new grant project
Eddie Ashworth Audio experts seek to preserve a nation’s recorded heritage
ddie Ashworth learned his skills recording American pop music. But a project funded by an Ohio University 1804 Fund grant will let him use them to preserve a South American nation’s recorded heritage. The project aims to digitize a large quantity of historically significant analog recordings (tape or even older formats), archived by Guyana’s National Communication Network (NCN). Emeritus Professor Vibert Cambridge, who helped organize the project, says the collection, with an estimated 11,000 items, is a treasure trove of music, history, and more. “This is phenomenal material,” he says. He cited recordings of Bill Rogers, a Guyanese musician who was “part of the first calypso wave in the United States in the 1940s,” and speeches by Guyanese leaders and British royalty on the occasion of the country’s independence in 1966. Ohio University has a relationship with the University of Guyana dating back nearly three decades. When one of Ashworth’s students, Ricky Chilcott—now technology and facilities manager for Scripps College of Communication—traveled to Georgetown in 2008 with a student team to provide tech support for Carifesta, a Guyanese festival, he learned of the NCN collection. Given Guyana’s tropical climate, “he was concerned about its stability,” Cambridge explains. Chilcott told Ashworth, who shares his interest in preserving analog audio, and the project was born. In May Ashworth, Cambridge, Chilcott, and five graduate students traveled to Georgetown, where they collaborated with Guyanese archivists and media professionals to inventory and assess a cross-section of analog media in the public sector at several sites around the city. The teams confirmed the presence of many historically and culturally significant recordings, including an entire collection of multicultural music and spoken word recordings previously thought to have been discarded. They were also able to demonstrate that 40 percent of these recordings were rapidly deteriorating. A final report with recommendations regarding the stabilization and future disposition of the materials was presented to the Minister of Culture, who now has made preservation of the collection a national priority. The team next will seek further funding for "a full-scale, multi-year effort" to digitize the materials, Ashworth says. Once it's done, it will be available to scholars and students. Cambridge predicted some of it will be "of immense interest to our Contemporary History Institute," as Guyana has played an important part in American an European history for centuries, including the Cold War.
The collection, with an estimated 11,000 items, is a treasure trove of music, history, and more.
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co-writing tunes. A producer often will suggest changes to songs, Ashworth noted, such as which key to play in, and will advise on arrangements and instrumentation. What drew Ashworth to this line of work was a love of popular music and a lifelong fascination with the recording process. A devoted record collector, he used to tinker with tape recorders in his youth on the West Coast, and while studying English at UCLA, performed with an acoustic act. “I would say that probably most producers, and most engineers, start out with this fascination for the media,” he speculates. After graduation, Ashworth set out in “somewhat naïve” fashion to break into the industry: He wrote out his resume in ballpoint pen on notebook paper, made a stack of copies, and began knocking on the door of every Los Angeles-area studio he could find. That innocence paid off when he landed a job at West Hollywood’s Larabee Sound; his time there gave him a grounding in the nuts and bolts of recording, and in doing his best with a record, whatever its style. “Fortunately or unfortunately, I started working there at the height of the disco era,” he recalls diplomatically. “But I feel pretty fortunate, because I got to learn from some of the top producers and engineers in the business.” In a period he remembers as “a blur,” Ashworth worked 100hour weeks cranking out records in an often wild atmosphere. “It was character-building,” he jokes. “I appreciate it more now than I did then.” After suffering a bout of burnout during which he left the industry and Los Angeles for a while, Ashworth ended up back on the coast a few years later, working with a studio called Total Access, where he waxed some of his biggest-selling albums. Finally, after a couple of decades in the business, Ashworth wanted a change. He still loved recording, but saw the Los Angeles rock-and-roll world stretching out endlessly before him, and it didn’t look appealing. So he answered an ad for a faculty position at Ohio University, where he joined an audio production program that featured Emmy Award-winning associate professor Jeff Redefer, a former musician and engineer with the Pure Prairie League. He likes that academia lets him take “a more scholarly approach to what I do.” It’s his ability to convey what he learned as a studio pro, however, that makes students rave about him as a teacher. Christy Illius, who graduated in 2011, works mixing sound in New York for TV networks including the Food Network, the Cartoon Network, and VH1. She has no doubt that Ashworth’s training got her the job. While she had a background in music, she initially had little interest in the technology of recording, she recalls. “(Ashworth) took the time to drill all of that into me, and show me 100 times over if I needed it,” she says. Illius still carries a fat notebook, crammed with all the tips she got from Ashworth in her college days. “I call it my bible,” she says. “Every little chunk of information I’ve gotten from Eddie is in that notebook … and it applies every single day.” Josh Antonuccio, who co-owns an Athens recording studio and teaches in the School of Media Arts and Studies, says one thing that sets Ashworth apart is that while he’s a “fantastic” technician, he’s also a musician and unabashed fan. (In addition to audio production, he also teaches a course about the history and practices of the recording industry, which also covers popular music history.) “He’s a genuine music nerd, a music geek, and it really shows in his work,” Antonuccio says, adding that having worked with big-name rock stars definitely doesn’t hurt Ashworth’s cachet as a professor.