Originally published at: Alvin and the Chipmunks at 16 RPM | Boing Boing
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OMG! My sibs and I would do that all the time with our Chipmunks albums on a player that looked something like this:
Playing the 33rpm album on 16rpm would make the Chipmunks sound like Dave.
Playing the album on 78rpm would make Dave sound like the Chipmunks.
(Yes, we were the weird family in the neighbourhood. Why do you ask?)
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Yeah, do Hanna Montana next. I’ll wait.
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… that cover of “Call Me” is actually pretty heavy. It totally does sound like something someone would deliberately do. Cool.
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'Ludes
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The first Alvin & The Chipmunks album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who played it at 1/16th its original speed formed a metal band.
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I used to listen to Georgie Fame’s recording of The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde at 1/16th speed. The shoot-outs sounded like a recording of the Battle of Midway.
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It was menacing, like you just know that call won’t end well…
I think that’s my second favorite version, after the original Blondie.
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The voice sounded a bit like Jim Morrison to me. That was cool.
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We had a Webster turntable of a similar sort with a 16rpm speed setting; in retrospect I don’t think we had any 16rpm records (plenty of 78s, though).
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Same here. Back in the 70s my dad, ever the garbage picker, scored a bunch of turntables from the local library. The 16rpm was for blind people (magazines would be pressed as audio on 16rpm flexi discs) and also for certain spoken word records (Mary Baker Eddy). We did the same trick with our knockoff “Happy Crickets” LP.
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Definitely an improvement.
Fun fact: if you play Springsteen’s I’m on fire at 45 instead of 33 rpms it sounds like Dolly Parton.
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This is pretty much the only useful reason to have vinyl records.
Sadly YouTube’s controls (the gear icon lets you control playback speed) only go as slow as 0.25x speed. Still I see what you mean about the shootout section.
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The other thing about the YouTube speed adjustment is that it does it through some kind of frame interpolation rather than with a pitch shift. So you don’t get the sounds actually pitched down at all. Just… stuttery.
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It’s brilliant. It belongs in my goth mixes.
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Dolly Parton music slowed down sounds exactly like Hozier. And vice versa he sounds like Dolly sped up haha.
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I used to do this all the time with my 78 and 45 rpm discs as a kid.
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Considering a radio DJ accidentally “playing it at the wrong speed” is the entire reason the Chipmunks ever resurfaced in the 1980s, and the specific song that was played at the wrong speed was Blondie’s “Call Me”, AND the entire Chipmunk effect was originally done by having the voice actors talk/sing slowly in their normal voice, and then speeding it up, it really should be no surprise that slowing their voices down makes them sound normal.
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