Accurately transcribing the audio tapes of Brother Branham’s Message into printed form is challenging, to say the least. We do this painstaking work by listening closely to each and every utterance of each and every syllable, trying to hear Brother Branham over the ambient noises on the tapes, such as babies crying, people worshiping, and other noises inherent with the older recording technology in place at the time of the original recordings.

This is done for two audiences: The English reader of the text and the foreign language translator who will be passing it along to the people of his language in a manner that they can understand what the prophet said.

Our goal is to accurately represent exactly what he said, with proper spelling and punctuation. The Editor’s Note is an important part of the transcription process. Most all are self-explanatory, but this one: [Blank spot on tape—Ed.] is a bit of a mystery. We use this to alert the reader/translator that we suspect that there are missing words in this spot and that there is a good chance that the previous words do not immediately tie in with the following words. Without such an indication, many places could be read as something he did NOT say.

You may have noticed while reading along with a tape that at times there is a click or a pop or a silent space between Brother Branham’s words, and the text says [Blank spot on tape—Ed.] and then it continues with what he said next. We call these “blank spots” because we are not certain what words, or how many words, are missing at that spot in the tape.

Blank spots come most often from when the reel tapes were turned over during recording. This always caused a blank spot on the original tape. Most of the time, the brother doing the recording had another tape recorder going so he could catch the words missed and, with Brother Branham’s approval, splice them back in later.

Some of the earliest sermons were recorded on 15-minute vinyl records. There were always blank spots every 15 minutes, when the recorded disc had to be replaced with a blank disc.

In some other cases, the tape broke or stretched and had to be repaired, and those words were lost. Sometimes, a tape may have been inadvertently recorded over, and a huge portion of a tape was lost. Other times, a tape may have been playing and an accidental press of the Record button erased several words. Some blank spots were caused by a problem with the original tape or tape recorder used in the field which was not detected until after the service. There are also the times when Brother Branham wanted to speak privately to the audience and turned the recording off. There are no doubt other ways also.

VGR has spent millions of dollars and immense effort researching and listening to thousands of reel tapes during the past 30+ years to discover new tapes, and FILLs for these blank spots. We have not filled them all yet, but we are always on the hunt.

No doubt, there are many blank spots that we have not yet properly identified in our transcriptions. We are constantly adding new blank-spot Editor’s Notes when we discover these places. Before we add a new Editor’s Note about this, our Audio Department researches to see if they have any notes on this spot, such as having original reels that “play through” even though it may indeed sound like there is a blank spot. Such places often sound like an ideal candidate for a blank-spot notation, but our research indicates that they are not.

Often, we may have another reel that plays-through that same place without the pop, squeak, or whatever, but we are not using that copy as our master due to other sound quality issues. Indeed, it may sound better at that particular point where it fills the blank spot but the rest of that source tape is not so clear.

Sometimes the blank spots just simply have no audible indication, but our research tells us that something is missing, although we don’t have that portion of the recording to fill it in. Sometimes it is a blatant change in ambience, sometimes a very subtle change, and sometimes it may simply be the organ music in the background that is the clue.

Basically, there are two ways of adding words to a blank spot.

The context of most of the blank spots make it very clear that there are words missing. For some, it is not so clear, but since we suspect there might be some words missing, we wish to alert the reader of this possibility. We often don’t know if one, several, or hundreds of words are missing in any given blank spot. When we find the tape that FILLs the blank spot, that is when we know and no longer suspect. We have filled blank spots with only one word, and we have filled others that were over 40 minutes long.

Typically, with a new release of our app, there have been newly discovered tapes added to the collection. Often, these come with blank spots in them. Also, we are constantly re-hearing spots, making corrections, trying to improve the accuracy of our transcriptions, and with this intense research, we often find undocumented blank spots in the audio for which there was no Editor’s Note. So, we add the Editor’s Note. Thus, the actual number of blank-spot Editor’s Notes increases due to us having a more accurate representation of what was already on the tape.