I might have an interesting perspective here - I really only started listening to the Beatles recently (as in, within the past few months), and am young enough that probably 99.9% of the recorded music I’ve ever heard has only ever been released as a stereo mix.
And yet even I vastly prefer the mono mixes of the Beatles catalogue (excepting “Abbey Road,” obviously). Why? Because despite being all fancy and stereo, with the sounds all coming from the different directions and whatnot, it ultimately always comes back to one inescapable fact:
The stereo mixes of The Beatles’s records are shitty stereo mixes.
It’s not really their fault, nor the fault of their engineers. Their landmark records were made just as stereo was taking off. As with any new technology, people hadn’t really figured out the most effective way to use it yet. The negative effects of this inexperience were compounded by the novelty of the technology, all of which crescendoed into a series of terrible mixing decisions that any half-decent engineer today would nix as gimmicky and bad-sounding. “Put on the headphones, man, and check this out - we can pan the drums all the way to one side! That’s crazy! It sounds like they’re, like, waaaaaaay to the right of the listener!”
Of course, real drums, even ones waaaaaaay to the right side of the listener, don’t sound the way Ringo’s do in the stereo mix of “Revolver.” You don’t only hear them with one ear, and they aren’t compressed into a single channel. If one was lucky enough to hear Ringo playing live during those sessions, one would be hearing the drums enter the right ear slightly before the left (the time difference varying between each drum and cymbal), and so even though you’d get a stereo effect, it wouldn’t sound anything like the tinny, half-deaf tone of the stereo mixes.
IOW, rather than adding anything of substance, the stereo mixes turn the Beatles’ amazing work into little more than a crappy tech demo, rendered obsolete almost instantaneously.
Yes, but the thing about the EMI studio was just how carefully every tape was kept and cataloged. They have all those loops and can re-sync all the bits to make something new. Even in the cases where things were recorded onto the same track, there are techniques to separate the instruments into new, different tracks.
Yes, but as someone who loves the Beatles music, until there is something really unique about a package, I’m not going to buy their music again. But to hear a new mix of their music by George Martin with excellent stereo? Or even better, a surround one using all the techniques that went into the Love project? I’d buy the whole catalog in a heartbeat.
There’s an article about the new game The Beatles: Rock Bandin the current issue of Wired. The goal was to use the actual music of the Beatles, and to accomplish that, they had to separate all the individual tracks, even ones that had been mixed together on the original master tape:
*But they did get a little help from a friend. Jeff Jones, CEO of Apple Corps, suggested they turn to Giles Martin, the son of longtime Beatles producer George Martin, for help. Martin had just completed remixing a series of Beatles tracks for the 2006 album Love (featured in a popular Cirque du Soleil show) and was intimately familiar with the band’s master tapes. “The stars just aligned,” DeGooyer recalls. “It turned out Giles wasn’t booked at that time, and he had the trust and confidence of the Beatles.”
Martin had discovered a way to isolate the individual instruments and voices using software developed by Cedar, a company based in Cambridge, England. Originally created for audio forensics, the software allowed Martin and the Harmonix team to zero in on the exact frequencies of McCartney’s vocals, for instance, and filter out the rest. After weeks in Abbey Road Studios, they disassembled five songs—enough to make the demo.*
Cedar is used mostly to remove hiss from pre-Dolby tapes, and can be used remove hum, mechanical noises, etc. This is the first time I’ve heard of it being used to isolate instrument. If they apply this technology to all the master tapes of all the albums, they could make truly excellent stereo and surround mixes for all the albums, instead of the lame, current release. Frankly, I’m sure some enterprising hackers will disassemble The Beatles: Rock Band and create new stereo and surround mixes within a few days of it’s release.
My condolences. If you were listening to the majority of the “stereo” Beatles releases mentioned in this thread, you’d be missing entire instruments and/or singers. They really are a mess.
It seems to me that for the last five or six years there has been a Beatles item released to coincide with the holiday season. I’m too lazy to research what they’ve been, but I’ve been noticing it. Things like the “Love” album, and this year’s Beatles games.
My take is that Paul and Yoko (both very interested in finance) are making sure this happens.
I believe those two (and their business managers) will keep that going as long as they can find things to feed a (willing) public. Ultimately that strategy will trump any concerns about not diluting the brand.
The iStore will sell their songs, the songs will get new stereo mixes, there will be 5.1 versions, there will be a Broadway show with soundtrack, Let It Be on DVD, onward and upward.
There will be a new ostensibly worthwhile Beatles product come out every fall, and everything is ultimately in play. But it won’t happen all at once.
I wouldn’t think that a good set of stereo and surround mixes would “dilute the brand” in any way. Instead, it would make it stronger and more relevant to current listeners, who are used to hearing stereo instead of the bizarre “guitar versus orchestra” mixes we have now on classic songs songs like Yesterday.
Nope, Sir George and son need to do new mixes that the remaining Beatles and their heirs need to approve. Anything less actually damages their legacy. I’d be curious to hear if the Rock Band releases are mixed in a modern fashion.
I’m confused. Aren’t the new box sets coming out remasters of the original material? Reviews I’ve read say they’ve the best the music has ever sounded. Even a famed bootlegger who goes by Dr. Ebbetts, who is apparently renowned for his Beatles restorations, says the remasters are better than his own work.
There’s “remasters” and then there’s “remixes”. Love was a remix, where they went back to the original 4 and 8 track master tapes, cleaned them up, and then do modern, proper stereo and surround mixes that respected the original intentions and relative levels, put the music into a modern soundscape. The new CDs are remasters, where the only went as far back as the mono and stereo mixed-down master tapes, cleaned those up and processed them. The problem is that there just is only so much anyone can do because so much due to tape hiss and limitations of the original equipment. I have no doubt the stereo and mono mixes sound as good as they ever have, but no, they do not sound anywhere near as good as they can.
Get Love and hear how good the original recordings can sound.
Current listeners are also used to hearing noisy, overproduced, overcompressed and overlimited shit in pretty much every genre of popular music. Unless you sat them down with headphones and did an A-versus-B test, most listeners wouldn’t know the difference between the versions of “Eleanor Rigby” on Revolver and Yellow Submarine Songtrack. And I’m quite convinced most wouldn’t care.
The Beatles’ legacy has held up pretty well so far, eccentric stereo mixes and all.
The problem with that idea is that what one generation considers “relevant” the next considers “laughably dated”. Remember rechanneled stereo? Remember how those early generation CD’s had that tinny, antiseptic sound that made everything sound like late eighties Phil Collins? Even if the original mixes weren’t perfect to the artists, those imperfect sounds influenced decades of musicians and listeners. Trying to radically rework them is like rewriting Milton or touching up a Renoir to appeal to modern tastes. Even if it works, is that respectful to the material?