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Underground > Radio & Music >

Travelling Man - The Techniques

07:24 / 01.06.06

Where to start with this? I don’t know if this counts as a Song That Made This Country Great, it’s just a piece of music that I love and fancied sharing with people. I don’t really want analysis to be honest – what’s to analyse? It’s just a beautiful song and I’m curious to see if it squares with the tastes of the Barbmassive.

Bit of history - The Techniques were formed by Winston Riley in 1962 featuring the great Slim Smith, and two other vocalists, Franklyn White and Fredrick Waite. They first recorded for Columbia but didn’t have a Jamaican release until 1965 when they were picked up by Duke Reid who put them out on his Treasure Isle label (Treasure Isle being the big rival to Coxsone Dodd’s Studio 1). Reid’s studio was situated above his Orange Street liquor store. Legend has it that rocksteady was invented in the long hot summer of 1966 when the heat caused musicians to slow down the frantic rhythms of ska, creating a new sound. Early ska was based on imitation of American R n B and rocksteady wasn’t that different – only this time, it was the harmonies of Chicago-style vocal groups (l.e.The Impressions) that got the once over. By the time this track was recorded the original group had split up. Various reggae luminaries passed through the groups ranks including Lloyd Parks, Pat Kelly and Dave Barker. I think the lead vocalist on this is Pat Kelly, but I’m not sure. If anyone can tell me for sure, fire away.

This track has everything I love about Jamaican music – it’s incredibly simple, has stunning souful vocals, great harmonies and musicianship. The BBC made a documentary about reggae a few years ago, it featured a record shop owner pointing out that the music from this period is still popular and still selling on 7” represses just ‘cos it’s so damn good! These songs never grow old. This is something I realised for myself – I used to listen to a lot of dub and steppers (70s roots stuff) and one day got hold of a Trojan compilation sampler featuring a lot of rocksteady. Within the space of three months, I’d listened to it more than any other record I owned. I love it. It’s simple, great music for dancing.

So, have a listen and tell me what you think.

Hoping this works.

Yousend it here The Techniques - Travelling Man

11:52 / 01.06.06

So this is rocksteady...I'm liking it! You're right about the harmonies on this. Gives me goosebumps as the chorus comes in. And yes, the lead vocalist on this is deeply soulful. The yearing in his voice backed with those slow but optimistic horns...BEAUTY. I'm really enjoying this.

12:45 / 01.06.06

Hey, glad you like it

I will get around to doing some tapes of this stuff sometime soon. Most of my reggae is on vinyl so I can't do CD comps - and to add to the hassle, all the tracks are really short.

13:28 / 01.06.06

tuuuuuuuuuuuuune, lovely choice

>doing some tapes of this stuff

man that is old school even for me

13:31 / 01.06.06

What else can you do? I know you can rip vinyl to file/CDs but I'm fucked if I know how. Someone PM me if you know how.

11:43 / 04.06.06

Fabulous tune. Do you know what the riddim is? Sound familiar but a quick search hasn't turned it up.

Rocksteady is the motherlode of inspiration for reggae - each successive wave goes back to it for versioning.

There's a really very good new compo of rocksteady on Moll Selekta which they recently sent to me if you look out for that. Plus check for early Wailers rocksteady gear.

20:57 / 08.06.06

Probably a bit late to bump this thread as I expect the yousentit has expired now, but cheers for posting. Like (I think) monk I'd not knowingly heard rocksteady before, having mostly restricted myself to ska comps, but this is superb. I've listened to it pretty much every day since downloading it, so will definitely look into getting more like this!

ONLY NICE THINGS

07:29 / 09.06.06

I find I'm having to listen to it repeatedly just to get a handle on it - very different from the stuff I usually listen to. The vocal harmonies are _fantastic_.

On transferring vinyl to MP3 - way-ull. basically, you just need something that converts the analogue signal of your vinyl to a digital signal - connecting up your PC sound card's line-in (or microphone port) to your turntable's phono socket is the first stage, probably with a pre-amp in between to bump up the volume. Then use a software program like Audacity to capture the output as an MP3 file. There are easier ways to do it - either a professional service or an all-in-one device like this. Given how much terrific vinyl Barbelith probably has, what we probably ought to do is get everyone in a major city like London to club together, get the setup and then pass it around or have vinyl recording evenings...

08:43 / 09.06.06

That's a very good idea Haus. Night in with a few beers and lots of records? It'll be like being 16 again. I'm reasonably flush at the moment so I'll look into it. Monk kindly sent me a PM with some instructions.

Glad you both like the track! If people are still interested in hearing it let me know, and I'll put up a new YSI.

11:28 / 09.06.06

Just a couple of nerdy points about encoding vinyl. You need to connect your record deck to a pre-amp not so much to boost volume as to take account of RIAA equalisation (special bass and treble settings used to get more music onto vinyl).

So you'd connect your record deck into either a DJ mixer (via phono inputs) or an ordinary hifi amp (via the phono / vinyl inputs) and connect the Record Out sockets to the audio in of your computer / sound card.

I have geeked out on this to a significant degree this year in a bid to make archiving of dubstep and reggae as good as possible. I got a Graham Slee Gram Amp One phono pre-amp, a little box that does nothing but turn the tiny delicate signal from the record deck into a line-level signal. This in itself transformed sound quality. But the really big jump was getting a specialist hifi shop to get me a US-made Grado Signature Gold pick-up (a proper hifi pickup mounted in a Stanton Cartridge, not one of their admittedly very good DJ cartridges) which they set up in their workshop.

Sound is now very, very good indeed.

Oh, and I record to full-bandwidth 16bit / 44.1K audio (I may upgrade to 24 bit soon!) and I now always encode with LAME, which takes twice as long but sounds twice as good to me. I've just discovered the "Insane" pre-set, which makes 320K mp3s very close to CD quality, just a little treble smearing and loss of low level resolution. DJ mixes are usually mastered to 24 bit and then dithered down to 16bits in Cubase with some phat multi-band compression.

OK, that's enough geeking-out. I am now stepping away from the keyboard...

ONLY NICE THINGS

12:07 / 09.06.06

Thanks, 2sf - that's really very interesting. So, the answer might be "go over to 2sf's place with an armful of records", since he clearly has the kit...

It's great that all this beautiful and potentially frangible vinyl is being preserved - like the Guttenberg project...

13:14 / 09.06.06

(off topic - if you check the link I posted above in my second post, you'll click through to the most frightening archive of vinyl rarities placed on line. Of course, I can't access any of them, 'cos they're rapdi share files and I can't figure out how to DL them).

15:23 / 09.06.06

Happy to help anyone who can schlepp over to Sheffield to preserve their vinyl goodness.

Woebot's da badman. He still hasn't send me his fucking 2step mix CD (and it was MY idea!! sort of...). I deliberately haven't checked out those "whole LP in mp3" blogs cos I am already overloaded with stuff to listen to - haven't even got through the demos yet.

[OT]RIP Billy Preston.

Illmatic, any clue on the Travelling Man riddim? Fancy posting more rocksteady? What about some of that old funk'n'soul from way back, you still got that.

16:46 / 09.06.06

No clue on the rhythm, no idea if it's even known beyond this track. Will check with a more knowledgeable authority and come back to you. Fully intend to post some more stuff soon, defintely going to come through with some funk and soul. I've got a lot less stuff than I used to have, record collection has been scattered to the four winds these last few years.

Incidentally, I think this might be part of the reason behind the response Haus mentions - if you listened to a lot of soulful type stuff, it does take a while to get your head around the particular qualites this music expressing. I've had quite a lot of friends say this.