George Martin RIP

they better curate the music for his funeral just right. send that man off with a dope orchestra imo

also sidebar, the remix stuff he & his son did for the Love thing in Vegas was kinda great

Or "Eleanor Rigby!" Compared to how it sounds on /Yellow Submarine Songtrack/...
--timellison

The "Love" album SOUNDS so good !
it made me enjoy songs I never liked before ("Back in the USSR" for instance).
And the version of "While my guitar" with strings is lovely.

i think everything until The White Album is vastly preferrable in mono compared to the stereo mixes

I don't think I have ever listened to their albums in mono (and I have always loved to put the balance fully right or left to isolate some tracks !).
I might have to download them since I don't think I'll buy again the albums (and they're only stereo on spotify)...

Mono White Album is interesting, but it's the first one that just doesn't sound right in mono. And as it turns out, "Revolution 9" was only mixed for stereo, and the mono is just a fold-down; loses much of its effectiveness.

Yeah, there's some very interesting differences between the stereo mix and the mono mix on The Beatles, but it's definitely the first album of theirs where the mono version was considered to be secondary to the stereo mix. If I remember, there's small parts of 'Helter Skelter' and 'Don't Pass Me By' which sound very different, but it's been years since I last heard it.

I listened to Revolver this morning for the first time in a very, very long time and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it... I thought I'd burned out on that album a long time ago.

Played those records so often that it this point it is very difficult to listen to any one from beginning to end.

If I remember, there's small parts of 'Helter Skelter' and 'Don't Pass Me By' which sound very different, but it's been years since I last heard it.

"Helter Skelter" is way different and, for me, significantly inferior in mono -- it's missing "I'VE GOT BLISTERS ON MY FINGERS!" [clang-ang]

Mono Revolver is the best. Not only does it sound so much punchier and immediate than the stereo, but there's so many more little differences to notice.

I recommend that anyone who is tiring or has tired of the stereo Revolver to give the mono a listen. The way the tape loops fade in and out of 'Tomorrow Never Knows' is different, for one!

otm

Early albums sound way better to w/o all that arbitrary pan one thing hard left pan the next thing hard right stereo mixing

I couldn't listen to, say, A Hard Day's Night in stereo, it wouldn't feel right at all!

Musical excerpts and good conversations here, with Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick, Emerson College music prof/ Beatles book writer Tim Riley, and maura:
http://onpoint.wbur.org/2016/03/11/george-martin-obituary-beatles (stream or download)

http://s3.amazonaws.com/media.wbur.org/wordpress/12/files/2016/03/Beatles.jpg

(Riley makes fun of "Goldfinger," but it's always been awes in its own right---still got the 45)

For some reason I prefer the stereo of Beatles for sale to the mono but otherwise yeah mono all the way up through mmt.

I'm really surprised nobody has mentioned Martin's arrangement on 'Good Night', which is so wonderfully over the top.

& "Glass Onion," the creepy strings make it, the solo Lennon version is garbage

and how he made the Mike Sammes Singers do batshit things on "I Am The Walrus."

Talking about The Beatles, George Martin was always part of the "should have been a single LP" camp regarding that album, but I don't think he ever divulged which songs he would have chosen if he had to make a single LP out of it. I've always wondered how he would have tackled that.

Yeah that always bugged me. He talks about in Anthology... total guess, but I can't imagine he was fond of "Why Don't We Do it in the Road?," "Wild Honey Pie," "Birthday".... those are the only remotely "throwaway" / B-sidey songs on the white album. It's my favorite - the sprawl and the lopsidedness is the best part.

'Birthday' is great, and one of my favourites on the album. You can hear how vibed up and into it they are on that track.

but I can't imagine he was fond of "Why Don't We Do it in the Road?," "Wild Honey Pie," "Birthday".... those are the only remotely "throwaway" / B-sidey songs on the white album

"Yer Blues" too

and yeah I wouldn't include "Birthday", that song and performance are v strong

There's a number nine elephant in the room

great track

Yeah, Martin had nothing to do with "Revolution 9," and the avant-garde wasn't really his bag -- Paul McCartney liked to play Albert Ayler records around Martin because Martin found them annoying. I'd be surprised if 9 was on Martin's White Album sequence.

For that matter, Martin said he "tolerated" Harrison's fascination with Indian music, and wasn't too keen on "Within You Without You" (despite doing an amazing orchestration, and in getting Western-conservatory-trained musicians to play relatively microtonally).

yeah didn't Martin argue to keep 9 off the album? would assume he would leave it off.

I don't care for WYWY but the way the strings whirl around the Indian charts is amazing.

I don't think he particularly liked George's songs except "Something" so I suspect "Long Long Long" and "Piggies" ("I was always raster beastly to George," he said once) would've gotten the ax.

Oh god, I completely agree about the orchestration on 'Within You Without You', it's one of the reasons I like that track so much, as well as the tabla fills and the way it slips into 5/4 in the middle section. I don't think it's a particularly great song at its core, but there's plenty of great musical moments happening in the arrangement.

I've often wondered what Martin thought of 'It's All Too Much', because apparently The Beatles started that one without him and he only came in towards the end of that one to oversee overdubs etc. I suspect he didn't rate it much... the final mix on that is fucking bizarre, to say the least!

he would toss out "Savoy Truffle" no doubt. but losing "Long Long Long" would be a big loss. i think it's one of the best songs the Beatles ever recorded.

My favourite part of 'Long Long Long' is the spooky ending.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htM-dIf5Lpw

Didn't Martin actually go on record once saying he absolutely loathed 'Only A Northern Song'?

That's one where I don't know if I'm crazy about the Songtrack mix. Original mono mix seems to be the one on the official Yellow Submarine album now, but the bass is so low.

Was there ever really a final mix on that one? The way I heard it, they did the mono at some point during the Pepper sessions, quickly discarded it, and then just as quickly pulled off the shelf and did a stereo mix for YS a year or so later.

I think there was only fake stereo. There's a bizarre tidbit on the Wikipedia page about the mono version of the album:

"For the monaural version of the album, originally available only in the UK, the engineers combined the two channels from this duophonic mix, rather than using the April 1967 mono mix."

I'd imagine this sounds horrible.

'Only A Northern Song' is one of those where I like the production of the track more than the song itself. I like the idea behind the song, but melodically it always sounded a bit too close to 'If I Needed Someone' for me, which was always one of my Rubber Soul highlights.

George apparently wasn't too enthusiastic about Pepper until he came up with WYWY.

It's kind of sad watching the Anthology...Paul is bursting with pride about Sgt. Pepper; Martin is obviously raving about it; then John goes, "It wasn't a 'concept;' any of those songs could've gone on any album;" Ringo said, "That's where I learned to play chess" (because of how bored he was); and George said his heart was still in India.

The Beatles quitting playing live to solely focus on studio work had its good sides and bad sides, really. On one hand, it enabled them to make Sgt. Pepper's, but on the other hand I think it kinda destroyed the power that The Beatles had as a "live" unit. I just listened to some selections from The Beatles and Let It Be followed by Help!, and the performances on Help! easily sounded like they had more excitement to them.

That's true, but on Help! they were also rushed; they had x number of weeks (or days) to finish an LP, so they couldn't plod through it and/or take tentative stabs at various approaches too much.

And by Let It Be they didn't have anything left to prove, and they all pretty much despised each other (or, more accurately, they all despised Paul).

Stopping playing live definitely messed up their group dynamic, but it had gotten pointless: for a band that had prided themselves on their shit-hot live shows, playing inaudibly to an audience that cheered wildly at everything, regardless of quality, must've been really frustrating. I do wonder what would've happened if they'd started using a monitor system and/or moved up to Marshalls or something, though.

There's a richness of beauty to some of the post-touring years music that doesn't exist if they stay in rock band mode.

(Ha, I'm kind of contradicting my usual line there, which is that they remained more of a musical ensemble than people sometimes seem to suggest in the later years.)

Yeah, and it's telling that the post-touring moments the Beatles rave the most about are those where they're really challenged as a unit ("Happiness Is A Warm Gun") or playing together like in the old days ("Yer Blues," the 3-guitar thing at the end of Abbey Road).

Stopping playing live definitely messed up their group dynamic, but it had gotten pointless: for a band that had prided themselves on their shit-hot live shows, playing inaudibly to an audience that cheered wildly at everything, regardless of quality, must've been really frustrating. I do wonder what would've happened if they'd started using a monitor system and/or moved up to Marshalls or something, though.

― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Saturday, March 12, 2016 4:00 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

They also quit just as the industry started to come up grips with the sound systems needed for bigger crowds and venues, and the hippie crowds that would have come out in say a theoretical show in like 68 would have behaved way different than a Beatlemania teenybop crowd so I feel like a lot of their purported problems with playing live would have evaporated

Oh, don't get me wrong, I fully understand the reasons why they quit touring, and I agree that they achieved some great things in the studio that they couldn't have possibly put together unless they'd had the time and focus to do so. I also agree that they never really stopped working as an ensemble, The Beatles in particular features a lot of ensemble playing, but the excitement and adrenaline rush that characterised, say, 'It Won't Be Long' and 'Any Time At All' begins to appear far less frequently, aside from the odd track like 'Helter Skelter' and 'Birthday' ... but I suspect even these would have benefitted far more from being performed by a band that had just come off the road, rather than by a band that hadn't actually played in front of an audience for a couple of years. While being in the studio helped some of their tracks gain a richness they wouldn't normally have had, I think their performances suffered a little from not having an audience to vibe off.

They also quit just as the industry started to come up grips with the sound systems needed for bigger crowds and venues

They actually played one show with a powerful sound system, and with stage monitors -- the first ever, supposedly -- in Atlanta in '65. The band raved about it, and Epstein offered the local soundman a job doing the Beatles' live sound (which he turned down):

http://www.cbs46.com/story/24667227/beatles-atlanta-65-the-most-memorable-show-of-the-tour