The Smiley Smile Message Board

Check this out, the tape may be gone but, with todays technology, it still may be possible to create a true Stereo Mix.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUaX52GbjSU

Cool! I hate watching the sound waves with that album cover right smack dab in the way though.  :lol

I would love to hear the isolated vocals...

My beach boys  holy grail, that

Very good indeed, just like the stereo mixes of Pet Sounds, there are details never before heard.

That's the best one I've heard yet - very smooth, very clean.

I wrote the fellow who made that and he says he is going to work on getting a good "vocals only" track.

I would love to have that software he used.  :)

Looks like he used Logic to assemble it. I'd love to know if there is a harmonic-audio extractor in Logic that I don't know about!

Best with headphones-I think I saw God. :spin

Hey, What'd you do with oldsurferdude?

This is fabulous. This guy should offer his mix to Capitol. I wish I could have this on CD. I wonder what he could do with "I Get Around", "Surfin' Safari", "409" etc.

Hey guys, since that's actually my mix, let me add a few things about it:

First off, I used two apps to put it together: sonicWORX Isolate (http://www.prosoniq.com/editing-products/sonicworx/) for all the vocal extraction, and then Logic for the assembly, synchronization, and mixing. That was my first time with Isolate, and as I wrote before, I do think someone with better resources could top this (I'm just an audio tech student with too much free time). It takes a lot of precision to even do very simple parts; since the analysis file is huge and slow (10+GB total) and all I had was a laptop, I didn't try extracting parts more than a couple of times each.

The Logic stuff isn't anything beyond the included tools. Stereo imaging, EQ, de-noising, and I tried my best to duplicate Mark Linett's vocal treatment with the included reverbs...and probably failed. So it goes!  :lol


To reiterate: what I ended up with in the extraction were a bunch of individual little stems of vocals with bits of leftover mono track occasionally floating around. By the time these are all mixed together and combined with the stereo backing track, most of them are inaudible, but it does make a vocals-only mix difficult. Some sections, like the chorus, are really weird: Mike's voice sometimes combines with the cello, an isolated Brian sounds weirdly breathy because half of his voice is still locked into Al's track, etc. But others, like the bridge "...tations" or the interlude "aaah," are almost totally isolated; in the case of the latter, I have each voice on its own separate track.

And that damned tambourine. Let's not talk about that.

Anyway, let me see what I can do for vocals. Maybe if it was qualified heavily I'd get away with showing off all the artifacts. Still, I'd dearly love to see a better version of this produced. Hearing the end of the interlude in stereo was pretty unreal.

Hi Austin. I have listened to that mix you made and played it for all my friends... Everyone is really impressed. Thanks again for uploading it.  8)

Brilliant work, thank you so much.  :) :)

sounds great, nice job....

I'm sure interested parties have heard this, and are duly impressed.

impressed enough to take it down? or is my 'Could Not Load Movie' an iPhone thing?

Link works fine for me.

phew.

Very enjoyable.

Great job - most of it sounded spectacular.

Also, you can really hear the split between Brian and Carl at the beginning of the third line of each verse in this version!

Austin,
thanks for that!!!
All I can say is wow, that is by far (at least on the mediocre playback on my PC) the best I've heard!
Screw that "too compressed" crap, Capitol has released far worse for money.

As mentioned, hopefully they're not suitably impressed as in "take it down".

I'm sure somebody making the big $$ with the correct equipment could do something about the "damn tambourine".
Then again - it takes effort - and why bother when you can crank it out for the MP3 I'm deaf anyway crowd.

BTW, using an iphone I believe you'll need to get a youtube app since the default is Flash.
Steve and Flash don't play well together.  :-[

Nice work!  In a few months it'll be interesting to compare this to The Smile Sessions stereo version.

What makes you think that Capitol will attempt something similar(I.E. computer-created stereo)?

I just listened to this with headphones. My God...that was beyond words. To say "good job" just doesn't cut it. Thank you so much for doing it and getting it uploaded somewhere where we could all hear it!!! The version of "Do You Wanna Dance" is equally impressive. I'm sure some people would be willing to contribute a few dollars for you to be able to do further work.  ;) But this post and overall topic are very close to being against the rules, so I'll say no more.

Thanks everyone for the comments.

I think if Capitol were to ever put a tool like this to use, it wouldn't be for salvaging complete vocal lines out songs, but to simply isolate particular overdubs here or there. I've tried this tool out on a few other songs -- the break in "Girl Don't Tell Me," Mike's bridge vocal on "Wouldn't It Be Nice" -- and have gotten very promising results. Maybe this use scenario could result in remixes of songs / albums that are held up by just a few missing multitrack stems.

Really an incredible mix.

Have you tried the piano and guitar solos from SDSN Rhonda?