Beatles Please Please Me Album Stereo Mix- MFSL Version

Was She Loves You assembled from a Delta mono tape or from several mono mixes made from twin track? There must have been some smoothing involved to edit the different takes properly.

 

Simultaneous delta mono recording is said to have ended with the From Me To You single. I's possible it continued and the mono SLY was made that way, though there's no evidence. But both the PPM and FMTY singles appear to have been made from the delta mono tapes rather than the twin-track tapes.

 

On some of the titles, but not all.

 

I agree, with the exception of A Hard Days Night, Beatles for Sale, Help and Rubber Soul.

 

And when Stan Ricker called him to get his input, George basically told him he didn't give a **** how he mastered them. True story.

 

Most likely he didn’t remember the stereo mixes so he didn’t have a clue, but that’s my interpretation of how things might have happened.

 

Several questions for you or @lukpac

How many edits are there on She Loves You?

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that some of the edits are obvious even with the attempts to smooth them out over the years. What caused the poor editing job? It almost sounds like parts of the edits were equalized differently.

 

I’ve never counted them. Somewhere I have a stereo transfer where it is easy to hear/see them though.

 

No. Stan may have caught him at a bad time, but Martin was somewhat sick of hearing about the Beatles in the late 70s. Here's the section from the interview

Dave: Another famous LP, or set of LPs that you mastered for them is the Beatles’ Box. Is there anything special you wanted to say about the Beatles’ Box? What the experience of handling the Beatles’ master tapes was like, how much they were insured for, how they got here, so on and so forth?

Stan: Well, what I really like about the Beatles’ tapes was, as probably with all EMI tapes, how well their use was documented. Each one came in a flat tin can, a mu-metal can, and taped inside was a log of when the tape was made, when the original was made, when the two-track tape was made, when it was edited, who edited it, who put the leader on it, and how many times it was loaned out, to whom and for what reason, which was neat; for us (MoFi), or American Capitol, or dubs for European distribution, or whatever. Except for the stuff that EMI released off of those tapes, everything else was made from tape copies of those originals. That’s why the Capitol things that were released here in the U.S. sounded so different, indeed, from the original. The copies weren’t all that very good.

One of the things that interested me was that with some of the earlier Beatles’ tapes the voices singing were all on one channel, and the instruments were on the other channel. And it’s not what you’d truly call stereo. It was, in fact, two mono tracks which were originally designed to be combined into a mono release. But we found these things very interesting in their original form. So a discussion grew into, "Well, how do you think we ought to release these things? Should we be true to our format and say, we’re gonna release ‘em exactly as the tapes are, or we’re gonna release ‘em exactly like the original records were?" Well, we really didn’t want to release them exactly as the original records were. One of the very interesting reasons for that, among other things, was that the MoFi cutting system was dedicated, hard wired stereo. There was no mono switch on this thing at all. I’m sure I could have easily enough rigged up some wiring to make it mono, but we thought it would be really interesting to release the records as the tapes really existed. And we got into kind of a discussion. "Well, geez, you think we ought to call them up and ask them?" or something like this, you know.

The net result was we placed a phone call to George Martin to find out, "Well, sir, do you have any preferences, or do you care?" or whatever, you know. And the tone of his answer was that he seemed to be quite much burned out on Beatles stuff and really didn’t give a rat’s behind what we did with it. So we elected to cut it exactly as the tape format presented itself. And then later I heard that Mr. Martin bitched vigorously about "Why the hell did you release it that way?" And I believe my answer to it was, "Well, earlier I phoned you up and asked you and you, in your words, told me you didn’t give a **** what I did with the things." "So," I said, "It’s a little late now to complain about it." He agreed and so, rightly, it is. That was the end of that hassle.

 

Obviously EMI could have recorded PPM and WTB in true stereo with the bass and drums on the left, the guitars on the right and the vocals in the center, couldn’t they? They probably didn’t care for stereo records for teenagers back then.

 

As noted, the twin track format/technique was utilized to (in theory) create a better mono product.

 

Looking/listening to the transfer on the Heineken cassette now, which is a stereo transfer of the master. As such, you can hear and see the edits, as they were made at an angle and come at slightly different times in each channel. Edits:

0:12 - Second beat of the bar before the first verse, right in the middle of the guitar figure.
0:37 - Second beat of the bar before the second verse, again right in the middle of the guitar figure.
1:02 - Fourth beat of the bar before the "Oooh!" going into the chorus.
1:15 - Second beat of the bar before the third verse, again right in the middle of the guitar figure.
1:23 - Fourth beat of the bar before "Pride can hurt you too". Noticeable EQ change here.
1:31 - Fourth beat of the bar before "And you know that can't be bad". EQ changes back.

That basically agrees with this:

What Goes On - The Beatles Anomalies List

@Danny Caccavo indicates there he thought the EQ change during the "Pride can hurt you too" section is because the tape got damaged and a dub from a 45 was spliced in, but don't the original 45s also have that change in sound?

Why they stick out so much in She Loves You is odd, as From Me To You has nearly as many edits and doesn't have those issues.

 

More cymbal work on SLY? Those are the edits that are most obvious to me--the sound of the cymbals glitch.

 

Yes, they could, and in fact, they recorded their OTHER most famous group, The Shadows, in True stereo from the start. Its always been frustrating for me to know that The Beatles masters could have sounded just as good as The Shads stereo masters.....same studio, same equipment

 

From Rolling Stone: The Beatles' Marathon 'Please Please Me' Session, Hour by Hour

 

We had centered vocals on From Me You ( the edit piece) and on Money - so it was possible!

 

There's never been a question about it being possible, they simply chose not to do that. They could have done live mono and stereo mixes, or even used 4-track, but they didn't. Needless to say, hindsight is 20/20.

 

You really need to listen to it on vinyl in MONO as it was intended to get that excitement and enthusiasm with echoes of a young band straight out of The Cavern.

I am playing it right now in recognition of it being 55 years ago today that it was released in The UK.

Richard

 

The stereo “mix” - albeit accidently perhaps - captures that more for me than the mono folddown of the twin track.

 

Agreed. I think its because you can hear the excitement in the vocals more clearly on the stereo version.

 

For me it’s being able to hear the room sound and instrument bleed (although you can clearly hear the compressors kick in and out).

For the life of me I‘ve never gotten the complaining about the ping-pong stereo for this LP because there is so much bleed between the 2 channels.

 

Yes!! And, I've been saying this for years, that the PPM album is NOT a classic example of "vocals on the left", "instruments on the right" Stereo , as I've read literally hundreds of people post. Dont these people even listen? There are songs with material in the center, and several with vocals and instruments on one side, AND as marcb states, there is a ton of bleed between channels, with the mics picking up the signals slightly delayed bouncing off the walls of EMI studios. It adds up to very exciting, pleasant listening experience.

 

I can’t think of anything mixed center except the echo. And that delay is tape delay going to the chamber, not sound bouncing off the walls in the studio.

Definitely bleed though.

 

True. It’s not true unprocessed room sound, but it’s still “room sound”. And it gets somewhat lost in the mono mix. And it’s makes the stereo more alive than the mono IMO.

Much more alive than With The Beatles.

 

No disagreement there. Just clarifying what it actually is (and isn't).