Revolver remade

Regular readers of this blog know we don't talk much about "affects" on here such as toys or records because it's really more a personal blog rather than the blog of a person however I was that boy and so some records are in their own way important within that.

It's also true that some artists and composers are very much connected with me so exploring them coincided with personal journeys of self exploration.

The last time I wrote anything on here about the Beatles was February 2017 which was looking at the records by them I owned, a good number from childhood around significant birthdays and christmas's part of reason was one you have a collection then, unless you collect variants and world-wide issues, you've pretty much have all you need and the last core albums of interest were issued in the autumn of 2012.

Recording technology today, indeed ever since the early 1970's was radically different than it was for much of the 1960's when these albums were recorded having far more individual tracks and in recent years attempts at remixing them for better stereo sound has been the focus.

Recently I bought the new remixed edition of the Revolver album of 1966.

This album was recorded using four tracks on a tape recorder working on one part of the song using up to all the four tracks to get all the elements wanted such as any instruments and then mixed to a single track of a new tape on another machine before starting again to build up the drum tracks, lead,bass and rhythm guitar in many sessions before a final tape with everything to be included in the final mix is made.

Back in 1966 the main aim was to make a mono record from those four tracks as that was then norm for pop music especially targetted to teens and young adults for playing on single speaker systems.

A stereo mix was made but the way it was recorded by design limited what could be done when it came to where in a stereo spread everything could be placed which coupled with the rather dashed off approach taking much less time than the mono left a less than satisfactory stereo version.

That version was the one I heard around 1977/8 when I was starting as a young teen to get into the Beatles and back then stereo versions were all you could buy as the mono deemed "old hat" in 1970 had been deleted from the catalogue.

Recently new computer artificial intelligence but steered by humans technology that enabled separating out some of the parts of the four track mixes into effectively separate tracks that could be mixed and placed within the stereo image in the manner many popular albums from the 1970's were by design using multiitrack recording systems has become possible and this album was treated to it.

What you could do to fix some of the errors of the original stereo version intrigued me

As some may recognize on the disc label they have gone for a more authentic 1960's label design although the copyright is 2022 presumably for legal protection and as the record is made not in the UK but the Czech Republic "Made in the EU" is printed,

Take Taxman for instance, there are many periods of near silence on the right hand channel as the vocals are just there or the errors in the double tracking at the start of Eleanor Rigby and the string quartet is now spread between both speakers.

The sea effects on Yellow Submarine originally from a sound effects tape have been remixed into the track in stereo adding atmosphere while the seabird effects on the psychedelic Tomorrow Never Knows are panned from left to right.

This remix centres the vocals more providing the immediacy and drive of the mono but with a more spacious feel spreading the instrumentation around the left and right channels.

Personally I feel the process has worked well producing a more enjoyable mature stereo sound spread without departing too far from what the album sounded like.

Critics have complained that the record sleeve doesn't have those folds around the edges originals had but my last original copy from the mid 1980's lacked them too and the only modern versions to feature them were the 2014 mono editions now deleted.