Sgt. Pepper 2017 remix tape sync

Findlay

Member
Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask this but I'm confused about how the remix was done on this. It appears that Giles Martin had access to all the original tapes. 4 track machines (Studers?) were used for the original recording and tracks were regularly bounced down from one machine to another to free up tracks - for example drums backing vocals and guitars would fill up 4 tracks and these would be bounced down to one track on another machine to free up 3 more tracks etc etc. It seems(unless I've got the wrong end of the stick!) that, for the first time ever with Beatles recordings, Giles used the original pre-bounce tracks to mix with the later recordings. He described the pre-bounce tapes as "glistening" as they sounded so good. So my thoughts are - how did he manages to sync these tapes up? Am I missing something? Surely it would be very difficult to do this.

I'm also thinking how wonderful it is that tape survives so well after 50 years. The mixes sound fantastic - I can't hear any hiss although there was no noise reduction around at that time was there?
 
He probably dumped all the tracks into a daw, lined them up, and used vari-speed to sync them properly.

It's pretty easy, since one track on each tape will have a premix of the rest of the tracks from the bounce. That can be used to line up the subsequent recordings.

I have no knowlege of what was actually done, but that would be the easiest/fastest way to do it. It's not hard at all.
 
Thanks for the replies - how does vari-speed work? Can it cope with all the variations in tape speed between the machines - surely it has to be absolutely perfect?
 
Thanks for the replies - how does vari-speed work? Can it cope with all the variations in tape speed between the machines - surely it has to be absolutely perfect?
In a DAW, you can actually create time points at each drum hit and you can tell the daw to line them up to the same hits from the comp track on the next tape. You can choose to have it simply time stretch (keeping the pitch) or vari-speed (changes pitch with the speed)

Yes, you could probably try to sync the analog tapes, but that is the long, hard way. With a DAW, you can probably do a song an hour. With the tape, it could take you the better part of a day to line everything up and there is no way to deal with any variation in the speed of the original machines the tapes were recorded on.
 
These comments from 10 years ago in the SoS interview about Beatles remixes on another project Giles Martin did, give some hints of how they dealt with the 4-tracks.

"In returning to the earlier masters, Abbey Road's Allan Rouse came up with a suggestion that would help shape the sound of songs like 'Eleanor Rigby': going back to the original, unbounced masters as well as using the mixed-down four-tracks. "We would sync up the fours to fours," Giles says. "So 'Eleanor Rigby' was recorded originally on a four-track one-inch as a double string quartet, and then we'd sync the bounce of the strings that was done, so we could then have a six-track of a four-track."

The whole article is here: George & Giles Martin: Remixing The Beatles |
 
This is interesting Findlay. I hadn't been paying attention as I see these remixes being packaged on the whatever anniversary of whatever album all the time, but now that I keep hearing that this is actually legit I am curious as well. I didn't know they went back to the pre-bounce master tapes, and I kind of surprised that this hadn't been done before. I bought the 120g vinyl of Sgt Peppers a couple years back and loved the sound. I've always been into the weird mixing techniques that they were forced to do back then like pan all drums/bass/guitars to the left channel while vocals went to the right etc and was so used to hearing tape hiss appear at certain times that it basically just a part of the song to me. Hearing that they spent so much time originally on the mono mix and then rushed through the stereo one was new info to me.

Thanks for the info guys
 
Glad you find this interesting Level Anything. I wonder why they haven't done this with "Revolver" too, as I'm pretty sure they were bouncing a lot for this.

Looking at the Studer J37 specs, it is amazing how good the humble 244 is by comparison (especially when running on type 1!)
 
Glad you find this interesting Level Anything. I wonder why they haven't done this with "Revolver" too, as I'm pretty sure they were bouncing a lot for this.

Looking at the Studer J37 specs, it is amazing how good the humble 244 is by comparison (especially when running on type 1!)

Umm, I dont think so!! The Studer would beat the pants off the Teac any day of the week.
 
Mr. Studer is turning over in his grave

Why's he spinning?

Umm, I dont think so!! The Studer would beat the pants off the Teac any day of the week.

Don't think he was saying they're in the same league. More like appreciating what a machine with something like 1/32 the width of the J37 per track can do. Obviously the Studer is a different beats in all aspects than a cassette 4-track.
 
Thanks Level Anything, that's exactly what I was saying! It is interesting that the quoted freq response of the Studer isn't that great -especially at 7.5 ips, and the 244 matches it at 15. Just for the hell of it I just recorded the remixed version of "With A Little Help From My Friends" on 2 tracks of the 244 I have set up for Type 1 and it sounds great - beautiful top,mid and bass and no dbx artifacts.
 
Thanks Level Anything, that's exactly what I was saying! It is interesting that the quoted freq response of the Studer isn't that great -especially at 7.5 ips, and the 244 matches it at 15. Just for the hell of it I just recorded the remixed version of "With A Little Help From My Friends" on 2 tracks of the 244 I have set up for Type 1 and it sounds great - beautiful top,mid and bass and no dbx artifacts.

We know what you are saying and that's the cause of my comment. You understand that this 1/8-inch track width was the consumer standard of the day - 7 1/2ips, 2-track (the 1-inch, 8-track part of it). A fat track at 7 1/2ips has got its own version of fidelity
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A lot of these true Binaural stereo will have separation many have not heard before. When FM got going, they would have Beatles Marathons, and we could record Beatles to our cassettes all day long. My cassette was only good to 12 and 13k(going downhill with the wind), but we got that wonderful FM processing that we couldn't get at home. My 1960 SOS MONO Telefunken was doing 16k at 3 3/4ips. Its pretty common to see specs looking real good, but the Technical specs only hit 15k, as that's about all one needs for music.

So, while we can find a number on paper, that doesn't mean it translates the same way on different machines. You might of tried half-speed remastering : )
 
I transferred some old 16 track recordings into Pro Tools using 8 channels of Lucid DA converters in two takes. It took about a half hour to get in lined up in sync by matching the drums on each take.

Can they do a similar remix for Revolver / Rubber Soul? Those are my fav Beatles albums!
 
I transferred some old 16 track recordings into Pro Tools using 8 channels of Lucid DA converters in two takes. It took about a half hour to get in lined up in sync by matching the drums on each take.

Can they do a similar remix for Revolver / Rubber Soul? Those are my fav Beatles albums!

It's probaly those two and Abbey Road for me. Over here, I have the Mobile Fidelity Abbey Road LP, and I think it sounds pretty darn good. The other two are, currently, vintage CD, though I've the albums in storage . I really don't have any problem with the stereo CD as I was buying stereo by that time.

I like to 2-buss though two old preamps and if one is noisey. or, off, it is one track at a time. No extra charge for the phase effect : )
 
We know what you are saying and that's the cause of my comment.

I meant the "Studer would beat the pants off the TEAC any day of the week" comment.

Agree with the whole numbers on paper thing as well. I'm finding it to be truer as I gain more experience in this field and hear more machines.
 
I love that Apple have now set the precedent of going back to the pre bounce session tapes for remixes. They first did it for the "Yellow Submarine Songtrack" CD, which was the stereo mix companion of the 5.1 mixes done for the remastered version of the film. But since that was for the film and not an "official canon" album all of us Beatle hardcores didn't know if they'd dive in with a full on remix program. The remixes for the "1+" album in 2015, again done the same way with first generation pre-bounce session tapes, were just another indicator they were serious about doing this on a large scale, on the albums themselves.

Half of me feels that too much Lucasian futzing with the albums is almost heresy but all the original mixes are still there, remastered beautifully in 2009, and the fact Giles Martin is the custodian of this remixing endeavor I feel like it is okay with the Universe... plus Paul, Ringo, Olivia & Yoko all have signed off on it.

The only problems that would've given Giles some headaches & head scratchers is that the Beatles often, using today's parlance, "pre produced" (i.e. thought ahead) their recording process knowing the limitations of 4 track. Meaning: on the first 4 track session tape they might record drums & bass on 1 track together, with guitars & piano on another, etc. Recording more parts together to avoid multiple bounces was to avoid too many "reduction mixes" as EMI termed them, especially in the early albums when the band played most rhythm tracks live as a band. A song during the era after "Please Please Me" two track recording & before the experimentation of 1966 would be the four main instruments on 2 tracks and the other two would be for vocals & solos. Song's did not go into many reduction mixes if at all.

It is unclear if the Beatles still utilized these methods on Pepper for every track, but as the bonus material shows, a track like "Fixing A Hole" had a basic live rhythm track of harpsichord, drums bass, McCartney's vocal etc. Did each of those instruments get their own track
or did they still use techniques they'd used for at that point years? Where isolation of every element wasn't possible is difficult to suss out even with Mark Lewisohn's Recording Sessions book as a guide it's not possible to suss out.

Giles would​ also lose complete isolation of every soubd if the Beatles did any additional overdubs WHILE a 4 track to 4 track bounce was happening (an old technique those of us who started recording when "home recording" was still PortaStudio's can attest to using to squeeze every possible inch of space out of the 4 track limitation. Either way it's a fascinating process, and now that everything the band ever recorded that exists on tape at Abbey Road has been archived to 192kh/24bit who knows what projects could get greenlit.

I have demos from the Tascam 424 & 488mkII that I'd love to transfer to DAW but without a 4 input interface (my Tascam US-2X2 has only 2) and the logistical nightmare of getting 8 tracks of tape output from the 488mkII I have never done it. The syncing used on this landmark albums remix could probably be approximated with a decent DAW, but my concern of even just transferring the 4 track session tape twice (track 1 & 2 in one pass, then 3 & 4) is how wow & flutter or any miniscule tape speed fluctuations may sound. Eventually I will do it, even as an experiment on a song or two.

But rumors are already swirling that a 50th anniversary "White Album" remix has already been completed, and even though "Abbey Road" was recorded on 8 track I can see Giles & Apple wanting to remix it too. Again, I am if two minds, but the original mix sessions his Dad & Geoff Emerick and occasionally the Beatles did are still there on the shelf. For no matter how cool these remix projects are for analog recording & Beatles freaks like me the original mixes will always be the definitive versions.
 
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