Do the Beatles get too much credit..

 

Alan Parsons produced Dark Side of the Moon, for which he received critical acclaim and a Grammy award. Do you know where he learned his production values? He was assistant sound engineer on the Let it Be and Abbey Road albums. Here is a quote from Alan Parsons: "I couldn't wait to find out the secrets behind the album. It left me totally in awe of the talent of The Beatles themselves of course, but also the work behind the scenes in the studio". He also added: "I couldn't have asked for a better grounding in recording - after all not many engineers got to work the greatest rock act of all time". So, without equivocation, The Beatles influence directly impacted the making of Dark Side of the Moon.

 

Alan Parsons also was the leader of "A Walk Down Abbey Road", a 2001 Beatles tribute concert tour featuring Parsons, John Entwistle of the who, Todd Rundgren, Jack Bruce of Cream, and Ann Wilson of Heart, among others.

 

Get a clue.

 

 

Multitrack recording was in its infancy during the period we are looking at. When the Beatles first started recording they were recording onto 2-track tape machines, in late 1963 Abbey Road installed 4-track machines (so their first two albums were recorded on 2-tracks), 8-track machines weren't installed until 1968, so Rubber Soul and Revolver were recorded on a 4-track system. Sgt Pepper was recorded using two 4-track machines to emulate an 8-track, unlike The Beach Boys who had access to a real 8-track for Pet Sounds.

 

For the White Album the Beatles went to Trident Studios to record some of the songs because they had an 8-track system - the Beatles final albums were recorded on 8-track machines. The UK lagged the USA by several years on the transition to 16-track studios - artists like Zappa, B,S&T, Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane all had access to 16-track studios while the Beatles and Pink Floyd were still using the 8-track setups at Abbey Road.

 

16-track tape machines didn't arrive in the UK until the tail-end of 1969, with the first at Trident Studios where the last track on VdGG's Least We Can Do Is Wave At Each Other was one of the first tracks to use it. That's not to say all the albums recorded on Trident's 16-track set up were fine examples of music Production - Trespass and Nursery Cryme were both recorded at Trident on 16-track tape, and the production on those is pretty poor. By 1971 most studios in London had transitioned over to 16-track tape. By 1973, when Floyd recorded Dark Side of the Moon, Abbey Road Studio was entirely 16-track and one of the most advanced studios of its time (and a little too late for the Beatles).

 

What this means is that the technology that the Beatles used in their entire recording history was simpler, older and less accommodating than that used by all bar one of the albums you cite (except Kind Of Blue obviously) - it was even simpler than Zappa had for Hot Rats. Abbey Road's 4 and 8 track tape machines didn't even have Dolby to minimise the tape hiss from one bounce down to the next. Therefore any "audio-defects", tape hiss or other recording faults can't be blamed on the artists who used Abbey Road in the 60s, but on the studio itself and EMI's reluctance to modernise it until it had to. That the Beatles, Martin and all those studio engineers managed to create what they did with the technology at their disposal makes them even more remarkable.

 

Remastering any of these older 4 and 8-track recordings isn't going to make the spotless, and it certainly won't raise them up to the same level as an original or remastered 16-track recording. Also, remixing any of these albums is impossible because the masters are already mixed-down and cannot be "unmixed". Remastering is not a magic process that guarantees to make things better or right - it is simply transferring of the 4, 8 or 16 track tape recordings down to a 2-track stereo mix with a bit of EQ and a bit of reverb to beef it up a little.

Both Crimson and The Beatles uses successive bouncedowns to free up tracks to use to record (overdub) new layers. A bouncedown is an intermediate mix where multiple tracks are mixed down to just two, freeing up spare tracks for new layers. For example to build up the rich orchestral sound on something like ITCotCK or Sgt Pepper they would have (say) 2 of the tracks for the Drums and Bass, 2 for Rhythm, 2 to build up the "orchestra" and two blank tracks to record new layers on to. Once they were happy with the two new layer they would bounce those two new tracks down onto the 2 previous "orchestra" tracks, freeing up the two "blank" tracks to record the next layer. Once they were happy with that they would then bounce down even further, from 6-tracks down to 4 for example, so they could record the lead and vocal parts (for example). So even though the 8-track master is not the final mix, a lot of intermediate mixing has been going on during the recording.

 

/edit: if you can imagine recording a drum kit onto 8-track there simply isn't enough tracks to record each element of the kit: every drum head will be mic'd up and then two or more mic's used for the cymbols (overheads). Therefore it is necessary to live-mix many of those onto one or two tracks, so for example they would live mix the kick drum onto one track, the snare onto another, then the toms onto say two tracks and the overheads onto another two. Once a they had achieved a good take that would have used up 6 of the available 8 tracks just for drums, so they would then bounce down those 6 tracks to two. After that it would be impossible to un-mix the drum track to boost or re-position (spacially) the snare for example. Of course if they kept copies of the original 6-track drum sessions then they could to some extend (but not the live-mix of the toms for example), but generally the cost of tape meant they just recorded over them.

 

Delving deeper into ITCotCK remix, Fripp does say that they have gone back to the first gen pre-sub mix tapes. I stand corrected.

 

 

 really? Would you like to be more specific about that?