Sgt Pepper Deconstructed

Thanks to Don for passing this on after seeing my While My Guitar Gently Weeps post. The below video shows each of the four tracks that make up the song Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Each of the four original master tracks is isolated and shown in a different color in the video.

Yes, Sgt Pepper was recorded on a four track tape machine. The whole album...

Below is how they took four tracks and via bouncing some of them to another tape machine were able to record nine tracks of audio.

Recorder (A)

Trk 1.. Drums + Guitars
Trk 2.. Bass
Trk 3.. Lead + Harmony Vocals
Trk 4.. Additional Harmony Vocals

*******
Recorder (B) -- The "BOUNCE" tape. This is what we're hearing in the video:

Trk 1 [GREEN ].. From A, Tracks 1+2 (drums, guitars, and bass)
Trk 2 [ BLUE ].. Horns and punched-in lead guitar
Trk 3 [ RED ].. From A, Tracks 3+4 (all vocals)
Trk 4 [YELLOW].. Sound effects

Producers Blame iPods for Thier Crappy Sounding Mixes

In this article in the Wall Street Journal this week, music producers, artists and other people who ought to know better said that they are starting to mix music to sound best over earbuds and iPods because that is how the majority of people consume music these days.

This is leading to mixes that are compressed and one dimensional, and sound particularly bad on any system higher end than an iPod (95 percent of everything else). Here are some of the more potent quotes:

"Right now, when you are done recording a track, the first thing the band does is to load it onto an iPod and give it a listen," said Alan Douches, who has worked with Fleetwood Mac and others. "Years ago, we might have checked the sound of a track on a Walkman, but no one believed that was the best it could sound. Today, young artists think MP3s are a high-quality medium and the iPod is state-of-the-art sound."

For example, says veteran Los Angeles studio owner Skip Saylor, high frequencies that might seem splendid on a CD might not sound as good as an MP3 file and so will get taken out of the mix. "The result might make you happy on an MP3, but it wouldn't make you happy on a CD," he says. "Am I glad I am doing this? No. But it's the real world and so you make adjustments."

"Ten years ago, music was warmer; it was rich and thick, with more tones and more 'real power.' But newer records are more brittle and bright. They have what I call 'implied power.' It's all done with delays and reverbs and compression to fool your brain."
All these engineers tend to be audiophiles, the sort who would fuss over a track to make it perfect. But they're beginning to wonder if they should bother.

...engineers experience some nostalgia about earlier technologies. Says Mr. Saylor, "What we've lost with this new era of massive compression and low fidelity are the records that sounds so good that you get lost in them. "Dark Side of the Moon" -- records like that just aren't being made today."

This is so flipping sad and pathetic. And it's short sighted. Who's to say that the MP3 format and iPods aren't going to go the way of the Betamax in a few years?

As all of the reissued Beatles albums and especially the ones that were remixed (Love, the Anthology Series and Yellow Submarine) have proven, if you shoot for the highest possible sound quality at the source, no matter the popular media of the day, your audio can sound rich, warm and timeless decades after it was recorded and the artists are long gone. That was the LAW at Abbey Road studios in the 1960s.

Conversely, certain CDs, when they were first issued in the 80s and not fixed up in any way, had pops and cracks on them because some producers in the 60s and 70s knew that the vinyl LP turntable and needle based format would cover up noises and imperfections. On CDs those same 'inaudible imperfections' are loud as day.

This proved to be short sighted, so why are we doing it all over again? Come on you lazy fuckers, don't cater to the lowest possible denominator!

The Death of the Album - or, Dancing on the Grave of the Music Industry

Over vacation, VoxMoose sent me a Slashdot posting on “the death of the album.” Nedmusic posted something similar recently as well, on the sorry state of the music industry. My take on it is this:

In terms of the ‘death of the album,’ the single was king in the 50s and early 60s and it was really bands like The Beatles who made albums important. Their attitude was, let's make EVERY song as good as a hit single so when you put your album out, it was strong – a collection of killer singles. And if you go back and listen to Rubber Soul or Revolver, that is exactly what those albums are.

Then of course with stuff like Sgt Pepper and Abbey Road, the linear nature of the album and how the songs were laid out were paramount. That paved the way for stuff like The Who’s Tommy and bands like Floyd, Yes, etc, who used the whole album to tell a story.

To me, bands like Van Halen (post VH II) who put three good songs on an album and a bunch of crap filler are the ones who started to bring it down as an art form.

There has been discussion about how we live among a generation with a very short attention span. We prefer to randomly hit our iPod shuffle and don’t sit and listen to full 45 minute pieces of music anymore.

That may be true, but to put it in a positive light, at least today you have a choice. You can get the one or two songs that are good and skip the crap, or if it's a band like Tool who still respects the long format of a CD, you can get the whole thing and trip out on the whole album.

If the record industry encouraged artists to actually develop, you'd see more album sales and less the buying of one-off singles. I am not a big fan of them, but Portland's The Decemberists seem to be a band that is doing this, and people are really responding. And there are others.

In terms of the sorry state of the music industry, I’d say it’s about time the big labels start to suffer after totally commoditizing music with commercialism and the ‘let’s make as much money as we can’ attitude that started with the big stadium shows in the 70s and continue today with outrageous ticket prices and a plethora of one hit wonders churning out forgettable crap.

Note that to have a “number one” today, you have to sell a fraction of what the top ten moved just a few years ago. People are buying less music and it ain’t because they are stealing it off the Internet. It’s because what the big five (four?) are throwing at us via Best Buy and Wal Mart is total crap I wouldn’t listen to if it WAS free. So they can all eat it as far as I am concerned. So there.

Neil Peart Posts Drum Part

For those of you who want to play bass or guitar along with Neil Peart, unimpeded by the noodlings of those clowns Alex and Geddy, the wait is over.

Neil has posted the drum part to the Snakes and Arrows instrumental The Main Monkey Business at his Web site. You can now hear what Neil's drum part for that killer tune sounds like without any other instruments. It's highly cool. Enjoy...

Asia In The Studio

Hmm. Ok back in March, I skeptically predicted there would be no new Asia album and that I would buy a copy for all of my loyal readers if it ever saw the light of day. From the Asia site this week:

We are pleased to report that the band have entered the recording studio to begin work on their first full studio album together since ALPHA in 1983. Sessions are expected to continue during breaks from their busy touring schedule.

OK, I might be on the hook to buy a few copies here. But do you still want it if it sucks as bad as I think it will?

PS - Asia is coming to Portland Tuesday August 21. I will be there to pen a review. Maybe they will bust out some of this new material!? I am cautiously interested...

CD Review - The Beatles "Love"

On the suggestion of fellow poster Ned Music, I picked up the new Beatles CD “Love.” The CD is the soundtrack to the Cirque du Soleil show of the same name, and it combines both familiar and unheard of snips from Beatles songs across their catalog and does a mash-up into new pieces of music.

It was created over a period of two years by original Beatles producer George Martin and his son, Miles. From the liner notes, Miles and George reveal that the idea for the show came from Harrison and a Cirque du Soleil industry friend.

When it was time to come up with the music for the show, the Martins were given full access to all Beatles studio tapes and were told to create about an hour and a half of music any way they wanted to, with the only rule that it had to be sourced from sounds The Beatles had already created.

What a fun project this must have been, and I have to say I am totally blown away by the result. Totally blown away.

Anyone who has been in love with The Beatles since childhood, like I have, has heard every Beatles song so many times that we turn off stuff like Hey Jude and While My Guitar Gently Weeps when it comes on the radio. We’ve just heard it so many times, it’s old.

The six CD Anthology series that was released in the 90s breathed new life into the catalog with outtakes, unreleased songs and alternate mixes. And the new soundtrack to Yellow Submarine that came out in 1999 is still a treat to my ears, because it offered re-mixed versions of fifteen classic tunes.

Not re-mastered versions of the same mixes, mind you – but RE-mixes. George Martin actually did new mixes from the original master tapes, so they are much fresher and you actually hear bits of music (like guitar parts, bass lines, etc) that were not audible in the original mixes. Much, much more than a soundtrack CD, pick that one up if you want fresh versions of the old warhorses.

Or get Love.

George and Miles created a masterpiece with this. Some of the more innovative songs are the combination of Tomorrow Never Knows with Within You Without You, where George Harrison sings his Indian mantra lyrics from Within You Without You over the hammering drum beat of Tomorrow Never Knows. Or how about Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite, which seamlessly segues into the heavy chord outro of I Want You (She’s So Heavy) with McCartney screaming heavily distorted verses from Helter Skelter in the background.

I think my favorite cut by far, though, is the new version of Strawberry Fields Forever. As we learned in the Anthology Series volume 2, Lennon recorded a number of versions of this song, from a gentle acoustic ballad to the version that ends with thundering drums, crazy noises and electric guitar fills.

For the Love version, the producers created a seamless mashup of all the versions. The song starts with the gentle acoustic version and every verse switches to a new, more layered and intense cut. I am 100 percent convinced this is the version Lennon wanted to hear but technologically could not be pulled off in the 1960s.

And then there is just the cool factor of hearing the solo from Taxman in Drive My Car, the drum solo from The End meld into Get Back, or the chord progression of Dear Prudence over the end of Come Together. There are sounds on the CD I am having trouble placing, and that’s why it’s so fun to keep listening to it over and over again. For example, is that really Clapton’s solo from While My Guitar Gently Weeps isolated and pasted in the end freak out part of Strawberry Fields? I know I hear the Piggies piano solo in there too…

And finally, since The Martins were given free reign to ‘mess with’ The Beatles’ legacy, the remixed versions of songs that they didn’t really mess with that much, are worth the price of the CD alone. For example, this new mix of I Am The Walrus blows away any version I have ever heard. Miles in the liner notes said he expected the master tapes to be in dodgy shape and to have tons of hiss, but he said what he found were perfect. Add some modern mixing and engineering technology and what you get is vibrant and shimmering.

Funky mixes and mashups aside, this music leaps from your speakers. Walrus, Come Together and especially Revolution are pounding. These tracks sound like they were recorded yesterday instead of 40 years ago.

Have I said enough? Go buy the fricking CD.

Townshend on the Lost Art of Recording

Fellow Blogger.com poster Pete Townshend (and he's in a little band called The Who) put up a very interesting post about old school recording.

The crux of it is that these days, producers and engineers try to separate sounds in the recording studio, using numerous microphones, soundproof baffles and other means of sound isolation.

Pete yearns for the good old days when the ROOM was the most important piece of the puzzle. Bands would set up in an acoustically killer room, the engineer would place a few mics and then the producer would capture the band actually performing.

For example, it is common these days to mic up a drum set by putting at least one mic on every drum, plus two or more mics suspended over the drums to capture the overall sound. Recording the drums alone might require 15 - 20 microphones!

Read the whole post, but Pete says:

So many wonderful recording rooms have been lost in the last twenty years, all around the world. Rooms that had either been 'found' to sound good, or 'helped' to sound good, or 'designed' to sound good are now serving duty as Loft-style apartments. Old deconsecrated churches and church halls were once commandeered to serve as recording rooms back in the late '50s. Now they are all gone...

The point I'm making is that still, the music, the performance and the space in which the music is made is what is most important. If an engineer is doing more than switching on the gear and pushing up a fader or turning a control knob, there may be too much interference with the performing process.

Backing up Pete's contention, consider that the HUGE drum sound in Led Zeppelin's "When The Levee Breaks" was achieved by sticking ONE microphone a number of feet in front of the entire drum set in an acoustically huge sounding room. Zep's Jimmy Page and other old schoolers also used to do things like put the drums at the bottom of a stairwell and place the microphone at the top of the stairwell, generating organic echo.

Stories abound of Keith Richards walking around a studio, snapping his fingers and listening to the way the sound bounced around the room. He would decide where the drums would be set up based on this low tech observation - just using his ear and experience. A lost art?

In the days of all this electronic gadgetry, it is nice to know that back in the day things were done more simply - and that those methods would still work today if allowed to. The golden age is not dead and gone.

In the meantime, listed to some old Zeppelin, Who, Stones or Beatles and try and figure out how the sounds were achieved. It's probably as simple as what the room looked like and where they stuck the mics!

Neil Peart Essay on New Rush Album

Rush's Neil Peart has always been a great writer. Aside from writing all of Rush's lyrics, he usually writes the text to their concert programmes and CD booklets, and has penned a few books as well.

One of my readers, Dr. John, uncovered this eight page essay Neil wrote about the writing and recording of Rush's new album, Snakes and Arrows, due out May 1. It's a good read if you have a few minutes and dig Rush (like I do).

Thanks, Dr. John!

A Beatles Book Worth Reading

I was clicking around some friends' Web sites and Blogs and landed at Ned Music. Ned's an old buddy of mine and fellow Beatles trivia maniac. He posted about the new Beatles CD, Love, which combines both familiar and unheard of snips from Beatles songs across their catalog and does a mash-up into new pieces of music as the soundtrack to the Cirque du Soleil show of the same name.

I don't have the CD yet but after reading the entry, I am going to get it. It reminded me that I have suggested a recent Beatles book called Here, There and Everywhere to a few friends. It's written by Geoff Emerick, who was an Abbey Road engineer who worked with The Beatles from Revolver through the White Album, and then off and on afterwards, even through McCartney's current dismal solo career.

This book is a must have for Beatles fans, or even people curious as to how a record is made.

Remember, in the days before being able to truck down to Guitar Center or go to the Musician's Friend Web site to buy, say, a Flange effects pedal for your guitar, they used to have to come up with these effects out of thin air. They used tape machines to generate echo and reverb. They re-wired Leslie speakers to run instruments and voices through them.

Emerick even tells a story about how he enclosed a very expensive microphone in a plastic bag and submerged it in a water glass to see what it would sound like (bad). He even tells about how Lennon wanted to be suspended by a rope from the ceiling of the studio so HE could revolve around the mic. This is the crazy experimentation that led to all those killer songs and sounds that we totally take for granted today.

Emerick's book rips the lid off of these mysteries and shows with vivid storytelling how The Beatles and Abbey Road producers and engineers did what they did, with the paltry supplies that they had at their disposal.

Also, apparently The Beatles were total a-holes post-1968 and Harrison was a piss poor guitar player! Emerick for sure is biased towards McCartney and against Harrison. He tells great stories of Lennon being a jerk and Ringo being boring.

Regardless of all of this, I whole heartedly suggest getting this book if you are into The Beatles or recording. You'll learn a ton and be right amused in the process. If only school has been this interesting...

New Rush Song Posted at Rush.com

As of this morning, you can hear a streaming version of Rush's new single "Far Cry" at the band's official Web site, which has been reformatted to promote the new Snakes and Arrows CD due out on May 1. Also check out the cool studio photos in the 'gallery' section. What do I think of the song? I am not sure yet. Catchy chorus, not so catchy verse. Some very cool musical interludes. Great drumming (shock). Killer intro but maybe a bit forced. Great, groovy, heavy intro riff! But you know, I am still waiting in vain for them to re-write "Red Barchetta." Anyway I have only heard it once. Tell me what YOU think.