In 2021 we were given a bunch of tapes by José Moças, founder and owner of a respectable traditional Portuguese music label. These were in fact given to him by Mário Viegas’ sister, Maria Hélia Viegas, who didn’t know what they contained. The tapes were quarter-inch 2-track, recorded at 4.76 cm/s. Some BASF LGS25, Philips LP8 and Geloso. These were found to be recorded by Mário Viegas himself, except for the Geloso tape, recorded in 1957 by his father.
António Mário Viegas (1948-1996) was an actor, director and poetry reciter. He wrote a 250 page self-biography which includes photos, newspaper cuttings, text and comics within 15 days. Honoring the 75 years of his birth, Tradisom released that same biography in a large format book with the contents of the tapes available in 4 CDs contained within and through printed QR codes.
The tape transfers were generally straightforward with no mechanical issues. The contents, however, required a great amount of post-processing to help with recording issues such as speed, flutter and wobble. Soon we got to hear the voice of Mário Viegas in it’s actual pitch, which would be easier to guess in late recordings but not that easy in the 57’ recording of his father, when he was 9 years old.
There were also two tapes with recordings from a 2-day live show with an unfortunate electrical noise problem during most of the show caused by the dimmers of the stage lights. Attenuating the noise proved a monumental task as harmonics from the noise caused by the PWM operation of the dimmers spread throughout the audio spectrum with varying intensity depending on the actual light intensity. As fate would have it, the softer passages were accompanied of a dim lit scene, which further increased the amplitude of the noise.