I have had it up to here waiting for the Beatles catalogue to be remastered

oh yes. crappy morning @ work. fuzzy brain.

A second boxed set has been created with the collector in mind. 'The Beatles in Mono' gathers together, in one place, all of the Beatles recordings that were mixed for a mono release. It will contain 10 of the albums with their original mono mixes, plus two further discs of mono masters (covering similar ground to the stereo tracks on 'Past Masters'). As an added bonus, the mono "Help!" and "Rubber Soul" discs also include the original 1965 stereo mixes, which have not been previously released on CD. These albums will be packaged in mini-vinyl CD replicas of the original sleeves with all original inserts and label designs retained.

That's odd, for having 'All of the Beatles recordings' none of these sets have any of the Christmas records, do they?

No.

Altogether now! "Get one of those for your trousers, get one of those for your hairrrrr"

the christmas recordings are the big ommission (also missing: a couple of available mixes of early tracks like ask me why and please please me; mono yellow sub mixes [if these exist, apparently a matter of dispute]). fwiw, cute as the christmas record is, they are not mindblowing works of art and you can find perfectly good bootlegs on the internet now so I don't really care. It'll just be nice to get decent sets of the actual albums on cd finally (yeah I have the purple chick stuff, yeah it's pretty good, but those all have issues too).

The Mono Yellow Sub is just the stereo mix combined.

the whole mini-documentary thing with these is irritating.

Yeah it will be like 5-minute edits of Anthology stuff padded with Box Set adverts.

btw I really like the 66/67/68/69 xmas records, they're really pretty charming and nice, even if they are slight..

For your game playing enjoyment:

GILES MARTIN WAS conjuring spirits, or perhaps summoning gods. The tools for this ritual included a pair of omnidirectional microphones, a digital mixing console and a hastily-procured set of teacups and saucers, but the magic was in the room itself. Studio Two at Abbey Road in London has changed very little since 1969, when Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison recorded together for the last time. The Steinway upright McCartney played on “Lady Madonna” still stands in one corner, its middle keys worn to the wood. Sound-absorbing quilts hang in wide stripes down the whitewashed brick walls. The view from the control room on the second level is much as it would have been for George Martin, Giles’s father, who oversaw the creation of nearly every Beatles album from this room. Giles held a slender finger to his lips, which turned up into a playful grin. He handed cups and saucers to three people nearby and mimed a sip. The others followed his lead, and a few feet away the microphones captured the small clattering sound of four people drinking tea.

The odd recording session in March was one very small contribution to what Apple Corps — the company still controlled by McCartney, Starr and the widows of Lennon and Harrison — hopes will be the most deeply immersive way ever of experiencing the music and the mythology of the Beatles. The band that upended the cultural landscape of the 1960s is now hitching its legacy to the medium of a new generation: the video game.

The sound effects Martin recorded are not anything most people who play the game will notice consciously. The Beatles: Rock Band, which is to be released on Sept. 9, involves playing ersatz instruments in time with the band’s original music. Between songs, players will hear the group warming up and bantering in the studio. Martin combed through hundreds of hours of tape to find these clips, but the chatter, recorded directly into microphones, lacked the subtle echo and ambient noise you would have heard if you were actually in the studio at the time. So after laying down a sound bed of background noise, Martin played the original clips through a set of speakers on the studio floor and rerecorded them through his mikes, this time with all the ringing acoustics of the room. Through the control-room window, Martin stared into the empty studio as if his mind’s eye could put physical form to the disembodied sounds. Across the decades a guitar was tuned, a snare drum rattled and John Lennon warmed up his voice for a new song called “Come Together”: “He got teenage lyrics, he got hot rod baldy.’’

And in response to me sending that around, Tom E. on Twitter:

Giles Martin is the Christopher Tolkien of pop!

the game is really neat and they did a nice job. the chatter stuff is kinda cool as atmosphere.

also I met Giles at e3 this year and he was actually super personable and nice, that NY times piece is so overwritten it makes him sound weird or something but he was just like a really nice dude and super friendly

he and his team also did some pretty interesting work in terms of getting the old track into a playable form for Rock Band...they had to come up with a way with filtering and other tracks to turn 2 track masters...i think they actually filed some patents and stuff..

anyway kinda geeky stuff but interesting to me.

Every time I see this thread bumped, I think of this record:

http://991.com/newgallery/Queen-Latifah-Latifahs-Had-It-U-471810.jpg

Long New York Times piece on the whole Rock Band hoo ha. Looks like a good read. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/magazine/16beatles-t.html

u might want to look a few posts up dude

ah yes my bad. onset of alzheimer's.

"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Rubber Soul will join Abbey Road as the first three Beatles albums available to download for The Beatles: Rock Band."

I'm not likely to buy many of these albums, but those three are among those I almost certainly won't. (I'll pass on Let It Be and Magical Mystery Tour for sure as well.) Beatles for Sale, now we're talking.

white album or nothing

For me it's the first four, White Album, prob. Revolver and maybe Help. And depending on how they sort out the Past Masters songs and how many of them end up on the RB disk, that one too. E.g. I'd want "Rain", "Paperback Writer", "I Feel Fine", "Revolution", but I think several of these are on the basic game disk.

That article is kinda funny. "The Beatles aren't really rock stars"?

.... I guess if you consider a band like Poison to be the model of rock stars then perhaps that's true.

Then again if you're basing it on drug intake and groupie sex I have always held a sneaking suspicion that the Beatles were far more hedonistic than anyone can imagine.

i took it to mean that there aren't, like, joe satriani-style shred solos in their songs... wasn't t dragonsofrce who sprang to fame through their appearance on guitar hero?

The beeb are celebrating all this in their own special way: http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2009/08_august/17/beatles.shtml

the highlight sounds like being this:

The Beatles On Record, directed by Bob Smeaton, charts The Beatles' extraordinary journey from Please Please Me to Abbey Road and reflects on how they developed as musicians, matured as songwriters and created a body of work that sounds as fresh in 2009 as the time it was recorded.

Narrated entirely by John, Paul, George, Ringo and their producer Sir George Martin, the documentary features more than 60 classic songs, rare footage and photos from The Beatles' archives and never-heard-before out-takes of studio chat from the Abbey Road recording sessions.

-

Then again if you're basing it on drug intake and groupie sex I have always held a sneaking suspicion that the Beatles were far more hedonistic than anyone can imagine.

Drugs, yes indeed. Not so sure about groupie sex though. And Rolling Stones were far more hedonistic at the time anyway.

Yeah, Groupie sex, loads of it. Soz Geir.

Not so sure about groupie sex though.
Are you serious? Their hotel rooms were revolving doors for groupies.
You don't really buy the suit-and-tie-and-tea-with-the-Queen sham that Brian Epstein put over on the world over four decades ago, do you? The Rolling Stones only seemed more sinister because they were specifically marketed by Andrew Loog Oldham to appear decadent, providing fans with an alternative to the "nice" Beatles. In fact, the opposite was closer to the truth.

From www.believermag.com:
Many in the media were quick to notice the two groups’ contrasting styles. When the Rolling Stones arrived in the United States, the first Associated Press (AP) report described them as “dirtier, streakier, and more disheveled than the Beatles.” Tom Wolfe put things more sharply: “The Beatles want to hold your hand,” he quipped, “but the Stones want to burn down your town.” Since these comparisons proved useful to everyone, both the bands and the journalists collaborated on the charade. In the early 1960s, Keith Richards remarked, “nobody took the music seriously. It was the image that counted, how to manipulate the press and dream up a few headlines.” Peter Jones, who wrote about both bands for the Record Mirror, recalled being in a “difficult position” because he was expected to “gloss over” the Beatles’ tawdry indiscretions. “It was decreed that the Beatles should be portrayed as incredibly lovable, amiable fellows, and if one of them, without mentioning any names, wanted to have a short orgy with three girls in the bathroom, then I didn’t see it.”

yeah i just read a lennon plastic-ono-band-era interview in this rolling stone compilation book and he basically said it was fucking insane on the road in when they still toured, in terms of groupies

yeah, he said it was like "Satyricon", right?

yeah something like that, it's in that rolling stone interviews book that came out a couple years a go.

Jazzbo OTM

The Rolling Stones aren't wearing matching suits but they're playing the same fucking game.

Will they remaster these orgies in mono or stereo?

surround sound, hopefully. and will the orgies be one of the hidden features on the Rock Band game?

one of the most common words used by lennon in the (1970?) playboy/ rolling stone interviews if you listen to the audio recording of them is 'whores'. he says it repeatedly when talking about life on the road. 'whoo-ers' is how he pronounces it. he never makes it sound like much fun either.

The GTO's "Permanent Damage" has a spoken word bit by the legendary Rodney Bingenheimer and he talks about how just by being in the same picture with George Harrison in a pop magazine resulted in a line of girls outside his door for a week. Says it was just like a queue; "NEXT"! Then Rodney compares his bedding skills with Ringo's, saying "I'm a much better lay cos I haven't had as much".

I like how this thread is now "Does A Beatle Have Sexytime?"

It's all Geir's fault.

he's a scando melodic eunuch manchild with the hots on for jeff lynne, the boy can't help it!

the whole mini-documentary thing with these is irritating.

If you have the Anthology DVDs, not to worry. From what I've seen/heard, the mini-docs are edits of the corresponding Anthology segments, with no new/original content.

Or was that what you meant by irritating (the redundancy aspect)?

yeah, basically, that and the quicktime format -- just seems like a kind of pointless add-on.

nvr frgt

http://www.rhymerecords.com/images/EnhancedCD.gif

those saved the music industry, didn't they?

there's definitely new content on the mini docs, it isnt (as i too feared it might be) regurgiatated ANTHOLOGY bits. or not JUST that.
mind you they're 4 minutes long each doc so hey.

When was the last time somebody included a quicktime file with a CD? I know Spandau Ballet did with their 2003 remaster of "True", and it seemed old-fashioned already then. :)

When the CD+ first appeared, I had the idea to do a "demo tape+" that would include some old TRS-80 program noise at the end... Never actually released it though.

he's a scando melodic eunuch manchild with the hots on for jeff lynne, the boy can't help it!
Can I steal this for a lyric? It'll never get released - but if it did there'd be a CD and a credit for you in it, M@tt.

pretty surprised these haven't leaked yet.

It's The Beatles, man.

he's a scando melodic eunuch manchild with the hots on for jeff lynne, the boy can't help it!
Can I steal this for a lyric? It'll never get released - but if it did there'd be a CD and a credit for you in it, M@tt.

― staggerlee, Saturday, August 22, 2009 1:39 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol it's all yours

and also no disrespect geir, glad to see you back on ILM on the real, i love your steez no lie.