I've been waiting a long time for this. For the first time since 1987 & 1988, the original Beatles albums are remastered and due for reissue.
It sounds like Apple Corps has taken a good approach to this. Let's look at what the press release says, and what it doesn't say.
The date of the release has been timed to coincide with the release of The Beatles Rock Band game from Harmonix. Think "number nine...number nine...number nine."
14 titles, 16 discs. All in stereo, all with the original UK album designs and song orders. The albums would be, in release order:
- Please Please Me
- With the Beatles
- A Hard Day's Night
- Beatles For Sale
- Help!
- Rubber Soul
- Revolver
- Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
- Magical Mystery Tour (as released originally in the US)
- The Beatles (aka The White Album)
- Yellow Submarine
- Abbey Road
- Let It Be
- Past Masters
A couple of notes on that list: Although Magical Mystery Tour was released in the UK as a double-disk EP, this will be the album as it was released in the US, which became a part of the international core catalog during the first remastering in 1987. Past Masters, which was originally two separately sold CDs containing non-album tracks, will now be sold as one album.
For a limited time, each of these albums except Past Masters will also include a QuickTime mini-documentary on the making of the album, including never-before-heard studio chatter from The Beatles.
If you're a collector, you'll also be able to buy all of these stereo albums in a box set, and the mini-docmentaries will be included on an accompanying DVD.
Of even more interest to serious collectors: A second box set entitled "The Beatles in Mono." Ten albums of the mono mixes, which were almost always the mixes on which the Beatles and George Martin slaved over. The stereo mixes, until very late in the game, were afterthoughts. In fact, the mono versions of The White Album and Yellow Submarine weren't even released in the United States back in the LP days. And it's the description in the press release of these mono discs that leads me to believe we'll be hearing entirely new, albeit faithful, mixes.
"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."
--thebeatles.com press release
According to the press release, the tunes have been remastered over a four-year period, but it isn't clear from the release what this remastering entails. I think it entails a lot. Back when The Beatles first were released on CD in 1987, George Martin was unhappy with the state of the mixed masters. So the first four albums were issued in mono only, and Help! and Rubber Soul were actually remixed by Martin in 1987 from the multi-track masters.
What I suspect and hope is that these are all new remixes, made from the original source tapes, not the original mixes. Why do I hope this? Because other Beatles remixes have proved to me it can be a valid approach. The 1999 CD of the Yellow Submarine Songtrack was entirely remixed, and sounds amazing. Even better, the Cirque du Soleil LOVE Soundtrack. Although much of that album is not faithful to the original mixes, listen to the LOVE version of I Am the Walrus. Loudly. It is amazing, and until the last minute or so of the song, retains the original's feel. If the experts at Abbey Road studios have worked their magic right, it should sound like years of grime have been cleaned away from these recordings. My only regret is that they won't be in surround sound, at least not yet. The surround sound mixes on the Yellow Submarine DVD and the LOVE DVD-Audio disk are superb. Furthermore, if they were using the original mixes for the core CDs, why would they bother to put the original stereo mixes on the mono discs of Help! and Rubber Soul? I doubt they would use the 1987 mixes of those two albums for the main part of this project.
It will be interesting to learn what the engineers have actually done. Of course, many of the early recordings are just on two-track or three-track tape. In fact, I've read that the original recordings for "She Loves You" have been lost; and that the version we're currently used to on CD was mastered from a 45 rpm single. But we'll know all the answers in five months and two days.
Leave a comment