Welcome to Capitalism! If there's still gold left in those old recordings, surely someone will find a way to get it out! Just another thing to be foisted on us to buy (again).
I for one won't bite. Another thing to consider is the cultural context within which those Revolver tracks were made. 1966 : the Vietnam war, the three assassinations, civil rights movement, women's liberation plus many other intangibles.
This is very well put - if they had attempted to contemporize the Beatles back catalog in 1989 as you've suggested it would be regarded as a grand folly nowadays, yet we think we know better in 2022. It recalls the horrid 80s drum facelift given to "I can't stand it" as released on VU. That being said, I would interested to hear someone try to 'unmix' "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" - I'm pretty sure it's the murk holding the whole thing together.
I 100% agree with this. Old recordings should *sound* like old recordings!! They are "records" of their time. This is a bastardization of an iconic piece of culture, in my view.
However, "Rain" was a single recorded around the time of Revolver -- it's not actually on that album..
I couldn't agree with you more. Every generation finds the music from the past that they connect to and tries to emulate it. In the early to mid 2000s, my friends and I dove deeper into our parents' eras of pop music than they did. As a result, we lost interest in radio stations so intent on playing music with the "same dynamic." The wonder, to me, of popular music in the '60s and early '70s was the wide variety of sounds being offered to, and accepted by, the mainstream. The pressure to turn in "radio mixes" and compress every track to the max inevitably denigrates music into background noise. It's ironic that we've spent 50+ years nerding out on George Martin's genius, all trying so hard to reproduce the quality of those records, and now his son wants to make them all sound like Billie Eilish? Nothing against Billie and her brother, but ?????????????????
"Rain" goes so fucking hard. There are days I'd say it's the Beatles' best song; I know Ringo said it was his best drumming. I'm pretty sure "Paperback Writer"/"Rain" is a contender for greatest single release ever. I don't know exactly what to call it but it belongs alongside the Revolver in what is the Beatles' version, to me, of when Dylan achieved that "thin, wild mercury sound" on Blonde on Blonde. The Beatles don't have that thin reediness that Dylan & his band somehow make so compelling, and "Rain" even sounds like it could be remixed or covered heavily to be a metal progenitor kin to "When the Levee Breaks..." but I associate these releases somehow with Radiohead's In Rainbows and VU's The Velvet Underground...all are mature evolutions of a traditional sound that are just supremely relaxed and confident, experimental but all just basically guitars.
This reminds me of the controversy around Iggy Pop's remix of Raw Power that came out in the late 90s - everyone agrees that the original David Bowie mix is kind of terrible, Bowie was coked out of his mind at that time and it sounds completely bonkers. But the 1997 remix contemporized the sound in a completely inappropriate way, and they took the original mix out of print (for a while at least)
Listening to the original mix though it's obvious that the completely terrible choices Bowie made turned out to be hugely influential - on most of the album the band sounds like it's playing a block away, but then the lead guitar comes in and it's 20x louder than everything else. It sounds crazy! Listen to tracks by Loop or Spacemen 3 and they ape that sound all over the place!
>It was originally recorded without any separation of instruments and voices beyond four tracks of tape - all the sounds the Beatles and their engineers used on that album were layered together onto those limited set of tracks – and then, in one of the most iconic achievements of 20th-century audio recording, they were mixed brilliantly to a single mono channel.
There was a stereo mix using the 4 track tapes back in 1966 as well. Unfortunately that mix consists of each stereo track panned hard to either left and right making for an odd listening experience. I believe Giles' main goal is to provide a conventional stereo mix of Revolver like the stereo mixes on BFS, AHDN, where the vocals are by-and-large centered and the stereo panning is less severe. To put it another way, the idea is to present the mono mix's overall sound while giving some stereo separation.
Welcome to Capitalism! If there's still gold left in those old recordings, surely someone will find a way to get it out! Just another thing to be foisted on us to buy (again).
I for one won't bite. Another thing to consider is the cultural context within which those Revolver tracks were made. 1966 : the Vietnam war, the three assassinations, civil rights movement, women's liberation plus many other intangibles.
This is very well put - if they had attempted to contemporize the Beatles back catalog in 1989 as you've suggested it would be regarded as a grand folly nowadays, yet we think we know better in 2022. It recalls the horrid 80s drum facelift given to "I can't stand it" as released on VU. That being said, I would interested to hear someone try to 'unmix' "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" - I'm pretty sure it's the murk holding the whole thing together.
I 100% agree with this. Old recordings should *sound* like old recordings!! They are "records" of their time. This is a bastardization of an iconic piece of culture, in my view.
However, "Rain" was a single recorded around the time of Revolver -- it's not actually on that album..
Love it
I couldn't agree with you more. Every generation finds the music from the past that they connect to and tries to emulate it. In the early to mid 2000s, my friends and I dove deeper into our parents' eras of pop music than they did. As a result, we lost interest in radio stations so intent on playing music with the "same dynamic." The wonder, to me, of popular music in the '60s and early '70s was the wide variety of sounds being offered to, and accepted by, the mainstream. The pressure to turn in "radio mixes" and compress every track to the max inevitably denigrates music into background noise. It's ironic that we've spent 50+ years nerding out on George Martin's genius, all trying so hard to reproduce the quality of those records, and now his son wants to make them all sound like Billie Eilish? Nothing against Billie and her brother, but ?????????????????
"Rain" goes so fucking hard. There are days I'd say it's the Beatles' best song; I know Ringo said it was his best drumming. I'm pretty sure "Paperback Writer"/"Rain" is a contender for greatest single release ever. I don't know exactly what to call it but it belongs alongside the Revolver in what is the Beatles' version, to me, of when Dylan achieved that "thin, wild mercury sound" on Blonde on Blonde. The Beatles don't have that thin reediness that Dylan & his band somehow make so compelling, and "Rain" even sounds like it could be remixed or covered heavily to be a metal progenitor kin to "When the Levee Breaks..." but I associate these releases somehow with Radiohead's In Rainbows and VU's The Velvet Underground...all are mature evolutions of a traditional sound that are just supremely relaxed and confident, experimental but all just basically guitars.
This reminds me of the controversy around Iggy Pop's remix of Raw Power that came out in the late 90s - everyone agrees that the original David Bowie mix is kind of terrible, Bowie was coked out of his mind at that time and it sounds completely bonkers. But the 1997 remix contemporized the sound in a completely inappropriate way, and they took the original mix out of print (for a while at least)
Listening to the original mix though it's obvious that the completely terrible choices Bowie made turned out to be hugely influential - on most of the album the band sounds like it's playing a block away, but then the lead guitar comes in and it's 20x louder than everything else. It sounds crazy! Listen to tracks by Loop or Spacemen 3 and they ape that sound all over the place!
>It was originally recorded without any separation of instruments and voices beyond four tracks of tape - all the sounds the Beatles and their engineers used on that album were layered together onto those limited set of tracks – and then, in one of the most iconic achievements of 20th-century audio recording, they were mixed brilliantly to a single mono channel.
There was a stereo mix using the 4 track tapes back in 1966 as well. Unfortunately that mix consists of each stereo track panned hard to either left and right making for an odd listening experience. I believe Giles' main goal is to provide a conventional stereo mix of Revolver like the stereo mixes on BFS, AHDN, where the vocals are by-and-large centered and the stereo panning is less severe. To put it another way, the idea is to present the mono mix's overall sound while giving some stereo separation.