But it’s ok to spend huge amounts of money on products where there is no artistic compensation, no royalties and no publishing. If it’s official product it has to be given away cheaply.
I've heard there is some good oldies jams in the Abbey Road sessions so fingers crossed we get some great ones next year for the deluxe set.
To summarise my thoughts on the remix.... Stand out highlights: Glass Onion - Perfect, looooove the strings!!!! Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill - Makes me want to listen to it over and over Happiness Is a Warm Gun - Everything in the mix shines now I'm So Tired - Beautiful punch on bass and drums! Everybody's Got Something To Hide - That punch again! Questionable moments (what i've noticed when flipping back and forth between original stereo mix and remix): Back in The USSR - Needs more grit and presence from the guitars but overall sound is lush! Dear Prudence - Intro guitar is different, not sure it it needed to be? Ob La Di - Missing handclap? Slightly thinner sounding then some of the punchier tracks (not a deal breaker, just an observation) Wild Honey Pie - Went too far with the ADT.... an effect that was once subtle yet effective now sounds like a couple of kids just got their hands on an ADT machine and had some fun... While My Guitar - Sounds good but there's something lacking and i'm not sure what. Giles said he had trouble with this one and it kinda sounds like it but I totally sympathise with him. Yer Blues - Not sold on the delayed vocal all the way through but it's not a deal breaker Helter Skelter - I soooo wanted this to be perfect but the levels aren't quite right especially on the guitars. Everything that needs to be loud towards the end just isn't. Long Long Long - Vocal feels like it is missing a bit of that eerie delay that was so prominent on the original mix. Maybe its just a different delay but it was a bit warmer and lush in the original. It's still there but seems a tad on the dry side. Minor gripe! Revolution 1 - I think the vocals are a bit more suited when they're back slightly in the mix and the brass is up front a bit more. I feel like we're losing something slightly within the balance of the instruments. Conclusion: A lot of these difference wouldn't be noticeable or as obvious if I wasn't switching back and forth between the original and new mix. There's nothing I hate in these mixes (although Wild Honey Pie is borderline). There are a couple of disappointments with parts that I was fond of in the originals but as a whole, new life has been brought into these songs. It'd be great if they were all perfect but perfect to me is not to someone else. The songs I was most impressed with are ones that were never favourites of mine (except for Glass Onion) but now I could listen to them over and over! Overall EQ's are very pleasing and they haven't gone crazy with the compression. Great job Sam and Giles!!
But people can't decide which threads to keep and which ones to remove... just like with shaving the track list of the double White Album down to a single LP.
No, unfortunately he had a family issue the day we were supposed to do it and never rescheduled. At this point he must be listening to the WA box that will never be released.
Good call on "Wild Honey Pie"! You make sense of both our ideas, and clarified what's audible, then and now. Overall, it does sound rather awash in whatever that 2018 remix effect is... The painful thing is, they could have remixed it as done in '68. And personally, I don't see this remix as an improvement. Nor as a complete disaster, either. Just wasted "modern" effort. Perhaps, like the burying of the flamenco guitar Tron on the start of "Bungalow Bill," or the inordinately loud first line of Lennon's vocal in "Dear Prudence," and other such examples, Mr. Martin will wish to elucidate his decisions at greater length. I'd be interested in anything technical he has to say. Jeff
I have to say if that first Revolution outtake is any indication of what it was like to work on The White Album, I can understand why George Martin didn't look back on it with fondness and multiple engineers quit lol. I mean I get it that for us it's cool to get these glimpses into making the songs, but for the people whose jobs it was to sit there for hours on end to listen to takes that just kept going and going and going and KNOWING that it wasn't going to be anything that was tangibly useful/usable, it just had to get painful lol. I can quite easily picture them up in the control room looking at each other rolling their eyes, wishing the take would end so they could move on to something else. I get that they're not ALL like that and there are of course exceptions, but still. This seemed to be the album where they spent A LOT of time in the studio just kind of slowly messing around and jamming more than just about any other. And I can definitely understand how that would get frustrating to the producer/engineer, especially when you consider the hours The Beatles worked.
Idk...wasn't that long of a track. Just can't fathom treating a multitrack that way. Always mysteries in Beatleland.
You are aware that there are mastering engineers who promote the virtues of dynamic range but who also have said that DR8 is often quite acceptable, especially for rock albums? Is the view of this sort of pro-DR professional less reliable than yours? There's no arguing with a listener's personal preferences and subjective experiences (e.g., "fatiguing"), but there are some listeners here who are asserting that their subjective experiences are objective fact (e.g., "They ARE dull and fatiguing).
Im It is a narrative of the Beatles breakup. The struggle to come together, stay vital, interested, and involved in this endeavor. For Paul to hold it together and direct and maximize the efforts of the others, for John to come to grips with his own mental state while dealing with this child he has created and can not stay involved with if he wants to enter a new world but which he can not dispose of on an ice floe, for George to be seen as more than a little fish in a big pond but wondering if he becomes a little fish in a huge pond if he steps outside the Beatles... and then there's Ringo... clearly an outlier in the post 66 studio Beatles until Yer Blues and his very strong imprint on the band sound which becomes relevant again even though concerts and touring have ended. All seeking to believe in the drunken teenagers' dream but with changes coming real soon that would pull them out of the dream. Though it is ironic as heck that Ringo steps out before those two tracks were recorded! The remix reveals that Ringo is never more missed than he was on the first 30 seconds of the White Album!!!
