Jeezee Peeps Jonno!
That's quite an effort!
Shows just how much Alfasound contributed to the "sound" of ILR in its heyday.

And THANK YOU ! for including the "Download Button" on S/cloud for these, so that they can be played "at leisure"
- too many S/cloud submissions generally (not just the world of jingles) don't have it enabled, and not everyone
can make the time available to sit through muckle great files to hear them in full in real time.

Well done Sir !

Yes nice to hear them

Good work Jonno, some of those early Trent cuts are great. The Duran Duran Victory cut is excellent.

Love it - so many memories. I knew all the early Alfasound stuff - Pennine, Severn Sound, etc, and I remember how ground-breaking they seemed at the time, a company that was actively learning from what the US producers made. Great memories ... as they were later to sing many times. Thanks, Jonno.

Apologies, the audio quality on some of them is rather nasty. As time etc. permits, I may re-do one or two of them with better quality sources.

I still have a lot of those cassettes too, if anyone is stuck
:^)

PS - historically, a lot of the Alfa cassettes had intrinsic dubbing quality problems - azimuth, high-speed copying, etc.
For most Collectors back then, a Jingle Producer who ACTUALLY SOLD DUBS (and often in the clear / near-clear) was
very much a novelty!

I have most of them from the reels & DATs that were then used to dub the collector cassettes so if you have a particularly awful copy and want to hear Alfasound in all it's glory, get in touch !

I'd like to fairly soon now replace ALL my "official" bought-and-paid-for jingle cassettes with properly-digitized
(i.e. NOT low-bit-rate MP3) versions.

The actual tapes I'd be happy to give away as "Collector Novelty Items" for the cost of Postage & Packing!

I think we’d all like to hear/have good WAV copies Iain. Unfortunately I only bought the later cassettes which featured lots of JAM.
Isn’t it funny that Alfa were at their best, in my opinion, when they were singing their own stuff. “Sitting in the shade drinking lemonade...”

DuncanNewmarch said:

I think we’d all like to hear/have good WAV copies Iain. Unfortunately I only bought the later cassettes which featured lots of JAM.
Isn’t it funny that Alfa were at their best, in my opinion, when they were singing their own stuff. “Sitting in the shade drinking lemonade...”

Agreed. Signal '83 & 85, Beacon 85 & 87, Radio Tees 87 are some of my favourites. Their stuff for Radio Stoke was good too amongst others I could mention

Wow, super cool. I've never heard of these guys before, and they're pretty awesome. jonno, thanks for taking the time to put this up.

DuncanNewmarch said:

I think we’d all like to hear/have good WAV copies Iain. Unfortunately I only bought the later cassettes which featured lots of JAM.
Isn’t it funny that Alfa were at their best, in my opinion, when they were singing their own stuff. “Sitting in the shade drinking lemonade...”

I have a special fondness of Signal 2, Beacon 2 & 3 and The Invica packages and Chiltern 4.
If it came it to Beacon 2 comes out top - for the news jingles, The great Summer of Music, The 80's WHAM cut and the More chances to win bed

For many of us in the UK of a certain age, Alfasound was the soundtrack to our radio experience if our households listened to BBC or commercial local stations, rather than national radio networks.

For me, the Radio Victory packages for the Portsmouth commercial station (named after Admiral Lord Nelson's flagship HMS Victory, which is one of the main attractions in dry dock in the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard) are what got me into jingles.

In the beginning, Alfasound, founded by Steve England and composer Alan Fawkes produced all their own material. Later Alfasound became agents for JAM in the UK, so we began to hear more Dallas jingles across the UK. Either full JAM vocals on JAM tracks or Alfasound vocals on JAM tracks and in a few cases, JAM vocals over Alfasound tracks.

I still think the demise of ALFA (as it was by the last years) was very sad. Aside from whatever business issues there were they were producing some great UK jingles again or working with Top Format. Like the Wolf or Vibe packages.or "get Movin" for Galaxy and "Power Positive" for Essex FM. and if anyone has a copy of the Power Positive Essex FM package get in touch I love it! but only have the demo :(.

jonno said:

For many of us in the UK of a certain age, Alfasound was the soundtrack to our radio experience if our households listened to BBC or commercial local stations, rather than national radio networks.

For me, the Radio Victory packages for the Portsmouth commercial station (named after Admiral Lord Nelson's flagship HMS Victory, which is one of the main attractions in dry dock in the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard) are what got me into jingles.

In the beginning, Alfasound, founded by Steve England and composer Alan Fawkes produced all their own material. Later Alfasound became agents for JAM in the UK, so we began to hear more Dallas jingles across the UK. Either full JAM vocals on JAM tracks or Alfasound vocals on JAM tracks and in a few cases, JAM vocals over Alfasound tracks.

Thank you so much for the explanation. I was under the impression that jingles in the UK generally came from Dallas because of the pirate ships and later radios 1 and 2. Now things are starting to make sense. So cool that the UK had its own jingle producers--and really good ones at that.

JAM vocals over Alfasound tracks? Is there an example of that in your montages? I wonder what that sounded like.

Here we go, what better than a comparison of a couple of Alfasound cuts for Centre Radio that were re-sung in Dallas for Delta Radio a few years later.

https://soundcloud.com/jonno-10/centre-radio-v-delta-radio-comparison

In addition to jonno's comparison, here's a Delta Radio montage of the package:
https://soundcloud.com/gameswizard/delta-radio-alternates-montage

that reminds me Mike, I did a montage of Centre Radio alternates
https://soundcloud.com/jonno-4/centre-radio-alternates

I think I matched yours cut for cut IIRC

Clearly I have too much time on my hands. I've just played both our alternates montages switching back and forth between them and recorded the A-B comparison. Sorry :)

https://soundcloud.com/jonno-10/centre-and-delta-alternates-a-b-comparison

Definite speed difference between our two sources.

jonno said:

Definite speed difference between our two sources.

Delta montage was sourced from the Delta Radio CD (purchased from Alfasound).

The hard one to find is the CentreSOUND resing of the above package!
If anyone has it please, you know where I am!

That was the ILR for Central Scotland on 96.7 which had a flea-powered TX and later became bigger
Central FM 103.1 under the Radio Forth group.

gameswizard said:

jonno said:

Definite speed difference between our two sources.

Delta montage was sourced from the Delta Radio CD (purchased from Alfasound).

I think mine was a dub from a reel to reel tape (maybe the speed wasn't calibrated)

jonno said:

Here we go, what better than a comparison of a couple of Alfasound cuts for Centre Radio that were re-sung in Dallas for Delta Radio a few years later.

https://soundcloud.com/jonno-10/centre-radio-v-delta-radio-comparison

Thanks loads for that. I actually like the AlfaSound sings rather than the Dallas versions. They just sound out of place to me when sang by JAM. Sorry Dallas fans, I'm breaking for your ranks for this one :D.

I've spent a few moments montaging all 30 together...which fill a nice hole when you're commuting to work and back.

Running time is 29m39s

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Y4-sbU_g9CSrBw2sN0eoOr13WPFqT2PR

Nice one Dave!

Ummmm.... I don't really know where to start with all of that.

Jonno - what an amazing set of montages.

I purchased Tape 1 when I was doing my A-levels (Autumn 93) and was mesmorised by the whole tape - which is probably why the very first jingle on the tape (Trent 1) is so evocative.

I can't choose a favourite, but there are some packs that, to me at least, are a-maze-ing:

Invicta 2 / 3 / High Veld - but hey, who doesn't love a strong lead guitar in their jingles???
Hallam (Tape 8) - Just to hear Jimmy Helms belting out those jingles is sheer pleasure
TFM 2/Severn Sound - One of my all-time favourite Alfasound/JAM packages (Breakthrough I think isn't it?
Kiss 102 - Possibly my favourite late 90's pack, it worked so well both on-air and off-air
Max FM - Just because I worked there and loved editing my own jingles.. and they were damn good ones too!