Help Save The Beatles Catalogue?

Wait till both McCartney, Yoko, and Starr are all dead, there will be a all out assault on the Beatles catalog.
Everything remixed, dance mixes, compilation albums, more formally suppressed outtakes and alternates released.

Universal is going to milk this cash cow for all it's worth.

 

One can never have too much Beatles product.

I think it would be nice if the American vinyl singles were re-issued in their original picture sleeves, and hopefully they will use clear images and not like the slightly fuzzy repros that were included in the Target department stores single with t-shirt or RSD 4 single box from a few years ago. Surely there must be better master copies of these images and if not, couldn't they go back to the original photograph and re-crate the sleeve using the same font and cropping the same way?

I'd also like to see coloured vinyl reissue editions of the Red, Blue, and White albums as well as of some of the albums that were made available in Europe in the 1970s, I think Pepper and Abbey were released but I don't know what the colours were.

 

From what Martin said in one of those books, Money was done with two 2-track machines in sync.
I heard here that the first 4-track song was "You Really Got A Hold On Me".

 

So they could do a new remix for all the stereo tracks on Please Please Me right through the catalogue to all the stereo tracks in Past Masters?

Although I stated that the catalogue actually sounded very good compared to some more recent recordings, it would still be a great idea to create new remixes of the whole catalogue (where possible) in my opinion. It can only improve them even more (if done correctly). I think if they did do this they should still stay faithful to the original mixes and avoid changing them too much.

Even though the catalogue has yet to be remixed I think it's safe to say that all the multi-tracks of The Beatles catalogue have been backed up digitally in high resolution, so the chances of losing them are probably now very low. The original 2-track masters were transferred flat to 24bit/192kHz in 2009 when the remasters were released. They probably did the same with all the multi-track tapes for possible future projects.

 

The latest stereo and mono remasters are fine by me. The chance for SACD's have long passed IMHO. Blu-rays I'm not going to buy because I'm done giving The Beatles my money for their albums. I love them but t here are many others out there I'd like to spend my money on.

 

The first two albums were recorded in twin-track to make a better mono mixdown, not to provide w-i-d-e stereo.

I think the best remix solution would be to pan the music halfway between left and center and pan the vocals slightly right of center (slightly more centered than the music). That's how I did my own versions and they sound wonderful especially when adding the vintage EQ bumps (or cuts) to sweeten the sound.

Recently a guy did fantastic spectral remixes of "Love Me Do" and "She Loves You". He's only posted the extreme panned version of "Love Me Do" on Youtube but the version with Paul left of center and John (& harmonica) right of center is awesome.

As the other guy said basically everything from the "I Want To Hold Your Hand" session and after exists. The existing tapes up to that point have all been bootlegged I believe.

My own theory is that in early 1964 when they wanted to make a German version of "She Loves You" and they couldn't just pull the original session tape someone put a stop to erasing their multi-tracks. Foreign language versions means more $$$$.

No. That's the result of a stereo mix of the basic take with a live piano overdub panned far right. You don't need two tape machines in sync. George Martin just hypothesized what he did in the past.

If Martin said that in his book then that's where Lewisohn got it. Lewisohn is not an recording engineer or technical person so he just took it as fact and repeated it regardless if it makes sense.

 

Please Please Me (the majority of which is in stereo) was recorded before I Wanna Hold Your Hand. Does this mean they don't have the multi-tracks for the Please Please Me tracks that are stereo?

 

There is some contrary information on what has been done.

I recall that originally everything (mixes and multis) was digitized in the 1980s by Mr. Jarrett (I think). Martin did his remixing of "Help!" and "Rubber Soul" from digital copies of the 4-tracks at his personal studio. I don't have any articles anymore but that was my memory.

Then when Giles worked on the LOVE soundtrack the story became that ONLY the final mixes had been digitized and Giles had all the raw multi-tracks digitized to high-res. It's possible that all the earlier work was redone.

 

"Money" is not a 4 track recording, it is two stereo machines linked via a power distribution block to allow the tape operators to stop and start both machines at the exact same instant. Electronic music creators had been doing that for years before The Beatles.

As far as new Beatles product, forget the released albums. We have had those shoved down out throats now for 50 years.

What I want is a complete audio restoration , done by professionals, of the Hamburg tapes. The 1977 Lingasong Records releases were as good as 1977 technology could provide, but its a different era now.
Technology exists today to make those tapes sound almost like a true studio recording.

Those tapes CAN be made to sound good, its a matter of time and money. I think most Beatles fans would be glad to pay a premium price for a 2 CD set if the audio quality was there.

 

They have the session tapes for several songs. Keep in mind that the only real noticeable difference between the session take and the finished mix of that take is usually some added reverb on the vocals and little EQ tweaks. Otherwise both versions are identical to non-technical ears.

 

Is there contemporary evidence in the form of a recording sheet this was actually done with "Money"? Saying the technique existed prior is not evidence they actually did it that way. Neither is Martin's memory.

My explanation above is far simpler and more practical.

 

Andy, there are no true "Multi Tracks" for the Please Please Me album. This album , and WTB were recorded onto two tracks of tape, no more. So, they mixed the stereo album from these two tracks, adding compression, limiting, EQ and reverb along the way.

About half of the tracks of the album still exist in the original two track master form (before they were mixed into the mono and stereo master). the rest were discarded once the album had been released.

Understand?

 

The "evidence" (as if this was a trial) is aural. For one thing, at the beginning, after the piano intro you can hear when one of the machines is started, there is a "bump" when the music track comes in, indicating a machine that was paused at just the right spot, then the play button was pushed.

Two, at various points in the song, the sync drifts a bit. Overdubs dont do that. This sync drift is caused by the motors of the two machines not being at the absolute same speed at that moment. NOTE: The same sync drift happens in the Stereo version of Please Please Me, which we KNOW was hand synced to put the harmonica rifts from the mono single onto the raw stereo tape.

Three, at one point , the fader of one of the machines is pulled down quickly and all machine noise dissapears in a flash.

"Money" was definitely done with two machines and is not just a piano overdub.
I took a class on 1950s electronic music, and got to listen to tons of that stuff, and the aural results are almost exactly what you hear on money......those kinds of syncs have a sonic signature.

 

I'm pretty sure that I read from a couple of reliable sources that all the 2-track masters were transferred flat to 24bit/192kHz when they did the remastering project in 2008/09. They were then transferred back to analogue during the mastering stage and then mastered back to 24bit/44.1kHz, which is what is on the USB device that was made available.

I knew about Rubber Soul and Help! being remixed in 1987 for their first CD release. I'm guessing these were the only two albums that had digital 16bit/44.1kHz mix masters, as opposed to the rest of the albums which obviously would've all been analogue.

I dare say that if they did decide to remix the whole catalogue at some point they wouldn't have to run the multi-track tapes again as they will just use the high rez copies that have already been made as the source for the new remixes.

 

Yes, I do. Do those two individual tracks still exist for these two albums?

 

Andy: They would most definitely mix from the digital copies of the multis and not run the analogs again. There is a sort of "rule" that the analogs are not be used these days because of their value.

 

For WTB yes,. for PPM, about half. The others were discarded or lost, no one really seems to know.

 

I presume doing a remix from these two tracks wouldn't improve things much. I'm also presuming that about half the instruments you hear are on one track and the other half of instruments plus the vocal track are on the other track.

 

Andy: You might also be interested to know that the GERMAN release of the PPM album was made from a different tape than the English one!!

EMI London made a tape for EMI Germany that had less compression, limiting , reverb and EQ than the one that was used to press the English Parlophone album. I have two of the German Lps and they just sound amazing, especially when played thru a tube amplifier.

 

That's exactly what I meant when I said that they'd probably just use the high rez digital back-ups of the multi-tracks as the source of any possible future remix. It wouldn't be worth running the tapes again.

 

They sound identical to me, just a bit of reverb on the Capitol.

 

OP posts a deliberately provocative thread then disappears without contributing further.....it's not like he's got previous for this or anything.....

 

Not really.....thats only "sort" of true on "I Saw her Standing There" and "Boys". The majority of the tracks have the vocals on one track and the instruments on the other, with the Abbey Road echo bouncing off the back wall and crossing over, created an "audio bleed though". Also, George Martin overdubbed some piano and a celeste and if
I recall correctly, those ended up in the middle.

 

There would be no point in going back to the twin-tracks for a few songs for an unnoticeable increase in fidelity and slightly less noise. The finished stereo "mix" is THE MIX, that's how they wanted it to sound. After that the sound quality has more to do with who's doing the mastering. A good mastering of 2nd generation tape will beat a bad mastering of a 1st generation tape anyways. Just 1 or 2 decibels at the right EQ points makes all the difference between blah and great.

 

As for "Improving" the stereo mix of those albums, heres how you do it:

You place the vocal track dead center, then use a Digital Audio Workstation to split the instrumental track into two discrete tracks, using spectral editing to bring out the guitars on one track and the bass and drums on the other, then pan them left and right. This is really not all that difficult, and I know this could be done and would sound great in the right hands.

In this matter, a very balanced, true stereo mix can be made. Also, for the overdubbed piano and celeste, since those are in the middle (I think) those could be extracted by themselves and placed anywhere in the stereo mix you wanted.