Cheryl Pawelski: The Archival Process
This blog is part of IMES’ “Protecting Legacies” series, featuring guest authors’ perspectives on archiving in pro audio.
Two-time Grammy® Award-winning producer, Cheryl Pawelski has, for more than 30 years, been entrusted with preserving, curating, and championing some of music’s greatest legacies. Before co-founding Omnivore Entertainment Group, she held positions at Rhino, Concord, and EMI-Capitol Records.
What responsibilities or roles do you have in the archiving process, either personally or for your clients?
When I get to do a deep dive on a record or a group of recordings, I try to find absolutely everything that I can that was recorded at the time, no matter how insignificant someone thinks the recordings may be, or how damaged the surviving recordings are. My first responsibility is to properly organize and archive everything I can get my hands on. I try to assemble the entire picture of the recording session and the era and circumstances surrounding them. Getting everything I can helps me understand how the recording(s) were made, and the decisions that affected the process. My role is to get the biggest picture and most information I can, and then be the filter to ultimately tell the story. I’m mining for and surfacing the gold.
It sounds like it’s important to you to find tracks that have a reference vocal rather than just the final one, so you can hear the process.
It really is, and actually, any demos, early attempts at arrangements or existing tracking helps me understand the aforementioned decisions that were made in the recording process. Sometimes the demo is the one recording that actually captures the essence of the song. I like to hear all these recordings if they exist and finding all this material allows the best to bubble to the top.
What role does communication play in the archival process?
Being as clear and direct as possible in communicating the story of a recording, or a group or era of recordings saves so much time and confusion for everyone. It’s critical. If my messaging is confusing at the outset of a project, it has ripple effects that often result in mistakes being made throughout the process and that includes the archival process. If you’re not organized or haven’t done all the research, don’t lay your hands on the material until you’re prepared. Your communication is going to be flawed. You don’t want to be guessing - for the sake of the archiving and for the final product.
Is there any particular media that you’re afraid is not being archived properly?
Digital. Digital itself isn’t bad, it’s the media we’ve laid it down on, especially the early media. It’s just destroying itself. Most analog sources we work with are extremely useable, salvageable and have weathered the years, but a bad CD-R or DAT is completely useless. New places to store digital audio are more resilient now and it’s easier to make one to one copies to store in other locations for safety. So getting material off of 1630s, DTRS and DASH tapes or any of the crazy digital formats/machines that were around for a flash and then gone is of paramount importance. There’s a good decade or two of recordings that need to be archived properly right now to get the material off of these early flawed sources. In addition to the failing digital media we also are facing scarcity of playback machines, skilled repair technicians and people with a good understanding of how to play this media back.