Two people provided me with this record, and for the life of me, I can’t find a record (pun intended!) of who sent them. Since both album covers are signed by the members of the dance band, I would like to return them. If you’re one of ’em, please let me know and I’ll return them promptly.
Click here or on the album cover to listen.
Like the annual leaf raking fiasco at the Forge, I’m cleaning up around BandSir.com over the next few days. You’ll already notice a few minor changes on the site — most of them cosmetic.
The audio player is now more attractive and the titles of the individual tracks are cleaner and easier to read. For the concerts, there’s a banner which identifies the year in which the track was performed. For the records, the album cover appears as the banner. (All the concerts are done as of this writing. I still have to clean up all the album data.)
There’s now a download button on the player so that you can download a favorite track.
A pop-out player exists so you can pop out a small separate window with just the playlist in it. It takes up less space on your desktop.
There are now social media sharing buttons on each page. If you would like to share a page, there are buttons at the top and bottom of each page which will let you share it to your favorite social media platform. If you’d like me to add a different platform than the four currently listed, let me know and I’ll add it if I can.
Lastly, I’m trying to find a better search engine that will allow you to search the site for a particular title. It sort of works now, but there’s still some refinement left in order to get it to work the way I hope it will.
I’m going to try to add more music to the site as well. I have a few more records to digitize and hopefully I can get to those in the coming weeks.
As always, if you see an error or can identify a track that’s unidentified, please drop me a note at danwolfe.us@gmail.com and I’ll fix it as soon as I am able.
Sidebar: Actually, Bill Kear had a great way to help identify the tracks, but I need to talk with him about it before going forward. Thanks, Bill!
Thanks again for your patience and for following this site! It’s always great to see new subscribers and familiar names pop up on the site.
Courage, Honor, Conquer!
Dan Wolfe
Band Sir!
Thanks again to Gerry Fornwald, ’55, we have this videotape recording from 1990. It features the entirety of the 1990 Alumni Weekend Band Concert conducted in part by Col. Feltham. The whole program runs around 45 minutes long, but you can click into it at various points in the program.
This is an audio recording of VFMA’s performance at President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 63rd birthday in Hershey, PA. Many thanks for the recording to Gerry Fornwald, ’55, who was there! There’s a fair amount of distortion on the original, but you can get a sense of the VFMA Band and choir in 1953.
Enjoy!
Dan
How I missed this, I’ll never know.
In rummaging around the site today, I discovered the page for the Spring 1974 VFMA Band concert. The page listed the music on the tape, but had the words “still needs to be digitized” at the bottom. Unbeknownst to me, back when I was digitizing the original set of tapes, I had some sort of issue with the 1812 Overture track on the tape. I had set it aside with a note to myself to “find a second tape” to complete the playlist.
Today, it was apparent that I never did.
When I started this project back when social security numbers were only two digits, I was using a borrowed reel-to-reel machine that was not in the best of shape. Many of the early digital captures suffered in audio quality because of that machine and my own inexperience at doing this. Some years ago, I got a vintage Teac reel-to-reel machine in good shape and it made all the difference in the world, so imagine my surprise today when the Spring ’74 tape played back first time flawlessly and with all tracks intact.
So now that concert is finally digitized and posted. Relatedly, I am delighted to report that even after a year still packed up from the move to Ohio, the reel-to-reel machine is is such good shape that I am considering redoing some of the earlier ones that sound less than optimal.
Before I do that, though, there’s more stuff in the queue to edit and some to digitize, too. I’ll be plugging away at it for awhile and hopefully make this collection a little bit more complete.
Thanks for all your support!
Dan
’74, ’76JC