Absolutely. Easy to do if someone decides that's the correct thing to do and takes responsibility for it and notes the corrections made.Can't you mathematically 'correct for' poor cylinder speed control to get an idea of what speed he was playing at?. Seems that if you know the info about the apparent pitch and the apparent tempo, and one makes a few basics assumptions: such as the tune should be played in the key of ?? and the standard tuning of that was was A= 440?.... then one could fairly easily calculate that actual tempo he was playing at.
I agree he probably played a bit fast anyway because his recordings don't have that drive that comes from hanging back a bit and not pushing the beat. Still, I disagree that the speed of a recording has to be way off to make a significant difference to the tempo. I think we really notice differences in tempo. David learned a lot of Mary MacDonald tunes from old tapes, some of which were too slow. Doug MacPhee has often had to remind him to speed up a bit because she didn't play things that slow. But it's hard to change your ingrained impression when you've listened to something over and over. So the lesson there is to make the effort to correct the recording instead of just tuning to it! But you have to be relatively sure that the musicians on the tape were actually using standard pitch or close to it, because that's not always true. At least with the Cape Breton recordings there is usually piano as well as fiddle (not that pianos can't be way out of tune too!).Trouble is you'd have to be really far off in the cylinder speed and/or tuning to have much of an effect on the tempo. I've a hunch that Skinner recorded with today's technology would still sound fast. At least that's the sense I get from my reading about him and his playing.
- Kate D.
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http://www.DunGreenMusic.com
Halifax, Nova Scotia
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