Beatles mix variations - WHY?

Remember too, that in the 1960's, particularly early on, there were great differences in the markets to which these records were being sold. The US had more interest in stereo. The UK was pretty much a mono-only country, and The Beatles themselves probably came at it from that British perspective.

Capitol was dictating what was happening for the US market and decided to provide stereo where none was available, hence the fake stereo mixes on tracks for which they only had mono dubs. It may have been the requests from Capitol that "urged" George Martin to even DO the stereo mixes early on.

Also remember that the reason that early tapes were misplaced, mislabeled, lost, etc. - this was viewed at the time as music from a disposable "pop" band, and not the early record of something that would be being analyzed and discussed 40 years hence.

Harry

 

Are those the only US stereo mixes (pre-"Pepper") that are identical to the UK ones?

 

No, "The Early Beatles" uses the same stereo mixes that are on "PPM". I think all the other US albums have differences (either entirely different mixes or use of fake instead of true stereo).

 

You make a very valid point Mike. Absolutely the Beatles, particularly Paul and George, and to a lesser extent John, were actively involved in the mixing process of their songs. But I do think having Chris Thomas doing the mono mix of Helter Skelter and then George Martin, presumably with Paul, doing the stereo a month later, differences were bound to happen. IMO, with the many variant sounds and structure, it's likely the mono mix wasn't even even referenced before they started the stereo mix. John never took an active role in mixing, occasionally he did, by telling Ken Scott or Emerick which faders to use, or taking delight making "number nine" pan across the stereo spectrum, but he was never a 'hands-on" type person. Of course, there's numerous pictures of Paul at the controls (pg 183 of Lewisohn's Recording Sessions) always with Sir George, or Glyn Johns, looking on. Ron

 

It's sort of fashionable lately to 'bash' the stereo Sgt Pepper mix as some dashed-off POS, but I have been comparing the stereo mix and the mono mix for the past month or so......and have come to the conclusion that I prefer the stereo mix on every song except for She's Leaving Home. The stereo mix appears to have been done with the intent of smoothing transistions between songs better and generally fixing little glitches. The mono (at least the version I have, a needle-drop of the Japan red mono), is often tubby sounding in the bass, and some effects, like the phasey-sounding vocals are almost over-done in mono and get annoying after awhile.

I don't care if the stereo mix was done in 40 minutes by the studio janitor; the results are pretty amazing. And keep in mind, I was jonesing for the mono mix ever since I joined this forum and was fully expecting it to kick the stereo's butt. It didn't.

 

To me, the mono took the cake. It really made me appreciate "Lucy" again. I really dig the phasing on the vocals, which the stereo doesn't have. I also like how in the last verse, where he references the train in the station, the phasing kind of lingers on making train-track-screeching sound effects. Everytime I hear the stereo, I miss that. However, I really prefer the Good Morning/Pepper Reprise/Day in the Life transition edits of the stereo.

 

That's the song that bother me. I keep thinking that there is silibance or the tape deck was out of phase or whatnot. The effect isn't quite strong enough to really sound "cool" to me on the mono--it just sounds like a technical problem. Oh well....

 

To each his own. I only heard the mono for the first time last year, so it was new to me.

 

Agreed. I only heard the mono for the first time 2 months ago. I have still never heard the mono MMT or White Album. I'm really hoping the reissues will include the mono like these advance reports are indicating.

 

Even "Sgt. Pepper Reprise"? Compare the sound of the drums & bass on the mono mix to the stereo (A/B the two if you can). The power of the rhythm track on the mono mix of this song absolutely CRUSHES the stereo. The bass is louder and more aggresive and the drums have a lot more "balls". A very exciting track in mono.

 

I tend to agree with you Jose. By Pepper, there was no last minute, do all the stereo mixes a day before a tour. Simple facts. There were two distinct stereo mixing sessions, one on 7 April, the other on 17 April. Four songs were done at each session, total time 9.5 hours. Two songs, Within You, Without You and A Day In The Life received their respective stereo and mono mixes at the same session. Sgt Pepper (Reprise) was mixed into stereo (the last mix done for the album) 20 April in 1 hour and 15 minutes... now THAT'S fast but, I think it's a tighter, more concise mix than it's mono counterpart.

The mono mix of Good Morning Good Morning was done, or I should say remixed after the stereo mix, and it's inferior. The chicken cluck/guitar note at the end is sloppier and doesn't quite match like it does in the stereo mix, and the animal sounds aren't quite as pronounced and tightly edited.

It's almost impossible to tell how long each mono mix took to complete. Considering most of them were done at the conclusion of the recording and the total studio time doesn't indicate specific recording/mixing breakdowns. My guess is each song took 1-2 hours to mix. It's also been mentioned many times that it took a bit longer to do a mono mix, particularly with all the bouncing they were doing by 1967. Take a look at the last two days of the Revolver sessions. In 22 hours, they recorded the last track for the album, She Said She Said; then mixed or remixed nearly every track into stereo AND mono at two marathon sessions 21 and 22 June. Dig this...

June 21
10:00 AM - 1:00PM stereo mixing: Love You To, I Want To Tell You, Here, There and Everywhere; mono mixing: Here There and Everywhere.

2:30PM-6:30PM mono mixing: For No One, Dr. Robert, Taxman, editing: Dr. Robert, editing: Taxman; stereo mixing: For No One, Taxman, editing: Taxman

7:00-3:45 Recording: She Said She Said; mono mixing after session

June 22

7:00 PM-1:30 AM Mono mixing: Eleanor Rigby, She Said She Said, Good Day Sunshine; stereo mixing: Eleanor Rigby, She Said She Said, Good Day Sunshine, Yellow Submarine, Tomorrow Never Knows, Got To Get You Into My Life

No wonder there's mixing anomalies on this album. And this time there was urgency. Two nights later, the Beatles would be starting their summer 1966 tour in Germany . Ron

 

I've always understood that he *did* catalog and listen to every tape. so the brackets should be accurate.

I still have problems believing Capitol was the "driver" for stereo. It doesn't seem like they tried all that hard to get stereo mixes (hence the use of so much fake stereo), and Abbey Road was making a lot of stereo mixes that weren't even used by Capitol.

Not sure what you mean. There are scattered examples of different mixes in the UK and US, but the majority were the same. Or do you mean all of the other US albums had at least one track that was different?

 

I find it easier to believe Barrett set out to listen to every SESSION
tape. Cataloging alternate masters would be very low on my
priority list if I had access to the actual session tapes...

It's simple matter of time management... his time was limited
(literally) and it would probably be a helluva lot more fun to
discover something like "12 Bar Original" than it would be to
find a well known song where the drums happen to be mixed
slighty more to the right - on one tape - than on another...

The general public finds the master tapes interesting only because
we are trying to explain differences between records released in
different territories... and possibly point ourselves towards
several that aren't as obvious....

And do we really know what his notes meant ???

On my scavanger hunt - I had tons of notes - and I'd be hard
pressed to assume that someone could figure out exactly
what each note meant.

Perhaps a tape without a bracket - might also indicate
a tape that had been recently RECOVERED from an
affiliate.

I imagine that any tape sent to an affliate - would probably
have a note saying where it was sent and when it was sent.
I imagine part of Barrett's job would have been to ask for
stuff back - if he discovered it missing....

Again - I realise it flys in the face of common sense to
say that EMI-UK would send a tape off in the 60s to
an affiliate instead of a COPY of the same tape... but
it explains why they seem to have constantly repeated
things that had been done previously...

Where the tapes went, whether they were returned,
who had copies, etc... is not something that can
be gleamed from publicly available information.

The fact that EMI-UK spent what I believe is a considerable
amount of time repeating previous efforts is a matter of
public record.

You're absolutely right that these extra mixes ended up in other
territories... not just the US.

And Capitol certainly wasn't consistent - because sometimes they
were quite content to generate a fake stereo mix from a mono
master... and other times they weren't... the appearance
of the three pre-Revolver tracks in both fake stereo and real
stereo is certainly very odd...

But my memory is that the extra stereo mixes ended up
in more places than the US.

Some went to Canada, some went to Germany, some went
to Australia, some went to Holland, etc....

I remember a mid-60s set called "Greatest Hits Volume 1"
and "Greatest Hits Volume 2" that was specific to either
Australia or Holland having some stereo material that
was at one time unique to that territory.

 

I guess its frustrating if you make "the Joe Brennan list" your personal
check list or "search list"... I'm not sure everyone does that - but
his web-page IS well known and people seem to go back to it
often.

The thing to remember is that Joe Brennan served as a focal point
for collecting the data (and in the end - a final judge - for several
cases where it wasn't incredibly obvious).

That list started because a book was published - that has since
long been forgotten - that came out slightly after Lewisohn's
book and it was missing a LOT of examples... and it was
embarrassingly clear that the authors of the book where listing
a lot of the variations based on hearsay...

I own about 98% of what Joe lists.... I probably owned about
50% of it when the topic started up... but I was lucky enough
to get interested in the topic back in a time when you could
wander into a record store in Princeton NJ and buy a bunch of
the records you needed to do the investigation for a couple of
bucks each... and back in the day, Joe and I were posting
stuff on rec.music.beatles every other day with our findings.

The people here would have probably been an invaluable
resource - if they were around on rmb at the time...
but back then - I felt more like Joe and I were boring
everyone with a very esoteric topic.

The stuff I'm missing I will probably never find - and I've stopped
looking for...

Stuff like the alternate early pressing of "Revolver" for an
alternate "Tommorow Never Knows"... the earliest mix
for "I Want To Hold Your Hand" (which I have heard as
an mp3)...

And I have a polite disagreement with Joe about two songs
that he used to list - but eventually dropped (with notes
that he wasn't sure).

The one thing I will give Joe Brennan credit for is he will
not list anything that he hasn't heard with his own
ears... but that doesn't necessarily mean he owns
the records... as the topic got more and more
advanced - he had people sending him tapes to
listen to...

I haven't talked to Joe in a while. The last time
I did - I sent him a copy of a Tony Sheridan song
called "Top Ten Twist" (hence my screenname).

He didn't agree with my theory - but after listening,
he did say he understood *why* I was fascinated
with the first Tony Sheridan album...

 

Well, what's your theory about the song and Tony Sheridan's first album ? I've been studying this part of the Beatles studio works for awhile now and would love to hear what you have to say. If this is considered a threadcrap, feel free to PM me. Thanks, Ron

 

while I don't agree that mono-takes-the-cake, I agree with everything else you've posted above

I didn't find a mono pepper until a couple of years ago, and it definitely made me appreciate "lucy" again - while some may consider the phasing "over-doing it", I think it really suits the song

but I also think that the mono "kite" really suffers compared to the stereo during the "random-loop" outro

and as you and jose jones state above, the edits on the stereo pepper seem smoother (though I do like the mono "reprise")

my personal "definitive" pepper is a mix of mono and stereo versions (and might someday even include "only a northern song" as a bonus, if I can ever get ahold of a mono mix of that )

 

IIRC, the brackets were added later by someone else who compiled the notes, decoded Barrett's notation system and put them into a more user friendly format. If there were brackets around a tape number, no location in the vault had been notated in Barrett's notes for the tape in question and the assumption was that Barrett couldn't find that tape. If there was no bracket, the actual location in the tape vault of the tape in question was indicated in the notes.

I think they used to be out there, but I can't seem to find them either. I may have printed them out at one time, but I can't track it down (so I guess I should put brackets around that statement, huh??).

 

Brackets. Brackets!! Brackets. Brackets!

That's correct - I am the one who typed up the Barrett notes (originally printed in the "Mythology" boxed sets), and I devised that bracket system as a shorthand way to indicate the lack of an "Elstree No." (vault reference) for a particular tape. All it really means is that as of 1982, when Barrett did his research, that tape couldn't be located. It's certainly possible that many have been found since or are still misfiled somewhere, awaiting discovery.

I understand there's a book out there which reprints and analyzes the Barrett notes in full...

- John

 

For those of us who don't own the Mythology set and never knew the notes were online before they disappeared, could you share the name of the book? A PM is fine if posting that info is a violation of forum or other rules.
thanks,
Frank

 

But it seems clear he listened to at least some of the masters. Like the "VOCALS RHS BUT GTR IN CENTRE" note for I Want To Hold Your Hand. Plus, the various mix tapes would be very small in number compared to the session tapes.

 

Part of the reason for the enthusiasm behind the mono is because it hasn't been made easily available in 20 years, despite the fact that both mixes were well-done. They each have strengths and weaknesses. They had so many mix sessions for that album, it's not even funny. Had the technology available for the 'Abbey Road' album's sonics been available in '67, SPLHCB would easily overtake that album as being the "best-sounding" IMO.

All things being equal, I will lean towards the more advanced "soundscape" of stereo. I don't think the mono "Lucy..." is any better or worse than the stereo. The mono reprise doesn't seem significantly better than the stereo, although the crossfade into ADITL is one of the few edits that were done better in mono IMO. The stereo crossfades too far into the intro for my taste. Like many, I also prefer "She's Leaving Home" in the fast/mono mix. Lastly, I definitely think the mono mix of the opening title track is better. It has the rhythm section (guitars/drums/bass) higher in the mix, and keeps the horns/crowd-noise/Paul's shouting lead vocal better in check. Basically, it makes it feel more like a rock song, instead of a novelty/"show-tune" (even if it was meant to be exactly that).

But for the vast majority of the album, I prefer the stereo. Martin and the engineers had to do such a ridiculous amount of repetitive mono mixing, that they knew how these songs should sound backwards and forwards. All they had to do for stereo was decide where to pan the tracks. They already had the mix levels, EQ, and compression memorized. They could have spent twice the amount of time on stereo mixing for that album than what they did, and they would've come up with the pretty much the exact same result (I believe the "slow" version of SLH was not a product of being rushed, but a purposeful decision by Emerick/Martin. Because the Beatles were usually not present for stereo mixing before the 'White Album', stereo sessions were sometimes used as an opportunity to "experiment" slightly. I know that at least Emerick has said this)...

 

I'll agree that its dangerous to make general statements (which I am
guilty of - more often than I am happy about)


Of the three "I Want To Hold Your Hand" stereo mixes that were done,
the one most likely to have gone missing was probably the 2nd one.

The first mix is the most dramatic in terms of separation - so it's
easy to see that when the request for a stereo mix came in
(about a year later for what I seem to recall was a "Greatest Hits
Volume 1" collection put together by a non-US affiliate)- that
the powers that be decided to make a new mix - simply because
they didn't like the original mix....

But then when the time came to put together a similar compilation
in the UK (Oldies but Goldies), its puzzling to ponder why they
did a 3rd mix... unless they hadn't kept the revised mix they did a
year prior...

Is Ken Scott still hanging around here ?

I really think he could shed some light on why this sort
of thing kept happening.


The entries in Lewisohn that were clearly embarrassing for Mark
centered around the songs that were provided to Capitol for
THE BEATLES 2ND ALBUM (prior to release of the EP in the UK).

Mark claimed that some of the mixes that must have been used
for the US album were "experimental - never used" - but they
appear to be the ONLY mixes made prior to the release of the
vinyl... so the idea that they were "never used" can't
be correct...

That's a no brainer...

But some other things that appear to have happened
don't make ANY sense (such as the fake stereo
mixes created in the US for the three pre-Revolver
tracks - where real mono and real stereo mixes
were created and also used by Capitol)...

It's almost like a trans-Atlantic shipment arrived
a day too late - and someone at Capitol panicked...

 

I'm glad you mentioned the Reprise. I don't like the mono version at all. The overall volume seems to fade up and down a little and while the bass and drums are a bit louder, the tambourine or whatever that shaking percussion sound is....tends to "eat" the guitars and hide them. I also cannot stand that silly McCartney shouting/ad-libbing right at the end that abruptly gets cut off as Day In the Life starts....a terrible segue there in comparison to the stereo.

 

It's really hard to judge the merits of one mix over another after having heard the same mix for 30+ years and then suddenly hearing something that is so different both in its content and in its sound.

I have original LP's of both the mono and the stereo, and I do find myself listening to the stereo LP more. It has a nice smooth tubey sound to it (that's partially missing in later pressings) and has a bit more air between the instruments (something that was lacking in the previous LP). The mono, OTOH, has a muffled sound to it in general, which was the MO when cutting mono vinyl back then. Still I don't kid myself for a moment that the stereo mix is more though out, more coherent and more intelligent. The mono mix has all the earmarks of a mix made with care. There are clearly more effects, perhaps to a fault, but that is what the Beatles wanted. All of the complaints of the mono mix of sloppy editing, IMO, are really just the jarring reaction to a different edit than you are used to.

Take for example the edit between "Good Morning..." and the "Reprise". The two edits sound completely different, and many forum members have said that they find the edit in the mono LP sloppy. But really the edit is exactly the same. The only difference being in that the two parts of the edit (the guitar) in stereo are mixed much lower and are in opposite channels. The effect may be different, but that doesn't make it sloppy.