I Believe In Miracles

[seltaeb1012002]

Just saw this title mentioned in the GV Sessions thread and it reminded me of what a great little snippet this is. Quite possibly my favorite track from the Made In California box set, even though some of us have heard it for years.

1) Can anyone definitively identify who's singing the held out falsetto notes?

2) Was this always meant to be part of Can't Wait Too Long or did the bootleggers just tack it on to the beginning of the Odeon track? Any evidence of it being a section of it's own song?

[JK]

Have you seen this other topic yet? I don't know if it's any help to you:

http://smileysmile.net/board/index.php?topic=16306.0

[seltaeb1012002]

Have you seem this other topic yet? I don't know if it's any help to you:

http://smileysmile.net/board/index.php?topic=16306.0

Well then. Apparently I was just as curious back then. 

Still thought it would be cool to bring up again. But thanks!

[JK]

Have you seem this other topic yet? I don't know if it's any help to you:

http://smileysmile.net/board/index.php?topic=16306.0

Well then. Apparently I was just as curious back then. 

Still thought it would be cool to bring up again. But thanks!

Haha. How stupid of me. Still, now others can investigate it if they want to. :=) 

[yonderhillside]

I've always thought of it as a lost vocal from CWTL but perhaps only because it's been presented that way from time to time. It would be nice to get to the bottom of it.

[The_Beach]

What is the longest version of this song that is known to exist? 30 seconds?

[seltaeb1012002]

What is the longest version of this song that is known to exist? 30 seconds?

The MIC version has two extra bars at the end. The boot version ends after 8 bars, then goes into that other awesome section that hasn't been released yet officially. It'd be great to hear that part in high quality.

Sidenote, been listening to this trying to figure out who's singing the high part. I think I cracked the code. I'm 99.9% sure it's Marilyn.

[bossaroo]

this is still too good to be true:

https://soundcloud.com/smileyhoneyfriends-1/cifotm-i-believe-in-miracles

[CenturyDeprived]

this is still too good to be true:

https://soundcloud.com/smileyhoneyfriends-1/cifotm-i-believe-in-miracles

Wowzers! Was that just overlayed and it fit perfectly, or was there some pitch correction to make it work? Either way, a missing piece of the puzzle it would seem... almost surprised it wasn't used in that very place during CIFOTM by Linnett/Boyd for TSS, unless the IBIM tape wasn't known about at the time.

[seltaeb1012002]

- deleted -

[Ebb and Flow]

this is still too good to be true:

https://soundcloud.com/smileyhoneyfriends-1/cifotm-i-believe-in-miracles

Wowzers! Was that just overlayed and it fit perfectly, or was there some pitch correction to make it work? Either way, a missing piece of the puzzle it would seem... almost surprised it wasn't used in that very place during CIFOTM by Linnett/Boyd for TSS, unless the IBIM tape wasn't known about at the time.

It's been awhile since I made that, but I recall only using some very minor tempo correction on the "I Believe In Miracles" part to make them fit together.  I really think there is a connection between the two pieces.

[Matt Bielewicz]

A composing connection, perhaps - ie. that one was derived from the musical ideas for the other, but I don't think Miracles was due to be *overlaid* on that CIFOTM fragment in the way shown on the Soundcloud link. I mean, perhaps you weren't implying that anyway — but I think it's pretty much established that it was, if not impossible, then a real stretch of the technology of the day to overlay a fresh multitrack recording on an existing (completely separate) one. The timing issues between the two multitrack machines would have just made the whole thing too unreliable.

I mean, George Martin did a little bit of that the same year as the SMiLE Sessions ground to a halt, using two four-tracks for the orchestral overdubs on A Day In The Life, and he is on record saying how hard (and unreliable) it was. And the Radiophonic Workshop at the BBC were doing something similar a couple of years before, creating 'multitrack assemblies' before they even had multitrack machines, by carefully creating two pieces of music that were complementary and *exactly* the same length, and putting each on a different tape machine running at exactly the same speed. By starting both machines at EXACTLY the same time and recording the output of both machines to a third, you could 'overdub' one part onto the other. But it was fraught with problems, and in most cases, the engineers doing it needed a lot of attempts (and no doubt much cursing) before they got it right.

It was easier if you were trying to crossfade a couple of bits of music and the sync between the machines or musical pieces wasn't critical. But as soon as there's any kind of rhythm in either of the pieces, a 'wild' crossfade like that with no kind of sync between the playback machines would have been very hard to get right.

Of course, there were ways to achieve that kind of effect. If you had a finished piece of music and all the tracks on your four or eight track were full, you could bounce them down to one or two tracks on a fresh multitrack, and then add new overdubs over the end of the piece to create the start of your new song. Then you'd have a multitrack that had a section where one song developed into another that you could mix from. But getting the existing section of CIFOTM to overlay on the separately recorded 'I Believe In Miracles', from a separate multitrack so that it sounded rhythmically right... people probably just wouldn't have even attempted that kind of stuff in the 60s. Certainly not for more than very quick fades from one piece into another (from memory, there are a couple of those on The Millennium's debut LP, from... er... 1968?). Trying to sync/crossfade two lengthy pieces over a long period would have been really tough, though.

It got much easier by the 1980s, when ways of locking two or more multitrack tape machines together were created; and nowadays, of course, it's child's play with digital tech, and you can time-stretch and pitch-correct recordings all you want as well. You've also got all the tracks you'd ever need for bounces and crossfades, too. But back then, it was insanely hard; enough to dissuade most from attempting it.

I think this is the reason most of the serious editing and assembly of songs recorded in sections from that era - and I don't just mean the Beach Boys here - was done with tape splices. Crossfades were just too hard to get right. Oh, and you always lost another generation on the recording when you made one, too, increasing noise and losing quality as you went.

Having said that, VDP supposedly told AGD that had it been finished, the Elements on SMiLE was going to have internal crossfades in it (presumably between the sections representing each element, although that's just my guesswork). But I think that was *extremely* unusual for the time — another way in which SMiLE might have been groundbreaking technically. If you look at all the contemporary assemblies of sectional BB tracks, including the various 1966-7 versions of Heroes and Villains and even stuff like You Still Believe In Me, God Only Knows or Here Today from Pet Sounds (where the recording of different parts of those songs were completely separate recordings... the intro on YSBIM, the tag on GOK and the instrumental bridge in Here Today), the 'joins' were all done by splicing mixdowns, not multitrack crossfades. I believe I'm right in saying that more recent remixes of those tracks, by contrast (such as those on the Pet Sounds and SMiLE Sessions boxes), DO employ short crossfades rather than straight stereo cuts. You can hear this by comparing, say, the original mono mix of YSBIM to the Pet Sounds Sessions stereo mix. As the intro ends on the mono mix, the vocal harmonies cut off dead at the splice to the main part of the song. There's more of a gentle fade out of the intro harmonies on the stereo mix, as the main verse begins 'on top'.

You can hear those kinds of sudden changes of ambience resulting from splices in quite a lot of the spliced tracks of the day. Sometimes, as in Good Vibrations or some parts of Heroes and Villains, the abrupt nature of the spliced transitions is a desirable effect in itself... but in other places, it would be more usual these days to crossfade between sections. You hear the same if you compare the edits between the vocal harmony sections in 'And Your Dream Comes True' from 1965: the mono mix features splices which sound a little too abrupt here and there, while the stereo mixes (I think) feature more natural-sounding crossfades. It's just way easier to do that kind of thing these days.

I recall in the days of the old SMiLE Shop board a lot of discussion about this kind of thing. Back then, there were lots of people using software to (for example) overlay the vocal 'wall of Brian' harmonies from the Pet Sounds session fragment known as 'Unreleased Backgrounds' over the main track of Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder), convinced that these were 'lost Brian overdubs' for the middle of the song. But the harmony recordings don't just fit over the top of the main 'Don't Talk' track rhythmically, so all sorts of timestretch is needed to make them work. That, straight away, disqualifies them for me as anything that could have been intended for that purpose back in the 60s, because that kind of manipulation was next to impossible back then. The harmonies might have been for an intro to be spliced onto the front of the song, like the harmony and piano intro to You Still Believe In Me... or maybe they were just Brian experimenting separately with vocal harmonies for the song. But there's no way those specific recordings could have been intended as overlays on the actual track. They just couldn't have pulled that off back then.

And to return to topic, I think an contemporary overlay of 'I Believe In Miracles' on that 'CIFOTM' section can be similarly excluded as a possiblility on grounds of lack of the available tech back then.

Not to say they didn't intend to *splice* 'Miracles' to another 'Child' or new, *Child-like* recording back then, of course. But now we're getting off into speculation again...

I too would love to know whether that 88-vintage edit of 'Miracles' to 'CWTL' material was just a speculative assembly, or based on some kind of indication that it was supposed to be that way back in the 60s. Anyone know any more? Brian did record some sections of songs under different titles, didn't he? Weren't the sections of Cabin Essence recorded under section titles like that? If so, that might account for 'Miracles' not bearing the 'Can't Wait Too Long' title. Or maybe they really *were* never meant to go together...

[Matt Bielewicz]

The MIC version has two extra bars at the end. The boot version ends after 8 bars, then goes into that other awesome section that hasn't been released yet officially.

Quite a lot of Beach Boys recordings of the period are recorded in sections like that. Often Brian would have the band play a section with the intention of splicing it to another separate recording, but what's interesting is that he would have everyone play for a little longer AFTER the point where he wanted to splice in the next part. I guess that was so you didn't hear the band cut off or stop playing just before the splice - instead, they play right through the splice point (although only for a few more seconds before stopping).

From memory, you hear that in the recorded musical section for the 1967 recording of 'Here Comes The Night', where the finished mix is just one musical section spliced together over and over, but with different vocal and instrumental overdubs and/or channels active on each pass to create different-sounding 'verses'. But for the original performance of that one verse, the band carried on playing for a couple of bars after the splice point before the performance falls apart and they all stop.

It's hard to know, of course, which bits of music were recorded in this way with splicing in mind, and which weren't. There's that incomplete performance of Part 2 of 'Love To Say Dada' (it's at the end of, uh... [checks library] ... Disc 4 of the SMiLE Sessions box, Track 11), the one which comes to the end of a section and features the band playing a couple of half-hearted bars of what is unmistakeably Child Is Father Of The Man before coming to a stop. Could that have been indication of a similar 'splicing intent'? That is, perhaps it's the case that Brian had the band play a little of the start to that section in 1967 because he was going to splice on that 'Child' section afterwards (which had already been recorded months before, in Autumn 1966). The alternative explanation is that the Child section was going to be re-recorded in full during those May sessions for ILTSDD, and it was going to be the music for the section after part 2. Perhaps it was on the scores the Wrecking Crew were playing from at that May session... and that's why they started to go into it... but they never got to recording a full performance of that section at that session, or not one that survived to be put out on the SMiLE Sessions box, anyway. That's another explanation that, frustratingly, also fits the known facts and what we hear on the surviving tapes... and like with so much of this stuff, we'll probably never know the truth...!

[king of anglia]

I removed the organ and percussion from "I Believe In Miracles", leaving just the vocals.

I layered it over CIFOTM:
https://soundcloud.com/grainger1981/cifotm-miraclesv1

Didn't use any pitch or tempo stretching.

It's quite a coincidence how well they go together.

[seltaeb1012002]

The MIC version has two extra bars at the end. The boot version ends after 8 bars, then goes into that other awesome section that hasn't been released yet officially.

Quite a lot of Beach Boys recordings of the period are recorded in sections like that. Often Brian would have the band play a section with the intention of splicing it to another separate recording, but what's interesting is that he would have everyone play for a little longer AFTER the point where he wanted to splice in the next part. I guess that was so you didn't hear the band cut off or stop playing just before the splice - instead, they play right through the splice point (although only for a few more seconds before stopping).

For sure. It's interesting in this one that it goes to two different (and really cool) chords that you would've never guessed the track would go to, going off the boot version.

Just realized that the vocals are also similar to some of the wordless "Vegetables" vocals (of course using different chords, etc). Hmm.

[seltaeb1012002]

I removed the organ and percussion from "I Believe In Miracles", leaving just the vocals.

I layered it over CIFOTM:
https://soundcloud.com/grainger1981/cifotm-miraclesv1

Didn't use any pitch or tempo stretching.

It's quite a coincidence how well they go together.

Nice! Did you OOPS it?

Might have to incorporate that idea if I ever revisit SMILE AD! (props to Ebb And Flow as well)

[king of anglia]

I removed the organ and percussion from "I Believe In Miracles", leaving just the vocals.

I layered it over CIFOTM:
https://soundcloud.com/grainger1981/cifotm-miraclesv1

Didn't use any pitch or tempo stretching.

It's quite a coincidence how well they go together.

Nice! Did you OOPS it?

Might have to incorporate that idea if I ever revisit SMILE AD! (props to Ebb And Flow as well)

Yep. OOPS it. Organ and percussion all gone!

[Ebb and Flow]

A composing connection, perhaps - ie. that one was derived from the musical ideas for the other, but I don't think Miracles was due to be *overlaid* on that CIFOTM fragment in the way shown on the Soundcloud link.

I was not implying that at all.  Merely that one composition led to another, as with many Smile songs.  

[Wrightfan]

this is still too good to be true:

https://soundcloud.com/smileyhoneyfriends-1/cifotm-i-believe-in-miracles

Interesting. Miracles was not far separated from the SMiLE Sessions either (the book lists it as a Smiley Smile track.)

Than again, it also sounds good with Can't Wait Too Long (although that started later.)

[The_Beach]

Anything eles that is only on this boot https://www.discogs.com/The-Beach-Boys-Smile/release/4975051 that cant be heard on TSS or UM?