Het Grote Beatles Topic - Deel 29

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Meet the Beatles, Again
Inside Abbey Road, as the Beatles' albums get their first sonic upgrade in 22 years.
By Bryan Hiatt

Ever since the Beatles' albums first appeared on CD, in 1987, fans have complained about the discs' anemic sound quality. After a 22-year wait, the caretakers of the band's legacy are finally doing something about it - with remasters of all 14 albums hitting stores on September 9th. "I remember going into a museum and seeing Winston Churchill's old papers, and they were getting yellower and crinklier," says Paul McCartney. "And what the joy for me is, our stuff is going the other way. It's getting clearer, and as long as the mixes and stuff are carefully followed, which the guys at Abbey Road do, you know it's not as if it's just a bunch of people in China doing it."

Rolling Stone's July 1987 review of the original CD releases complained that they were "shriller and more grating" than the vinyl versions. And as digital sound improved over the years, the CDs' shortcomings only became more obvious. (In contrast, the Rolling Stones' catalog has been remastered at least three times since its original release.) But it wasn't until four years ago that McCartney, Ringo Starr, and Beatle widows Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison finally approved the idea of remasters - and a team of Abbey Road engineers (headed by Allan Rouse, who worked with George Martin on 1995's Beatles Anthology) immediately went to work.

The first step was to transfer the original master tapes - housed in "a vault with two steel doors, both with combination locks, an alarm, two cameras, and a smoke detector," says Rouse - to digital files, one song at a time. The remastering team spent much time debating how much to clean up the recordings by removing hiss and other flaws. "What we did agree was that if it was part of the Beatles' performance, we weren't going to remove it," says Rouse. "The squeaky chair at the end of 'A Day in the Life,' breaths, coughs, anything that was actually really part of the performance, those stayed. Anything that we considered to be technical - clicks, sibilance, pops, bad edits, drop-outs, hum, things that were a technical problem - we would either try and improve them, or, if possible, remove or repair them."

One of the most fraught issues was loudness. The 1987 CDs are dramatically out of step with current trends in mastering - they sound puny next to more current rock releases, which make extensive use of audio limiting to reduce dynamic range and make songs seem louder. After extensive debate, the engineers ended up using a "tiny amount" of limiting - which still had a major effect on the sound: "I Am the Walrus," the title track from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and other rock tunes have a newfound heft and thump. "It gave it a little lift," says Rouse.

The remasters mostly offer improvements that are subtle but noticeable. "Love Me Do," for instance, loses its dusty, distant haze of age, and "The Long and Winding Road" no longer has what Rouse described as a "muffled" quality to it. Otherwise, it's a matter of suddenly noticing details: McCartney's nimble bass line on "And Your Bird Can Sing," the vivid three-dimensionality of Starr's opening and closing hi-hat on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," the cinematic quality of the choirs and orchestra on "Good Night."

But even before the engineers began tweaking them, the digital transfers immediately sounded better than the 1987 versions, for two reasons: Analog-to-digital converters have vastly improved since then, and they were also able to work at a higher resolution than before: specifically, 24-bit, 192 kHz, which is used in the Blu-ray audio format. At that bit rate, the engineers say, the digital version is indistinguishable from the original masters - but, alas, there are no plans yet for a Blu-ray release. ("There's plenty of time," McCartney says.)

The engineers were well aware that many listeners won't even spend much time listening in CD quality, let alone Blu-ray - they'll rip the CDs to their iPods and listen to them in lossy MP3 and AAC formats. "It's like if you clean up a painting, and then you photocopy it or something," says engineer Paul Hicks. "The thing is, it's still going to look better, even though it's a photocopy. It was definitely worth doing this, because the resolution might not be as good, but it will still be clearer and better, and hopefully there will be things people are going to hear that they haven't previously."

In addition to the stereo remasters, the team assembled a box set, The Beatles in Mono, which collects every existing mono mix of the band's music. It's the first time that the mono mixes of Sgt. Pepper, the White album, and Magical Mystery Tour have been released on CD. (Confusingly, the 1987 CD releases of the Beatles' first four albums - Please Please Me, With the Beatles, A Hard Day's Night, and Beatles for Sale - used the mono mixes. The new releases will use the stereo ones instead, with the monos relegated to the box set.)

The mono versions are no mere curiosity. They can be radically different, to the point where there's entirely different vocal effects on, say, "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" - and rock songs like "Helter Skelter" hit with a revelatory, garage-y force. Up until Abbey Road, the Beatles themselves focused almost entirely on mono versions. "In the main, we thought mono," McCartney says, noting that the band spent weeks on the mono mix of Sgt. Pepper, and then left the stereo to George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick. "The stereo mix wasn't really important to us - we figured, well, you just spread the mono."

Some Beatles fans will be eager to compare the new remasters to their original vinyl - but while the engineers did make their own comparisons to the LPs, matching them wasn't the point. "No one's heard the master tapes apart from us," says Guy Massey, one of the engineers. "And you have to remember some of the limitations of vinyl - they had to cut some of the low end off to master it." Adds Rouse, "These releases are closer to the master tape than you've heard before."

McCartney judges the reissues by an even higher standard. "It sounds like it did in the room when we recorded it," he says. "We had this pure sound, then the minute it goes down a bunch of wires it's going to get ****ed up to some degree. So now it sounds like I'm back in the room, in the session."

The remastered albums come with new liner notes and mini making-of documentaries. After the outtakes-filled Anthology release, the Beatles are reluctant to dig deeper into the vaults - which include hundreds of hours of unreleased recordings, from unheard Beatles tracks to early versions of tracks that ended up on solo records. "George Harrison and I were joking when we did Anthology - we were saying, you know, the next album should be called 'Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel," says McCartney. "Because there is that element to it like, 'Come on, guys, ****, we made all these Beatles records sound lovely and shiny and terrific, and now we're looking for the outtake that got away.'" Still, there is material McCartney would like to release, including "Now and Then," an extra Anthology-era song that (like "Free as a Bird") found Harrison, McCartney, and Starr adding to a John Lennon recording. "George didn't like it - basically, he didn't think it was good enough," says McCartney.

McCartney admits he's no audiophile. "I can listen to a record on the radio on the beach and it sounds OK to me," he says, sitting in Abbey Road studios, where he's co-producing a new album by his son James' band, The Light. "I'm probably the least tech person in the universe, you know. And John wasn't an audiophile either. It was always George Harrison who spotted when Capitol re-EQ'd our albums [in the Sixties]." So McCartney sees the remasters in emotional terms, not technical ones. "Now I hear John and think, 'There he is,'" he says. "Like, you can almost close your eyes and you can kind of see him, because the quality is so real. So I like that about it."

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In January 1994, Paul McCartney was given two tape cassettes by John Lennon's widow Yoko Ono that included home recordings of songs Lennon never completed or released commercially. The songs on the tape included the eventually completed and released "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love", in addition to two other songs "Grow Old With Me" and "Now and Then". In March 1995, the three surviving Beatles began work on "Now and Then" by recording a rough backing track that was to be used as an overdub. However, after only two days of recording, all work on the song ceased and plans for a third reunion single were scrapped permanently.

According to Paul McCartney, George Harrison "didn't want to do it," possibly because new verses would have had to be written. Producer Jeff Lynne reported that "It was one day – one afternoon, really – messing with it. The song had a chorus but is almost totally lacking in verses. We did the backing track, a rough go that we really didn't finish." An additional factor behind scrapping the song was a technical defect in the original recording. Like Real Love, a 60 cycles mains hum can be heard throughout Lennon's demo recording. However, it was much louder on the Now and Then recording, therefore making it much harder to remove.

Throughout 2005 and 2006, press reports speculated that McCartney and Starr would release a complete version of the song in the future. On April 29, 2007, it was reported in the Daily Express that the song may be released to coincide with the Beatles catalogue being released for the first time via digital download. Additional reports circulated that same year that Paul McCartney was hoping to complete the song as a "Lennon/McCartney composition" by writing new verses, laying down a new drum track recorded by Ringo, and utilizing archival recordings of George Harrison's guitar work.

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Op woensdag 19 augustus 2009 18:32 schreef blckbb het volgende:
Van de week een engels muziekblaadje gezien met een 12-pagina Beatles special en een CD met ''inspiratie-nummers'' van the Beatles (nummers van Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, etc.)
Kost 9 euro, waard om te kopen?

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Op woensdag 19 augustus 2009 18:53 schreef webfreak het volgende:

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Uncut zeker?
[ afbeelding ]

Voor die CD's hoef je 't niet te doen, daar staat nooit zoveel bijzonders op.
Dus even doorbladeren of die artikelen wat waard zijn. Vaak is het informatie die al 1000 keer is gepubliceerd. Al maakt dat niet persé uit, toch kan zo'n special in een blad erg leuk leesvoer zijn.

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Op woensdag 19 augustus 2009 16:10 schreef Honky het volgende:
Kan ik hier uit opmaken dat tijdens de Anthology-sessies Now and Then uberhaupt (af)gemaakt is?

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Op woensdag 19 augustus 2009 18:40 schreef psychedelicate het volgende:
Volgt er nog iemand die samples op Cual Es?

Tot zover heb ik Please Please Me, With The Beatles, Beatles For Sale en Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band gehoord, en ik wil zo graag Revolver horen. Het klinkt allemaal wel mooi, trouwens, vooral die heldere stemmen en instrumentatie die ik voorheen nog niet (zo duidelijk) heb gehoord.

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Op donderdag 20 augustus 2009 00:49 schreef Arn0 het volgende:

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Waar staat die poll? Het gaat dus zeker tussen die 4?

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Op donderdag 20 augustus 2009 13:40 schreef psychedelicate het volgende:
Volgens mij is alleen All You Need Is Love exlusief voor Xbox Live.

The Beatles: Rock Band - Trailer #3

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Op donderdag 20 augustus 2009 13:54 schreef psychedelicate het volgende:
Trouwens net ook eindelijk de stereo box besteld. Op CDwow.com besteld, wat betekent dat ik wel eerst zo'n 7 werkdagen moet wachten, maar het scheelt me ook ¤35.

Next up is de Epiphone Casino, en ik zoek nog steeds naar een winkel die de TB:RB (Limited Edition) op 09-09-09 kan leveren, anders gaat het gewoon via het oude vertrouwde Bol.com.

@Bovenstaande post; de twee oude nummers zijn nu vervangen door Hey Jude en Revolution.

Edit: Rain en Hey Jude klinken nu wel zeer lekker. Revolution is helaas niet zo explosief als op LOVE, maar dat wisten we al.

The Beatles: Rock Band E3 09: Day Tripper On Stage Demo HD

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Op donderdag 20 augustus 2009 18:14 schreef psychedelicate het volgende:
Probeer nu mijn bestelling bij CDwow te cancelen, zodat ik bij Amazon voor ¤140 (incl. verzendkosten) de stereo box kan kopen. Dat zou me weer ¤45 besparen.