I have had it up to here waiting for the Beatles catalogue to be remastered

how are the DeAgostini releases currently in whsmiths? i noticed the white album was out yesterday.

ditto the RSD version of S Fields / P Lane?

uhm okay so if u guys are done discussing whether Sgt. Pepper's has good tunes, I'd like to ask about this quote in RS abt the remaster/remix:

The remix is full of nuances any fan will notice, especially the bottom end – Starr’s kick drum reveals new dimensions. “There’s nothing new – this is the album they made,” Martin says. “All we do is peel back the layers of compression that were necessary to release music in 1967. It’s their album now. It’s just boys in a room, making noise.”

usually audiophiles complain that nowadays music is heavily compressed as opposed to the good old days, and I know this is to some extent fake nostalgia since for instance Motown singles supposedly were very loud and iirc most labels were doing loudness wars alreadyu in the 60s, but can someone say something abt the type of compression necessary in 60s production? is it mainly a kind of bass eq'ing due to vinyl groove limitations?

also Mark G, very interesting to hear abt mono being difficult to mix - do you happen to have a good source on this?

can someone say something abt the type of compression necessary in 60s production? is it mainly a kind of bass eq'ing due to vinyl groove limitations?

speaking of Motown, I heard this thing during the w-e :
https://youtu.be/EsMjTTFRHdY
I find it quite charming (and well done).
after more than 15 years, maybe it's time for a mashups comeback !

also Mark G, very interesting to hear abt mono being difficult to mix - do you happen to have a good source on this?

No, apart from personal experience (my demo tapes, I know, I know), but no-one's directly contradicted me as yet (and I have said that statement a few times, around the place) (I wonder what S.Hoffman's site might say, however).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsMjTTFRHdY&feature=youtu.be

I also discovered the Beatles'Rock band isolated tracks : some great stuff !
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bealtes+rockband+isolated

and you get to see them perform the pepper tracks... well sort of !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3BXAR1ZEF0

Yeah, get a couple of those isolated tracks (heck, get four) and mess around with the play buttons. Hey Presto - Instant Remix.

The "With a Little Help" one is pretty cool (I love that you can hear Paul's foot following the rhythm) !

Re: mono mixing vs. stereo mixing ... while it's true that with everything being in the centre while doing a mono mix, one has to be aware of how the levels are balanced at all times during the recording process and make sure no element overwhelms another, it really all depends on the nature of the project, the elements of the track and who is mixing.

Mixing a four track tape consisting of 1 x acoustic guitar, 1 x lead vocal, 1 x backing vocal and 1 x tambourine track in mono would be far easier than trying to cram 128 tracks into stereo in Pro Tools.

On the other hand, the mono mixes done in the '60s were done on four track tapes where there had been much bouncing down and the levels would have had to be considered right from the start of the recording.

Stereo mixing is a completely different skill to mono mixing and it obviously took a while for people to grasp how to use it. Taking the mono mix and seperating it out all at the same levels is not a good way to do it - this is how one ends up with crap mixes like the stereo Rubber Soul. The best way to do it is to mix from scratch with the format in mind using existing mixes as a reference -;this is how the better 5.1 mixes are done these days.

I seem to remember reading somewhere (and am open to correction) that the early Beatles stereo mixes were panned hard-left and hard-right because that's all that was available at the time -- there weren't mixing consoles designed specifically for stereo (or at least, none at EMI) that enabled the elements to be placed anywhere else other than in one or the other channel.

Xpost There is a lot to what you have said, yes.

To get a decent Stereo Mix, you would not want to start with what they were mixing when they did the mono (instruments mixed on channel 1, vocals on 2 and 3, extra instruments on 4)

As has been proved by how they have done the latest Stereo mix.

Panning controls were a lot less "finer" then than they are now, if I remember correctly, you could only pan to certain set positions in the stereo field. This is why when you hear things getting moved about in the stereo field in '60s stereo mixes, the panning movements seem sharp or "in steps" rather than the smooth panning we have now.

I don't know if they were panned/mixed, would not be surprised if they took that last 2 track tape and said Use that, and the mono mixdown happened at the cutting stage, as was the (lack of) stereo mixdown.

(I'm talking about the "Please Please Me" album there)

chasing around those isolated tracks upthread lead me to this McCartney 1969 vocal warm up for Oh Darling which is pretty entertaining:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmnrHsYMHfI&spfreload=10

As much as I love The Beatles, listening to the pre-Rubber Soul again has made it apparent that there's an excitement to a lot of that stuff which is just completely absent from a lot of The Beatles, bar things like 'Birthday' and 'Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me and My Monkey' etc. 'It Won't Be Long' and 'Any Time At All' are fucking fantastic examples of a band just going for it full-on and full of enthusiasm.

I think it would be fair to say the band's enthusiasm was tempered by more complex emotions and a certain amount of ambivalence by the White Album, but it's I'm So Tired that I sing to my daughter at bedtime, not Help!

Not... Good Night (or Helter Skelter) ?

band's enthusiasm was tempered by more complex emotions

they were also taking a lot of speed on those early tours

Helter Skelter is the encore (xp)

yeah, and a lot of pot/hero from the white album on, hence the slower, heavier (and bored ?) aspect, I guess.
Even if you compare a faster/old school number like "one after 909" on Let it Be with their performance in their earlier, it's striking.
they still made great songs, of course, but it's almost like they didn't compose the same way anymore (and I'm not talking about the fact that at the very beginning they were still composing together).
They changed/evolved drastically as composers/arrangers. Like it would seem unlikely the Lennon of 68 could write "You're going to lose that girl" just as unlikely as the McCartney of 64 could write "Let it Be" (let alone "You never give me your money")...

ahah. good way to ruin your effort for the bedtime song !

That said, regarding pot I think they started circa Help/Rubber Soul so it may not be the main reason for the change of songwriting/sound.

the clip of Lennon and Macca sharing a mic and doing Two Of Us in a pepped-up electric fashion is probably the liveliest recording of the last couple of years, aside from some of the medley on Abbey Road i guess. once again it's a bafflingly under-seen bit of footage, and obvs nowt like the version on the record.

Just to echo someone far upthread, the Miles-penned Macca 'autobiog' really is an eye-opening (if partial) vista on the whole Beatles phenom, and a joy to read, as well.

That said, regarding pot I think they started circa Help/Rubber Soul so it may not be the main reason for the change of songwriting/sound.

― AlXTC from Paris, Tuesday, April 25, 2017 7:25 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In the Anthology, Ringo talks about how Help! was impossible to film because of how baked they were the whole time. One scene with all four of them took two days only because one of them would blow a line, and they'd all get the giggles, then another one would screw up a line, more giggles, etc. etc.

I think it would be fair to say the band's enthusiasm was tempered by more complex emotions and a certain amount of ambivalence by the White Album, but it's I'm So Tired that I sing to my daughter at bedtime, not Help!

― Impartial Father (stevie), Tuesday, April 25, 2017 9:17 AM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's great and everything, but it was 'Please Please Me', 'She Loves You' and 'I Saw Her Standing There' that they made their name with, not 'The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill', 'Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da' or 'Glass Onion' ...

They also didn't make their name with "Till There Was You," "Anna," or "A Taste of Honey."

And as for "You know my name" ...

Like, people often forget this, but it's not like The Beatles suddenly clicked into place on Rubber Soul, they were writing huge hits and putting out some ballsy, punchy tracks out 1962-1964, and it's this stuff that led to Beatlemania. I think people just avoid this era because of the cover songs on the LP's, but it wouldn't be difficult or much of a stretch, given how much music they put out in this period, to put together a couple of all Lennon-McCartney LP's from the available material.

xxpost:

Well, uh, technically yes they did, with all of those tracks being on theur first two LP's which sold shitloads.

*their

Like, if Please Please Me or With The Beatles hadn't sold, there sure as hell wouldn't have been A Hard Day's Night - movie or album.

Like, people often forget this, but it's not like The Beatles suddenly clicked into place on Rubber Soul, they were writing huge hits and putting out some ballsy, punchy tracks out 1962-1964, and it's this stuff that led to Beatlemania. I think people just avoid this era because of the cover songs on the LP's, but it wouldn't be difficult or much of a stretch, given how much music they put out in this period, to put together a couple of all Lennon-McCartney LP's from the available material.

― The Anti-Climax Blues Band (Turrican), Tuesday, April 25, 2017 3:48 PM (eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Do you find people typically respond positively to you when you tell them things they already know but in a tone assuming they're an idiot and you're bringing some deep deep science to the table?

Then I shouldn't need to point out that this conversation is about The Beatles 1962-1964, therefore it would be silly to stray from that topic, so...

I think at some point today I'm gonna throw together a playlist of just the Lennon-McCartney songs recorded 1962-1964 ... not that I have a problem with the cover songs, which I like on Please Please Me and With The Beatles but not so much on Beatles For Sale or Help! ... some great stuff on Past Masters 1 which would have been great additions to the albums.

the clip of Lennon and Macca sharing a mic and doing Two Of Us in a pepped-up electric fashion is probably the liveliest recording of the last couple of years

oh yeah, definitely, the one where Paul starts it off yelling "Good morning!" i love that version.

I love that version of 'Two of Us' and really wish the final version had sounded like that.

i thought this conversation was about having had it up to hear watiting for the beatles to be remastered, fwiw...

Turrican I love you and you've said lots of interesting things about the Beatles (and solo stuff, and other topics) over the years, but maybe you need to chill on this thread a bit? There's a certain "this is the facts and the way it is" tone creeping into your posts which does remind me of Geir and kinda doesn't encourage a hearty happy music-fan conversation among friends about the Beatles. Maybe I'm misreading you utterly.

Also I don't think anybody, at all, forgets that they had huge hits in their early years...? Those songs and that period are widely celebrated, considered canonical, and take up a tremendous space in the Beatles mythography; as an example I'd cite the Anthology TV series where the first four of eight installments cover the early years + Beatlemania period, with Rubber Soul kicking off part five iirc, and several of the more rockist critical-acclamation touchstones (especially Revolver) getting really shortchanged. I guess the one thing I could say is that with the aging of boomers and the shifting of radio formats, you really don't hear those songs quite as much, but I really don't think anybody who even bothers to get into a conversation about the Beatles doesn't know, or has forgotten, "I Want To Hold Your Hand," "A Hard Day's Night," etc.

I wasn't saying that 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' or 'A Hard Day's Night' were forgotten tracks in any way, not at all... but The Beatles' post-Help! work does tend to get picked over and analysed far more than their Please Please Me to Help! material. While anyone who even bothers to get into a conversation about The Beatles is undoubtedly aware of the existence of their pre-Rubber Soul material, discussions are more likely to revolve around the production on Revolver or Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, or the band "falling apart" on The Beatles, Abbey Road and Let It Be, so in that context the pre-Rubber Soul material does get talked about far less. Even now I hear and/or read the theory that The Beatles didn't get started until Rubber Soul and made their best music from Rubber Soul and onwards and obviously I disagree as, like I said, there's a freshness and enthusiasm to a lot of that material that later Beatles just doesn't have. I think a song like 'I Call Your Name' or 'Any Time At All' is just as fantastic and well written as 'She Said She Said' or 'If I Needed Someone', but the latter two are more likely to be talked about than the former two, because pre-Rubber Soul Beatles aren't as "cool" ...

TBF I may be in a bit of a bubble of Beatles opinion where it just seems obvious that AHDN is a contender for their best album and that there's a lot of iffier stuff on the later records (or at the very least, 'growers' even if they become fave tracks).... which I suppose is probably not the contention of, say, your average kid with an Abbey Road poster in the dorm or whatever. Though I think it is the POV of Allmusic and probably some other outlets that helped shape my own views on this stuff....

But in a way this just takes us around to Rockism 101, and if there's any space where you could take for granted that there's other ways of reading the Beatles, it'd be here. Though some of what you say may still obtain - looking at the ILM Beatles ballot poll (one of those where I have NO idea how I missed it) it does appear top-heavy with later stuff, despite "Ticket To Ride" at #5 - "She Loves You" at #17 is the highest pre-'65 song and "I Want To Hold Your Hand" is, staggeringly, way down at #53. Clearly I need to sit down and read that whole thread...

Also, and this may be stating the obvious, but in a sense it's easier to talk more about the recording of the post-Rubber Soul material because the recording was more involved. Doesn't mean there's not details to admire about all the early songs - I could go on at length about individual arrangements/performances/lyrics from the majority of Beatles songs - but there's certainly less, idk, 'narrative' to an album banged out in a day or in two weeks between tours and movie shoots, where not a lot of alternative approaches to any given song were considered or recorded, than one tinkered over at enormous leisure. Again, that doesn't diminish the music itself, which I think is pretty much stellar.

If it's true that the pre-RS material isn't rated as highly or at least discussed as often — I'm no Beatles historian — I wonder how much of that might be due to their early squeaky-clean image vs. seeing them as proto punks who at least in the Hamburg days were into the sordid the rock n' roll lifestyle well before that sort of thing was widely done.

Yeah - partly because of how popular they were, the o.g. canon narrative ("squeaky-clean lovable mop-tops later bust loose and innovate, with drugs and The Counterculture") is probably still unshakeable for a lot of folks. Though a great many of those folks probably did, and do, prefer the early stuff, the stuff they screamed along to. The more rockist-ready version - "long-haired speed freak basement rockers adopt suits and smiles for two years before busting loose" etc - doesn't have anywhere near as deep of roots in the popular imaginary, but that's understandable given how many people owned Beatles pencil cases, stuffed Ringo dolls, etc...

(There is, very unsurprisingly, a gendered aspect to this iteration of pop vs. rock, re: who was a screamer and who was a skeptic, who was a shallow teeny-bopper and who was a serious music head, etc. Zemeckis's I Want To Hold Your Hand is fun as a cartoon of this. Of course this plays out in time, and portions of their audience were going through very rapid changes in exactly those same years, which is why they so often get held up as precisely tracking the developing youth culture, whether posited as leaders or just some guys caught up in the flow like everybody else.)

i think part of the reason that the later Beatles material is discussed more often is because it has proven to their most influential music. that may not always have been true (i guess i'm thinking of certain early punk/ramones/lennon albums like rock n'roll that directly looked back to 50s/early 60s music), but as time goes by it is much easier to see the connection between today's music and later beatles rather than today's music and early beatles.

or not? (that's my josh marshall-style twist ending)

I guess there might be something to that - reminds me of a discussion we had somewhere recently about R.E.M. and how right at this moment their sound is pretty far from what most young bands would be taking up or exploring or trying to sound like. Doesn't mean they weren't influential at the time, though, or that today's bands don't in any way descend from things they did.

Early Beatles might be a similar case in 2017, where few are aping them, and indeed few going back some years now have been aping them. And yet trends/groups that were very immediately influenced by the early Beatles are very clearly part of larger family trees. At the moment what's coming to mind is the whole Byrds lineage derived from George's 12-string playing in 1964, but of course that just leads me back to R.E.M. so maybe that's not the best example but hopefully this makes some kind of sense. Obviously they were so huge, and prompted so many people to form bands and try things, that their early-years influence might be measured simply on the resurgence and formalization of the "rock band" as the thing to pursue, or the "drummer, bassist, rhythm guitar, lead guitar, and trading off backing-vocal duties" as your basic lineup, etc. Not a singlehanded accomplishment but, I think, a real one. "Guitar groups are on their way out, Mr. Epstein," and all that.

Hmm. Well, personally I think Kraftwerk, soul and funk are more influential on "today's music" than late-period Beatles. There was a point in time where popular music in general was just naturally evolving independently from anything to do with The Beatles and The Beatles were perceived as very much an "old band" - influential, yes, but very much an old band. Now they've been picked over to death to the point where everyone has convinced themselves that The Beatles invented and influenced everything, which is bull. For one thing, all The Beatles did was take what was going on around them, take the bits they liked and then blend it all together to create something else - which is what people were doing before and after them, and no doubt the same would have occurred without them. This goes for both their earlier material and their later material.

it's interesting to look at their studio years cos they are much closer to how people record music now. they ended "Taxman" by copying and pasting the entire guitar solo to the end of the song. this is how a lot of music is made nowadays.

it's relatable. it's not as fun to reminisce about them playing "It Won't Be Long" 17 times in a row, more or less exactly the same each time, hoping to get a perfect full take. nobody records like that anymore anyways. we are much more likely to use post-Taxman editing techniques.

Well, personally I think Kraftwerk, soul and funk are more influential on "today's music" than late-period Beatles.

just so i'm not misunderstood, i was comparing the relative influences of early vs late-era Beatles on ""today's music"" as a partial explanation as to why one of the Beatles' eras seems to be discussed more frequently than the other, and not talking about Kraftwerk or any other artist or genre.