Is the Beatles 1962-66 (the 'red' alb) the only record of theirs that you need?

It's hard to say for sure, but when they played George's acoustic guitar track, it sounded like it could've had Lynne's usual sound for acoustic guitar (which he loved to pile on to a lot of his productions) - basically thin out any lower frequencies, maybe add a lot of compression, etc. Just listen to his stuff with Tom Petty, he produced some stuff with him where it was mostly just a strumming acoustic guitar. I'll guess we'll know when they release the single, but regardless, when they played John's isolated vocal, that was really fucking cool.

There's gonna be so much of this kind of thing in the future, Halfway's comment upthread I think is pretty prescient.

Especially now that the cleaning-up end of things has finally been almost completely solved, in my work every day I use two simple 'Waves' Plugins ($29 apiece) that do really quite remarkable things with noise/reverb reduction

Idk exactly what Jackson's software is, that he's clutching so tightly, but it's reasonable to assume that they've gone much further down the route of managing to correctly separate instruments with a complex set of shared frequencies.

But the next thing coming down the wire is the ability to recreate/simulate lost (or never properly captured) frequencies, it's already here in the form of a couple of things that came out this year, and they're pretty decent but still limited.

When they have that licked in a few years, however, it'll be game on and the record companies will jump on this as the latest way to make us buy the same music. We'll all be given the opportunity to listen to Robert Johnson in crystal clear Dolby Atmos and the Hoffman forums will implode.

that recent Coltrane / Dolphy album that came out this year, Evenings at the Village Gate...that's the sort of thing I would love to hear this technology applied to. not that that album didn't sound good given it's source, but image being able to really separate those instruments and balance them out with a proper mix. There are loads of live and archive recordings like this that would really benefit.

Jackson has said he wants to do the Beatles Hamburg tapes as well.

It also extends into TV/Film/Radio archives too, spoken word is much easier to work on, in this way, than music.

The Hamburg tapes would be perfect, I forgot about those - I honestly think one of the great live albums in rock could've been had if that recording was better. The main problem is the vocals are almost impossible to hear. It's going to be tougher because you're dealing with more instruments across a wider range in a room with even worse acoustics, but given how well the Lennon cassette demo worked out, I'm sure a massive improvement can be made.

re: the pete best tape, it's rumored to be this which has been out for a while now; but Jackson did say it hadn't been seen...so I don't know

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5Lwh6BJGyw

Where exactly can we hear this at 2pm GMT? All the streaming services?

yep

https://open.spotify.com/track/4vziJcnB2Qyi9o4nIRUeN7?si=e8e07619efb74908

Definitely better than the Anthology songs, imo.

well, that's about as good as it could have been given the source. surprised to a degree how little mccartney actually sings on it. they really went with a full lennon vocal through the whole song.

Yeah, I was surprised by that as well.

McCartney's slide part is...okay? Shows how singular George's playing was.

It’s interesting as an artefact, and the heavily melancholic mood of the original song is developed well whilst avoiding going completely over the top.

Not sure about the strings though tbh.

My third listen now. This is gorgeous.

I like the strings.

george's slide parts were generally higher on the neck.

Regarding strings, I was wondering what is meant when it says that Giles Martin provided a string arrangement like George Martin did previously. Does he really create and write it himself? Is he really that musically accomplished? Or does he subcontract it to a specialist to do it, approve it, and then manage the process of how it's recorded?

string arrangement is really great, imo. feels a bit more like a john solo song than a beatles song, tho i could see it slotting onto disc 2 of the white album

Better than “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love”, but that isn’t saying too much

better than love me do

the new Love Me Do remix is actual shit

ben foster is also credited for the string arrangement alongside martin & mccartney. they did a decent job at coming up with a george martin-esque string part

i don't think it's as good as "real love" or "free as a bird" (both of which are just fine) but it does feel about as good as it could have been? i agree it feels more like a solo lennon song but that comes back to the tune itself, it's just a mode of his that was far more common in his solo career.

Spotify chose to play Au Contraire by They Might Be Giants immediately afterward and I wished Paul & Ringo had dropped a cover version of it as an unhyped b-side

new stereo "love me do" is silly, it's just ended up hollow

I have had it up to here with Beatles remasters

i liked the previous new stereo mixes generally - the abbey road one is the definitive version imo and the rest are all at least major improvements over the original stereo mixes, but this "love me do" just feels like they're showing off the tech (which is genuinely impressive) now

It's fine, I don't hate it. I've made imaginary post-Beatles LPs and it will be a nice thing to include on the final one.

Spotify (which I don't really use) next played me "All You Need Is Love?", then "I Want To Hold Your Hand" then Dolly Parton's "Islands In The Stream" before I turned it off.

there's a little run on the strings that really recalls that bit in Carry that Weight just before it reprises You Never Give Me Your Money...probably the most 'beatle-esque' part of the song

lol my algorithms cued the Blue Nile and T.I. after this lol -- I've been seen.

I wasn’t sure if ‘Love Me Do’ had really lost its original energy in the new mix or if it was a lingering mood from ‘Now and Then’ affecting me.

as a lennon solo song it's one of the better ones (because it has a good melody and a sincere sentiment, precious things from him in the 70s) as a beatles song it's probably middle of the pack which is pretty good going (after one listen, maybe it will grow or wear on me later)

how come paul's bass and vocal are mixed so modestly here? is that an overcorrection in response to (past or anticipated) criticism or something?

I loved the Sgt Pepper remix, disiked most of the White Album one (how dare they fuck up Long Long Long/remove 'pleh'/other stupid things), thought Abbey Road was alright, ignored Let It Be/ATMP and liked maybe 20% of the Revolver one (which really bottoms out on the awful She Said She Said).

love me do sounds especially dopey after this track I wish they'd cleaned up "in spite of all the danger" for the b-side instead

xps Love Me Do is completely energy-sapped here yes

Had this been completed in the 90s, this would have been on Anthology 3, right?

so if Paul is playing the slide part, what is george contributing? I thought it sounded like in the 12 minute film that Paul was saying that he was trying to channel george via the slide, and so he is…but what is george from 1994 doing?

can they make the early albums sound fuller and richer without losing any of the energy? is that possible, on a technologically or musically?

also why are the mono mixes so damn obscure they still sound way better than giles' dicking around

xps

scratch "on a.."

Just acoustic guitar I believe

I now wait patiently for the music video tomorrow. FAAB and Real Love probably work best with their videos, so...

love me do remix sounds great to me though I prefer the mono; but given that they did this from a needledrop I'm really impressed.

(this is the ringo version of the song, which may be why some people feel it lacks energy ... the andy white version has tambourine in it and is a little more jaunty)

Spotify gave me "Please Please Me", "Live Forever" (lol), "All of The Day and All of The Night", "Vicious" (Lou Reed), and "Down On The Corner" afterwards before I peaced out.

I get it, I'm boring!

New song is nice. Kind of clear there wasn't much to work with. Will sound wonderful at CVS in two years.

It's decent, in a way kinda modest, given all the directions they could have gone in.

I feel like should have been sparer in the first verse and had more development in the second, the way the strings hang along the piano for the first, but they wait till the solo.

Without going Hoffman, the mix choices are curious to me, like they kept it quite dark overall because there's not much high end in Lennon's vocals.

but what is george from 1994 doing?

This post gives the same kind of slight jolt as in the promo film where Paul says it took almost a quarter of a century to wait until the right moment to tackle ‘Now and Then’ again.

it's okay; i'll probably never listen to it again

Had this been completed in the 90s, this would have been on Anthology 3, right?

Yes, it was planned to lead off the album like the other two new songs led off the earlier records.

I don't like it, but it sadly captures everything that I don't like about the reunion while paradoxically how much I wanted them to happen despite a sober critical realization of what it would produce.

When Dave Kehr originally reviewed the Let It Be film, he said it was "a domestic squabble that somehow touches history," and I think that nails something about these reunions. In some weird way, it's like trying to patch up a relationship or a marriage that ended for good reason, and yet you more than welcome the possibility of reconciliation even though things have clearly changed too much. (Maybe it's more fitting when you think of it from the view of children wanting their divorced parents to make up, but I think it kind of works from an ex-partner perspective.)

I love the Beatles, they're likely my very favorite band along with the Velvet Underground - my adulation is really focused on their work, and that plays out in these recordings. I've always had mixed feelings about their solo careers, which produced a substantial amount that I love, but also far more that I dislike or find extremely frustrating. I miss hearing how their talents work together and how they play off each other - there's no better example of chemistry and how four guys produce music that's so much greater than the sum of their recorded contributions. So on the reunion, it's wonderful to finally hear George playing his solos again (the best thing about these reunions) in the context of John's song or Paul's musical contributions, and to hear Paul arrange parts around something John wrote, and to hear all their voices together...all the stuff that happened decades earlier that you never thought would happen again. But it's also not nearly as good, and there's always going to be that sad paradox - on the one hand, it's great they're reconciled, it's great seeing them physically together and hearing them together, but it's just kidding yourself that they're just going to make music on the level of Abbey Road.

And there's no getting around the fact that John is long gone and this is straining to make something happen that isn't 100% really happening. And when I say "straining," I don't mean just the effort of making these recordings work - if you're a huge Beatles fan, yeah, you absolutely wish the band could be somehow reunited with John when he's been dead for so long. "Real Love" works the best - at minimum, I could see that being a good cover of a John song. (Like going to a good reunion show where the band plays one of their member's solo hits and it actually sounds really good.) But "Free As a Bird" feels too much like a patched up work meant to fill out something incomplete, and this new one feels too much like a solo John number that's been dressed up to be a Beatles number.

The chorus of the new one drives everything home - I would really, really love to hear a chorus to a brand-new song made out of John and Paul singing harmony again. I guess technically this is it, bu it sounds like a sonic mess, where John's vocal sounds garbled and Paul lays a vocal over it, clearly sounding much, much older. In the '90s, it was close enough to remind you of how they sounded together in the '60s, especially with George singing too. But now it just sounds sad, a clear reminder that those days are loooong gone and ain't happening again. Processing the shit out of everything with AI fairy dust can only do so much.