These discs are remasters of a tape Doug Knapp gave me in 1987. A short time after Quest broke up, he sat down with some tapes, just grabbed a few, slapped
this together and jokingly called it "The Best of Quest". The thing is, there are a lot of good pieces in there and some could legitimately be on a true Best of Quest compilation. Maybe after I finish remastering all of the Quest tapes, I'll make my own compilation.
This is the second time I have remixed this tape for CD. The first time was in 1997 and only 16 of these songs made it onto that single CD. This was when home digital mastering was brand spanking new and it never occured to me to make a 2 CD set of the tape. I just looked at it and said "90 minutes? Better cut some stuff out.". I also included 2 pieces that weren't on the original tape, one of them that didn't have Tim drumming. That first CD is still the first homemade full music package CD I had ever seen, so it was still pretty cool. But this time, all of the music is on there. Disc one is called 'Side One' because it is all of the songs from side A of the casette and let's see if you can guess why the second CD is called 'Side Two'.
These tapes were not really recorded with the intent of future use beyond listening to the improvisations and possibly arranging future songs from them. As far as I know, this never happened, which is a shame because I keep finding some great almost complete pieces in here. They were recorded by sticking a cassette into a boombox, putting the boombox an acceptable distance from the sound source and hitting record. That's it. Yet the sound quality is pretty good, considering.
I have gone through the tapes a few times and done some experimenting and what I have decided was to forgo any noise reduction. The trouble is, these tapes already suffer from squashed dynamics and running them through a filter, mostly for eliminating tape hiss, just squashes the high end even further. The cymbals and higher notes on the guitar end up sounding like they were recorded underwater, a completely unacceptable result. After trying several different brands of software, I've come to the conclusion that it is not the software, it is the source. So the tracks have been EQed using a 30 band equalizer and I've coaxed a bit more dynamics out of the recordings, but the tape hiss remains.
When you listen to the songs, it's quite obvious that on more than a few of these, Doug just chose the middle sections of some pieces. As I remaster all of the tapes, you will be able to hear the entire songs on other CDs. I'm going through them all, chronologically, and just pulling the good stuff off. Originally I was going to do everything, whether it was a gem or not, seperating them into improvisations, covers, studio work and goofy stuff. After doing some initial work I came to the realization that I was looking at a ridiculous amount of work and putting out less than stellar material. So only the best will follow. My goal is to do a disc every other month, so if you like what you hear, check back once in a while for new music. And, as always, free of charge.
