Beatles 5.1-Channel Rumors

[alk3997]

Wow! That is impressive. I don't think I've ever seen the cover before. Very very rare.

 

[fredblue]

Just Ordered The Mccartney Years............surely not the best selection of his library, but enough good stuff in 5.1 to make Snood :51banana:

Thank You SurroundofMusic :banana:

how did you like the Macca DVDs? excellent mixes on there!

 

[alk3997]

Resurrecting this thread...

As you may remember the four possible surround sound releases in 2014 were:
1) A Hard Day's Night
2) Let It Be
3) Beatles 1 Videos
4) The Beatles Live

Well, we already have AHDN Blu-Ray. Now comes word today that Ron Howard will be producing The Beatles Live and that multitrack sound-board masters have been found of some of the concerts.

More here:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2...erforming-history/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

and the official release is here:
http://www.thebeatlesliveproject.com/

There would certainly seem to be the potential for a 5.1/7.1-channel mix. Of course, the rear channels would probably just consist of thousands of screaming teenage girls.

BTW, should anyone be hiding a multitrack master or film of the concerts from 1960-1966, there is a way to send an email to the producers included in the official release.

Current release date is late-2015.

I still think it will be The Beatles #1 Videos for the second release of 2014.

 

[GabeL]

I'll never understand why they don't release a dvd-audio or blu-ray audio of just the songs from the films in surround sound....what a shame for those of us who aren't big fans of watching a movie to hear songs

 

[jdmack]

and that multitrack sound-board masters have been found of some of the concerts.

What is the source for this information? I didn't see anything about multitrack tapes in the linked articles.

Even if they found multitrack tapes, they'd be 3-track at best (such as what they had for The Hollywood Bowl concerts).

J. D.

 

[alk3997]

What is the source for this information? I didn't see anything about multitrack tapes in the linked articles.

Even if they found multitrack tapes, they'd be 3-track at best (such as what they had for The Hollywood Bowl concerts).

J. D.

You almost had me thinking I had imagined reading that. From Billboard Magazine,

Early research for the project, conducted by One Voice One World, has yielded footage shot in 8mm and Super 8 that has never been available to the public. Simultaneously, producers have been reaching out to collectors and finding soundboard recordings, some of which are multi-track, which can now be married.

By 1966 there were "portable" 4-track recorders available. I suppose if you had multiple 2-tracks you could now sync them, as well. We'll just have to wait 1-1/2 years to find out.

http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6157669/ron-howard-to-direct-beatles-documentary

 

[key_wiz]

Are there really soundboard concert recordings out there that haven't leaked out in all these years??

 

[alk3997]

It took until 2008 for this to surface:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSGvznibHdA

It was not uncommon for a U.S. radio station to replay a Beatles concert in the radio station's home city. Medium-sized or large-sized radio stations might have recorded the concert in 3-track or 4-track and then mixed for broadcast later. Having a mono master, the multitrack is put in a pile where it sits until ready to be converted to digital many many decades later.

Another explanation is someone knew what they had and was just waiting for the price to get high enough from Apple.

 

[neil wilkes]

Anyway, the AHDN 5.1 mixes are a bit limited just because it's three guitars, one drum kit and a cowbell (AHDN), usually with double-tracked vocals. So, you don't get the number of instruments that are available on say Rubber Soul, even though both albums were 4-track recordings. Separating the instruments is now do-able, if Apple chooses to do so. So that the drums, bass and rhythm guitar are recorded on one track isn't that much of an obstacle anymore with time and money. I would truly enjoy hearing a good mix of And I Love Her with the lead guitar properly mixed.

You cannot split out Drums, Bass & Rhythm guitars from a mono stream into the component parts. That is like getting an egg yolk out of a baked sponge cake, and it matters not what spectral editing package you have in 10 second bursts you ain't splitting a rhythm section into component bits without nasty artefacts.
Doing this properly would be a case of going back to the 4-track submix tapes that got bounced to the mono track in the first place, as was done with Crimson's ITCOTCK.

 

[dr8track]

That is like getting an egg yolk out of a baked sponge cake.

Ha! Love that analogy.

 

[keenly]

2 and 3 tracks into 5.1?

 

[key_wiz]

You cannot split out Drums, Bass & Rhythm guitars from a mono stream into the component parts. That is like getting an egg yolk out of a baked sponge cake, and it matters not what spectral editing package you have in 10 second bursts you ain't splitting a rhythm section into component bits without nasty artefacts.
Doing this properly would be a case of going back to the 4-track submix tapes that got bounced to the mono track in the first place, as was done with Crimson's ITCOTCK.

I'm not even sure that they were bouncing and submixing tracks in this manner during AHDN. Mark Lewisohn's "Recording Sessions" book describes the song AHDN as having "basic rhythm" on track 1, John's first vocal on track 2, John's second vocal, Paul's vocal, bongos drums and acoustic guitar on track 3, and the "jangling guitar notes at the end of the song and George Martin's piano on track 4.

I suppose it's possible that tracks 1 or 3 were mixdowns from another 4 track, but he doesn't mention that. Since Abbey Road had just recently gotten a 4-track machine (the first Beatles' song recorded on 4-track was "I Want To Hold Your Hand"), I don't know that they would have had two?

As near as I can tell, Lewisohn's book doesn't mention when they first started doing bounce-downs of tracks or utilizing two 4-track machines, but the first mention of a "reduction mix" I can find is for "Michelle". Although some of the techniques described for the Help! recordings sound like they have been doing that then too.

 

[key_wiz]

And I'm pretty certain that at least up until Sgt. Pepper that they only submixed tracks when they absolutely felt they needed the extra tracks. If they could do it all on the original 4-tracks, they went with that. So even if you could peel back enough tracks for a true 5.1 mix on some songs on Rubber Soul or Revolver, I don't think it would be possible for all of them.

 

[Ranasakawa]

From Sgt Pepper to Abbey Road i'm sure 5.1 mixes are possible.
I would buy them.

 

[alk3997]

I'm not even sure that they were bouncing and submixing tracks in this manner during AHDN. Mark Lewisohn's "Recording Sessions" book describes the song AHDN as having "basic rhythm" on track 1, John's first vocal on track 2, John's second vocal, Paul's vocal, bongos drums and acoustic guitar on track 3, and the "jangling guitar notes at the end of the song and George Martin's piano on track 4.

I suppose it's possible that tracks 1 or 3 were mixdowns from another 4 track, but he doesn't mention that. Since Abbey Road had just recently gotten a 4-track machine (the first Beatles' song recorded on 4-track was "I Want To Hold Your Hand"), I don't know that they would have had two?

As near as I can tell, Lewisohn's book doesn't mention when they first started doing bounce-downs of tracks or utilizing two 4-track machines, but the first mention of a "reduction mix" I can find is for "Michelle". Although some of the techniques described for the Help! recordings sound like they have been doing that then too.

You are correct. The only bounce-down on Rubber Soul was Michelle. That's the equivalent of a 5-track recording.

Help! (the title song) is the only bounce-down on the Help! album. It too is an equivalent 5-track recording.

Revolver is where the reduction mixes started being used most of the time, although Tomorrow Never Knows is "only" a 4-track recording.

 

[ar surround]

You are correct. The only bounce-down on Rubber Soul was Michelle. That's the equivalent of a 5-track recording...

The 5.1 mix of Drive My Car on the Love album sounds like there is a number of discreet components. So is there not a bounce-down on that track from Rubber Soul as well?

 

[Quadwreck]

The 5.1 mix of Drive My Car on the Love album sounds like there is a number of discreet components. So is there not a bounce-down on that track from Rubber Soul as well?

Starting with "Beatles For Sale", EMI saved all the tapes used in Beatles recording sessions, making possible a recent synchronizing of all the tracks that were mixed down then, so they now have true multitracks to work from in any remixing.

 

[alk3997]

The 5.1 mix of Drive My Car on the Love album sounds like there is a number of discreet components. So is there not a bounce-down on that track from Rubber Soul as well?

No, Drive My Car was straight 4-track. Now that doesn't mean all 4 tracks were recorded at the same time. For instance on Drive My Car, the Drums (Ringo), Piano (Paul), Rhythm Guitar (John) and Tambourine (George) were all recorded on track 1. The bass guitar was recorded on track 2 so it could be overdubbed later. Main vocals on track 3 and track 4 had the double tracked (and beep-beep) vocals along with the cowbell and the lead guitar. No need for more tracks that way. More often than not in the Rubber Soul era, the first track usually contained the whole band playing instruments, while track 2 was the bass overdub. I count 7 instruments and 2 vocal sessions, which is more than sufficient for the "Rubber Soul sound".

The REDD .51 mixing desk had mic inputs for 8 mic channels. So, in normal operations, up to 8 mics could be fed to a single track. In practice they could use more than 8 mics by using outboard equipment fed into the mixing desk.

I'm trying to find the reference to EMI's policy for holding onto tapes in Lewisohn but I'm not having luck. Certainly all of the version of I Want to Hold Your Hand exists so it had to be by early 1964, if not earlier. The studio documentation for all of the sessions exists which is why there is evidence to support than none of the songs on A Hard Day's Night or Beatles For Sale (or the Long Tall Sally EP) had bounce-downs (reductions mixes). They had been freed-of twin-track overdubs. Who would need more than 4-tracks?

 

[alk3997]

Finally found the reference. Page 20 (September 11, 1962) in Mark Lewisohn's "The Beatles Recording Sessions" (c) 1988,

"It was not customary in 1962 to keep session tapes once completed songs had been mastered for disc release so the Orbison-like "Please Please Me" no longer exists. 'We didn't keep outtakes then, we had enough problems storing masters,' says George Martin today. Fortunately, such a policy ceased in 1963, and from that moment almost every session tape was kept, and still exists today."

I suspect it was right after "She Loves You / I'll Get You" were recorded that the policy changed, since those session tapes no longer exist. She Loves You was so heavily edited that I wonder if the original master was chopped up (accidentally maybe) instead of a tape copy.