
One of the show segments was photos of dozens of students posing at a studio shoot, set to Madonna’s “Vogue” and enhanced with lighting and pyrotechnic effects during the show. The problem was that this college was a conservative Christian college.
It was nearly certain the music committee wouldn’t approve the song as is, essentially only because of some lyrics. So some show crew got the bright idea to try submitting an edited version to the committee to be used in the show.
This idea was born after one crew member discovered an instrumental-only version of the song, so the plan was to strategically swap in this version for key parts of the song with lyrics we thought the committee wouldn’t like.
This was LONG before digital editing. No one was sure how to pull off the edit without it sounding choppy. However, two years prior, I was a production editor for the college’s NPR affiliate radio station and had gotten pretty skilled hacking open reel tape with razor blades.
By the time of this 1992 show, I had been at a different college, but I was excited for this particular show and spent my spring break driving from Michigan to Tennessee and back to work with the crew. I elected to take a crack at editing the song.
So, over what I’m sure was many hours in the radio station production room, I recorded both the original and instrumental songs to 1/4” open reel audio tape and carefully cut out sections of the original, replacing it with the same section of instrumental.
There were also a few sections where I simply eliminated a phrase we didn’t want to include because the instrumental version didn’t fit well in those spots.
Naturally the biggest trick to all this editing was carefully listening to exactly where the beats were and finding the corresponding beats on the instrumental version. Thankfully I never trimmed too much and never had to re-record bits.
There were, however, a few cases where I sweated through having to shave off near-microscopic lengths of tape to make the cadence of the beat just right. Anyway, after it was all done, it was recorded to our master show tape.
Incidentally, the master tape was an early form of digital recording. We had a digital audio converter and it turns out the digital signal could be fed to the video input of a Betamax VCR. So the show was advertised as digital stereo sound!
This was a great solution for audio because the control signal for the slide programmer could be recorded to the VCR’s analog audio channels. Prior to this digital solution, I imagine the show was run in mono with one channel as the soundtrack and the other as the control track.
Anyway, because a certain faculty member was chair of the music committee and perhaps among the most strict, we named the remix after him—VegeVogue: the Wild Bill Don’t Dance Remix!
The original edited tape is long gone today, but I still possessed it in the late 90s. The last bit of time I had use of an open reel deck at the office where I still work (before it died), I digitized the recording, resulting in the MP3 linked at the start of this thread. Enjoy!
