Gillian Welch’s 2011 album, the GRAMMY-nominated ‘The Harrow & The Harvest’ is going to be released for the first time ever on reel-to-reel tape via her own Acony Records. David Rawlings reveals about the release, “as someone who spends a lot of time listening to analog tape, I’ve been a big fan of the reel-to-reel culture that has slowly grown over the past decade. So, given a window of time waiting for the construction of a new top-notch pressing plant (that’s another story), technician Brent Bishop and I decided to develop our dream duplication system for making peerless reel-to-reel tapes. Gillian and I are particularly proud that this release of The Harrow & The Harvest is, from the writing, recording and final reel-to-reel, completely homegrown.” For those of you with the equipment to play it, or if you just fancy a souvenir which can double up as a very sophisticated paperweight, the special limited release of The Harrow & The Harvest is available to pre-order here and will ship by mid-November.
Housed in a deluxe slipcase and custom tape boxes beautifully made by Stoughton Printing and featuring the original artwork by John Dyer Baizley, each reel-to-reel set is personally produced by David Rawlings at Woodland Studios in Nashville, TN and hand leadered on two ¼” archival quality SM911 tapes. The set also includes a complete song lyric sheet as well as an exclusive photo print by Mark Seliger, hand printed by the artist himself, autographed by Mark Seliger, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. These 1/4″ two track 15ips one-to-one duplicates are produced in real time from an original 30ips 1/2″ master tape on meticulously calibrated ATR 102 tape machines through a custom distribution system providing “proper impedance matching and the most direct path for the highest possible fidelity.” Beat that Spotify.
