Abbey Road 50th Anniversary Discussion. What Can We Expect?

Which is what I pin my hopes on - the preserved archives of pre-bounce recordings! Because YSS, Love, Sgt. Pepper & White Album 50th certainly have shown how pristine the tapes still are.

Yet this is also why I find the anemic Got to Get You Into My Life drums so strange, since by the time of Revolver they routinely did these kinds of bounces, and achieved far more robust results (e.g., the rest of the Revolver album). So why did this one song's drums end up so sounding watered-down, when 99% of the time the tape-to-tape transfers of basic tracks retained great clarity and power?

Hopefully, we'll see track charts when Revolver finally (please!) gets the deluxe treatment, and then more may well be revealed.
In any case, it's astonishing the kind of fidelity that EMI's engineers were able to maintain through multi-generational transfers!

Jeff

 

Yeah it seems to be an atypically botched bounce for some reason.

 

The Peppers remix was praised AND cursed by many.

The White album remix has much better variable dynamics than the Peppers remix. With not everything pushed to the edge of the red zone. I look forward to similar dynamics in the Abbey Road remix.

 

I'd rather get an isolated drum track from Oh! Darling

 

There'll be enough of THAT the 8th of August!

 

I've thought this for years, but listening again recently, I wonder if it was deliberate. Their lack of definition and presence suggest disorientation of being stoned.
Then again it could just be a botched bounce!

 

Not really, outside of this forum. It was as well received as anything can be, and so I'm certainly justified in saying it was "praised to the heavens".

 

I agree totally. Let's hope they get this oddity sorted out! Revolver is my favourite LP of the lot, so I hope they don't fluff it when the time comes!!

 

The drums sound like they're underwater or in a different room down the corridor to the rest of the band! I've always felt this, so I really do hope they correct it on the remix. It's a really great track that could sound even better!

 

Wow

 

Just got 'reccomended' this on youtube: '

Lovely arrangement and nice to hear Billy's organ part clearly.

 

Could the album be released on a Tuesday instead of the necessary Friday?
October 1st, which is 50th anniversary of the US release, is a Tuesday.
That way they have the party on the 26th of September (UK debut) right before the rest of the world had it.
Either way, it's The Beatles — no release date is truly Beatle-proof, is it?

 

It’s embarrassing how the majority of The Beatles 1965 and 1966 mixes sound. It’s jarring whenever it comes on the radio, while it has been recorded so good. A remix of that material is long, long overdue. Listen to what they could do in 2003 (!) for the Anthology DVD, let alone now. Still not perfect, but they then at least they put the backing tracks for 'Revolver' in the middle, with the vocals and overdubs panned.

 

Firstly, I second your 2003 exclamation! How has it been 16 years since the dvd came out?

I quite like some of the 60s remixes where the instrumental tracks are centre but with vocals panned. I seem to recall Nowhere Man was done like this on YSS and it works a treat (the lead guitar overdub was panned to the side also, from memory). Even with bounces, those 65/66 songs won’t have a lot of tracks to play with for Giles but something punchier has to be achievable surely?

 

Those rock band stems were sure fun to play around with!

 

Well you can listen to the first two tracks which were remixed in 2015 for "1." That's pretty much what I'm expecting this to sound like, but he does have the luxury to change those two mixes as well.

 

Have you listened to Here Comes the Sun before?

 

I found those mixes to be very restrained. Giles even mentioned that you don’t mess too much with the Beatles’ number ones, implying he played it safe. I think those tracks taken out of that context back into their natural home on Abbey Road will get different mixes. We’ve spoken at length about placing the drums of Come Together in the centre and I feel he may go down that route this time, especially given the Love, 1+ and original mixes are all fairly similar.

Something also has the ability to change a bit, bringing out that orchestra more would be ideal.

I think one of the remixes I am most looking forward to is Oh Darling. Those backing vocals soar and one element Giles has done mostly well so far is get backing vocals to be placed strongly in the mixes.

 

Yes, wonderful song.

 

The most-streamed Beatles songs of 2018 revealed - Independent.ie

 

Would renaming Abbey Road for this remix be wrong?

I was thinking Abbey Boulevard.

Or Abbey Road Remix 2019.

Or Abbey Road Centre. With all roads leading to the center.

 

I meant because of it’s mix. The lead vocals are badly panned.

 

Of course. EVEN - and this would be unnecessary and rudimentary in 2019 - some stereo reverb on mono backing tracks with spare overdubs on left and right would already sound so much better than the vintage mono or stereo mixes. And even with 2 tracks for the earliest material you can still work with enough to make it an enjoyable stereo experience, listen for example to the multiple 'Twist And Shout' remixes they did. Although you can basically do that right now at home from the original stereo mix.

Let alone with the 4-track material. With spectral editing you can very carefully extract certain elements. But how it often goes wrong there is that it's being used completely wrongly in a mix. Some of the most awful stereo extraction mixes on YouTube are tainted by the fact that clashing elements are being used all over the stereo mix. It's all about very carefully panning. Extract the guitar overdub from a vocal track and put the guitar 20% on the left. Extract the bass and drums from 1 track and pan the drums 20% to the right. It gives a great stereo feeling on backing tracks, and then you've got 2 or 3 more tracks to make it a full stereo mix without the full backing track only being dead centre. And without hearing artifacts like on those 2012 Beach Boys spectral edited remixes. Of course they didn't have much to work with, and those were mono to stereo mixes as opposed to what I'm describing here.

I just don't think Abbey Road is very into anything spectral editing related though. Because so far they barely used the technique at all, and even skipped on very easy tasks. The guitar solo on 'Good Morning' is on the same track as the harmony vocal, I take it? It would've been achievable to extract it, but instead the guitar solo is suddenly on the right channel when the harmony vocal kicks in on the right channel, and the last clashing word ("wife") is hearable in the left channel when the guitar solo pops up there again. Then, for 'Bungalow Bill' Yoko's short vocal could've been 100% successfully extracted, it being in a completely different frequency range to Lennon's vocal. Yet it's being panned around quickly, with the final phrase clashing again. And the line they sing together is both at the same place in the stereo spectrum, which is just distracting, because she was in just one channel 5 seconds before.

Or maybe Sam Okell - which is doing the heavy lifting on these mixes - isn't using very much advanced software and couldn't do it. Because the few things on which they used it are not sounding great. How they tried to make the piano intro on 'Martha My Dear' in stereo turned out awful, it's phasing all over the stereo spectrum, with notes leaking left and right. Unlistenable. On the 'Lucy In The Sky' intro you can hear the noise level jumping back and forth, while that's so easily avoidable by restoring the higher frequencies after extracting. The organ on the 'Pepper' reprise turned out OK, but shouldn't have been panned that extreme. So maybe it's a blessing in disguise .

Anyway, to come back at the 'Revolver' subject, it indeed seems somewhere in the original bouncing process things got very sloppy. Why it's so "muddy" with often the backing tracks plodding away in the background luckily hasn't got anything to do with how it was recorded, as the Anthology DVD mixes prove. With just the tapes digitalised and synced up properly that would already be a huge upgrade, let alone the actual remix process.

Same for - on-topic - the Abbey Road remix they finalised months ago. It's not necessarily about panning, but about fidelity. 'Abbey Road' always sounded from a lower generation, a lower fidelity. It's noisy (tape noise, not room noise), it's slightly fluttering at points with tiny drop-outs in the higher frequency range. Even if they would just remix it in the same way - which they won't - the fidelity would be a lot higher. Just compare the 'Something' 2015 '1' remix to the original mix.

 

I'm back, Paul says Hi to all members here by the way.
Will try to check out this thread but since I'm not OK, maybe not as often as I wish.