The Smiley Smile Message Board

It's been a dozen years since The Smile Sessions in its various packages dropped. 
The vinyl 2LP and the big box seems to be out of print, as they command big $$$ on eBay.  So, the available official Smile offerings have gotten a bit stale.
And fans keep plugging away with their own remixes/fan mixes/AI mixes/alternative sequences etc on YouTube etc, so there's still a lot of interest out there.
It just seems to me that it's about time to go back to that well.  I certainly understand or at least suspect that very little if anything "new" in the way of acetates or tapes  has surfaced since 2011, but still there's a lot than could be done with the extant material
Anyone agree?

I’m hoping for some kind of 20th anniversary release for BWPS

David Leaf has a celebratory book in the works for that.

If Capitol could pull it off legally, I'd love to hear the album with all missing vocals finished by AI (similar to what some fans have already done).

I have this weird feeling about this kind of stuff lately. There are certain places fans are willing to go that a "legit" version wouldn't be able to.
This applies to Smile and other classic works. My stuff, and ESPECAILLY Dae Lims, makes changes to the mixes and vision of the tracks that goes
beyond, say, remixing already presented and recorded tracks.

Giles doing the Beatles stuff is the furthest I've seen this go, fundamentally changing the sound of these songs. I happen to love it, but it is certainly finding some backlash. I think that the official stuff should try as hard as it can to preserve the legacy and sound of the tracks.

New masters? Sure... but at this point, with what they have to work from, I wonder if an ai-remixed Smile would truly preserve the sound. Even if it may sound "better"... (was there any reaction like this to the stereo Pet Sounds CDs? I seem to remember reading some)

Yeah, I am not the biggest fans of the flown in "Child, Child, the Child" vocals on TSS's 'Look'. And while I'm never bothered by stuff like that on fan mixes, something about it doesn't ring right with it being on an official mix. And look at the backlash that the 2021 mixes of 'Marcela' and 'YNAMOHTSA' got - I'd imagine that controversy would pale in comparison to any official AI vocals.

As for remastering/remixing; I have never been crazy impressed with the '66/'67 sound quality of Smile. I've always found it odd that stereo Pet Sounds sounds like a Dolby 5.1 cathedral of angelic music in comparison to the bare-bones/sparse/tinny sound of The Smile Sessions (with the exception of a few songs, Cabin-essence in particular). Though I think this is less to do the with the mixing, and more with the original instruments and production of the songs.

So if Giles Martin were able to remix Smile, where it sounds like I'm standing in the middle of a Smile cathedral, I would be perfectly happy.

There are big differences in sound quality from song to song.  The 2011 remix of Vega-Tables, for instances, sounds really good to me. Old Master Painter / Sunshine is typical of a half-dozen or so tracks that sound fairly lo-fi.  Many sections  of H&V sound like crap.  I suppose that there are number of factors at place: subpar initial recording in some cases, tape deterioration/damage in others, 2nd/3rd generation copies of some material.

IIRC, even in 1967-68, David Anderle was complaining, in his print interviews with Paul Williams,  about the poor sound quality of the H&V 45 mix.  To some extent, the issue may be due to Brian moving away from his method of mostly recording at Western with Chuck Britz engineering to being all over the place with Good Vibrations and Smile, i.e.., a little here at Western, a little there at Gold Star, a bit more at RCA, and then a few at Sound Recorders  etc. etc., and then eventually, by June '67 into the home studio.  

I completely forgot about Vega-Tables - that Smile Sessions mix of that is one of the coolest sonic experiences, especially that second chorus. I’ve always been bummed about how ‘Holidays’ sounds so lo-fi. The marimba on ‘All Summer Long’ from two years prior sounds infinitely better. The BWPS version really makes that song pop, imo.

Good points Rab and juggler.

And if we consider Smiley Smile, which is of course lo-fi in a sense, I've always found it has a somewhat cleaner/less tinny/more rich sound in some ways. Speaking of Vega-Tables, remember the very last section of the Smiley version is actually fully sourced from the original Smile version sessions and sounds very clean to me even in mono. I always find that little section to be a tantalizing teaser of what a 1960s Smile would have *sounded* like.

Almost never.