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A quick note to Nick from UWS and Estelle from Austin: If you spend any time learning guitar parts off old blues records, you will find that people tuned to whatever pitch was comfortable for their voices. You are absolutely right that none of those guys played Bb chord shapes, but plenty of them played A shapes with a capo on the first fret, or tuned high, or tuned low. In New Orleans, the standard tuning for six-string banjo players in bands (six string banjo is just a guitar with a banjo body) was 1 1/2 tones high, so that they could play G and C shapes and be in tune with the horn players who liked Bb and Eb.

Document Records vs. Fantasy Records

Jack White Track hurts my ears.

just because you can't "tell" the difference doesn't mean you don't "feel" the difference.

In the Classical world, most artists want to give the illusion of perfection, and that they were actually able to achive this, but it is more and more a completely edited and mixed fiction. Sadly for us but even more so for the artists themseleves it is no longer a document of their work but of their ability to exploit the recording studio.

I saw Imogen Heap's show the last time she was in town, and it was one of the best I've seen. She recorded her samples on stage, one by one, so we heard all the layering, and saw how she did it. She's amazing.

production dynamics and speed-aren't we talking about things that are part of the same,but also different?

Been traveling for a while and missed the previous show... interesting though. NPR was recently asking what the "best opening track" on an album was. I'm not sure if it was side A or side B but The Cars' Nightspots - played about 15% too fast cranked up on my variable speed turntable - was totally manic. I dubbed it at that speed onto a mixtape and when I hear it at normal speed it sounds plain ponderous. Cranked English Beat too; I wish there was a speed control on my CD players or mp3s, because I used to always speed or slow the music for my mood or the style of music.

Simone is correct (almost): 100 + 20% more of 100 is 120. But to get back to 100 from 120 we need 1/6th, not 1/5. So the actual percentage of slowdown should be 16.66666...% (not 18).

How come none of Johnson's contemporaries—especially his acolyte/disciple Robert Jr. Nighthawk— never speculated on the accuracy of the recording speed? They would have heard him in person as well as on shellac (or wax or whatever the medium was).

Obviously, over time the recordings would have superseded initial comparisons, but if the discrepancy was a whopping 20%, someone who knew him would have noted it, and probably remembered it decades later.

Everything sounds more natural in the "slower" version: the voice, the guitar, the "room acoustics," not just better.

The vibrato in Johnson's voice sounds more natural to me at the slower speed.

In the 1970s my college buddies and I turned Linda Ronstadt into the world’s greatest male soul singer by playing the 45 single “You’re No Good” at 33. What a rich voice!

i wonder if elijah is intimating that johnson is the white mans [aka brit rockers] blues man?

Nah...it should be the slower speed.

The slower version is precisely in the key of A, which is a dirt-common guitar key. All blues guitarists play in A or E or G or whatever.

Speed it up and it becomes Bb. No guitarist plays in Bb.

Nothing to do with "feel" or "sounds better".

Just a superfluous note: if the speed was increased by 20% you should slow it down approx. 18% to revert the change, and not 20%.
Another note: why not trying slowing down a blues singer that was certainly recorded at the right speed and compare the results?

Oh, he was using a capo? Ok, I can see the problem.
Did the industry speed up other artists' recordings at the time?

The fixed version of "Kitchen" you played sounds right to me and is in the key of A (more or less) which is physically more suited to playing blues.

Why is this a surprise? A "recording" is not a true representation of what "actually" happened, whether it be a photograph, video or sound recording. Simply listening to an MP3, one can tell it is not a true representation of what the music "truely" sounded like in the recording studio.

Wouldn't it be pretty easy to figure out whether the guitar in the recordings are tuned to the proper notes, rather than a few steps sharp---indicating a sped-up recording?