Brian is as they say in great shape . You're right that finishing Smile had a tremendous positive affect on him and shows just how important the project was to him.
Mark

You now know as much as I do.........

And here I am in the doorway to the control room.....

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I am more than pleased to report that Western Studios (Cello) has been saved. It was bought for a considerable sum and will hopefully be back in operation within 6 months.

Mark

Incredible . . . I knew someone would eventually step up and make this happen. The place is too important to the history of the industry. A "working museum" would be ideal.

M

Here's how the great ST 3 looked back in November........ Mark



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Can you reveal any details, Mark?  I'm ready for that sort of thing now that I've contained my weeping for joy.

That's about all I know.

Mark, will you please let us know anything about the Western/Cellos studio auction happening tomorrow, if you hear anything?

I am more than pleased to report that Western Studios (Cello) has been saved. It was bought for a considerable sum and will hopefully be back in operation within 6 months.

Mark

Still, i think the idea of a smaller, "vanity"-type pressing has its merits for this material.

Hm.  Say folks can download this from a BRI-authorized BB site...and they can download the mono mixes.  Would they then be inclined to purchase an actual disc of same??  If not, then the download is clearly the more cost-effective way to go...

It certainly would be. EMI really needs a "handmade" type label and a download only label for their catalog, but until then it will be really difficult to get these kind of projects released imo. I have spoken to emi about this in the past and will continue to lobby for more collector's type packages, so we'll see....

Mark, if there's something that the hard-core fan base can do to help push something like this over the top with EMI or whomever, please let us know.  There are a lot of people who would love to help lobby for this kind of thing.

Write to John Owen in the marketing dept at EMI with your requests. Couldn't hurt........

Still, i think the idea of a smaller, "vanity"-type pressing has its merits for this material.

Hm.  Say folks can download this from a BRI-authorized BB site...and they can download the mono mixes.  Would they then be inclined to purchase an actual disc of same??  If not, then the download is clearly the more cost-effective way to go...

It certainly would be. EMI really needs a "handmade" type label and a download only label for their catalog, but until then it will be really difficult to get these kind of projects released imo. I have spoken to emi about this in the past and will continue to lobby for more collector's type packages, so we'll see....

  Perhaps if EMI ever launches a download only service, we can make the mono albums available that way.

Would it be possible to let Rhino Handmade (or some other niche-market label, e.g. Audio Fidelity or Hip-O-Select) do a limited release of the mono mixes on a double CD? Because the five remaining mono albums could easily fit on two CDs (if it is okay to split the Little Deuce Coupe album). I would be all over such a release!!! All Summer Long (the album) is just perfect in mono.

Rhino Handmade only releases material owned by the Warner Music Group. They don't license outside material. Also I doubt EMI would license part of the Beach Boys catalog to a competitor.

"I should mention that when the beatles catalog was first released on CD by Capitol the mono mixes were used and the public outcry was so extreme that they were redone with the more familiar (and popular) stereo mixes."

Ahh, the joy of hearing the drums in you right ear and everything else in you left ear.

More like the track on one side and the vocals on the other......

I hope so too. But I would actually want the mono releases more.

The choice to put out inferior stereo mixes of early 60s albums on cd instead of the better mono mixes is something that bugs me. The Beatles and Jan & Dean and many others are victims of the same thing.

"inferior" is not the word I would use, and in fact Brian has asked that we use stereo mixes wherever possible on the most recent compilations. We also constantly get requests to create stereo mixes of mono only songs which we have done rather successfully I think over the years.

As far as the decision to use the stereo mixes on the twofers, we knew that either way some listeners were going to be upset with the choice of using the mono or the stereo versions of the albums. While the group's more ardent fans would probably prefer the mono, the vast majority of listeners (a far greater number of people) prefer stereo and so it was decided to go with what the larger group preferred. Not ideal, but the best solution since putting the single albums out in mono and stereo was not an option.

Ideally we would issue each album on a single CD with both the mono and stereo mixes plus bonus tracks, but I doubt the sales would justify the expense, and the highly regarded twofers would likely also get deleted as a result.  Perhaps if EMI ever launches a download only service, we can make the mono albums available that way.

I should mention that when the beatles catalog was first released on CD by Capitol the mono mixes were used and the public outcry was so extreme that they were redone with the more familiar (and popular) stereo mixes.

As they say, "you can't please all the people all of the time" , but I think we 've done a fairly good job with a really great and important catalog....

Mark

First, I would like to thank you for answering our questions, Mark. I speak for all when I say that we're very grateful!

This question might have been asked before, but I'll ask it anyway. Please disregard the post if it has already been answered.

Is there any plan of releasing mono mixes on cd of the early Beach Boys albums?

As most of you know, these albums have not been released in mono on cd:
-Surfin' USA
-Surfer Girl
-Little Deuce Coupe
-Shut Down vol. 2
-All Summer Long

What I've heard of these in mono (basically the All Summer Long album and the various mono mixes on the Good Vibrations box set) I absolutely love, and like better than the stereo mixes of the same songs. It's common knowledge that the stereo mixes were done without Brian Wilson's involvement, and that they in some cases were rushed. For that reason, I for one would be all over such releases. I like to think that there's a market for these kinds of releases, and I guess that that's what ultimately decides it?

This is an EMI decision, and there are no plans at present to release the mono versions of the albums or for that matter to create stereo versions of the albums that were never mixed in stereo  (Wild Honey, Smiley Smile, Today, Summer Days). We may see the release of some 1st time stereo mixes in the future, and I would hope that we find a way to release the mono albums as well.

Mark

Do you have any pictures of this piano and Taylor Mills?  I won't believe it was there until you present a little more 'evidence'.   

You can't see her but Taylor is actually inside the piano doing the playing.  Darian's just faking it.........

Thank you very much!

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That would be some shockin news to me. In a really good way. To know that there is a REAL grand piano on "Surf´s Up" would made my day. I mean, with all this faked-piano-discussion I always assumed that EVERYTHING was faked (no, I´m not able to hear that  ). The fact that we didn´t see a real piano in the "Recording SMiLE"-featurette convinced me even more. Or did I miss something?

Well the piano was there in the studio and was used throughout the recording. We also overdubbed an upright piano on sevreal sections at my studio.

Hey Mark,
I gotta say that you're a magician! I was watching the SMiLE DVD last night and was mystified how you were able to mic so many different instruments & vocals and still make everything/everyone prominant in the mix. Amazing.

Now the question: How much post prod work was done to the actual recording?
Here's why I ask- I noticed a few times Brian's lips didn't quite match his recorded vocal. I was curious if this was due to video/audio synching to work done on the concert in post production. It was most notable in a few Windchimes snippets (a few other spots, too).

thanks loadz!
Kevin

Thanks for the positive review. We didn't do any overdubs on the DVD, the musical performance was edited together first from the best takes and then the video was matched to that performance. The director did use visuals from difft takes to create the video (not just the takes used for the audio) so that is likely what you  noticed although everyone worked very hard to keep everything in sync. Also, visuals can be funny in that they can be totally in sync but look out because of what the person is doing or how they are moving.

The entire show was of course mixed to picture in both stereo and 5.1 , and many adjustments were made both visually and sonically until everyone was totally satisfied with the perfromance. I think the mix took about four weeks total to complete.

Mark

Ah, I was actually going to ask you about that.

Was there a working standard, as far as you can tell, for the Beach Boys and EMT versus Chamber?  Has Brian ever said the he prefered the chamber for something but EMT for something else? 

One thing I was surprised to find out was that Stephen Desper built a chamber at Brian's house, because until I got his book, I'd sort of assumed they just bought or rented some EMT plates for the house.  But obviously it was worth it to somebody to build a real chamber.

Can't answer that one. My guess is it was mostly Chuck Britz's decision what to use or it may have been simply been a matter of what was available. How the reverb was used would have certainly been Brian's decision. At Western Studio two had (has )  its own dedicated chamber above the hallway, but the other chambers would have been available to any room that needed them.

As for Brian's house I assume building a chamber was easier and cheaper than bringing in an EMT plate.

Mark

Thanks, Mark.  Particularly for explaining the echo send, I wasn't clear on what the manual was suggesting when it said "3 echo busses."

Western had (er..."has") 3 chambers, correct?  Would the engineer be able to patch into all three of them at the same time, if they were all available?

It sounds to me, on the stack-o-tracks stereo versions of the California Girls track and the Let Him Run Wild track, that Brian chose to print reverb returns from certain things on different tracks than the dry signal.  Carl's 12-string on the intro to Cal Girls, in particular, although it's difficult to tell with so many guitar players on that date.

At the peak there were only four chambers at Western and three at United so EMT plates were certainly in use by the early 60's as well (I'd guess around 1963)

You explained some of the inner workings of your board from Western Two.  I'm trying to clarify the various signal flow options.  Here is my understanding from what you've written as well as others, and from info from an original 610 module manual from 1967.

The 610 boards had something in the area of 12 inputs at that time.  Three program busses (l-c-r) would be sent out to the three-track tape machine.  Each module also had an echo send pot, and as such there were three "echo busses".  THE ECHO SEND AUTOMATICALLY SWITCED WITH THE BUSS SELECT SO THAT IF YOU WERE SENDING A CHL TO THE LEFT BUSS (TRACK) THE ECHO SEND WENT TO THE LEFT ECHO BUSS. THE THREE ECHO RETURNS WOULD NORMALLY GO BACK TO THE SAME BUSS (LEFT TO LEFT ETC.) BUT YOU COULD PATCH IT TO A DIFFT BUSS ON THE RETURN ALTHOUGH THIS WAS DONE ONLY ON OCCASION.

So it would be possible to send a dry signal from, say Carl's direct 12-string guitar, to one track, and the return from the chamber to another track. YES BUT SELDOM DONE.

Now, I realize they'd be monitoring in mono, but would they be monitoring off the program busses or are there monitor sends? NO MONITOR SENDS AT ALL. YOU EITHER MONITORED THE THREE BUSSES IN THREE SPEAKERS OR THE SUMMED MONO OF THE THREE BUSSES  WHICH THE CONSOLE DID AUTOMATICALLY AT WESTERN, MONITORED IN ONE SPEAKER.

That was the end of "topic 1."

Topic two:

In several interviews, Bruce Botnick has mentioned that he would only use tube condensers to record at Sunset Sound, primarily U47s and C-37As.  SEEMS VERY UNLIKELY. HE CERTAINLY USED CONDENSERS AND PROBABLY MORE THAN AT WESTERN OR GOLDSTAR, BUT DYNAMICS WERE CERTAINLY IN USE AS WELL.

Larry Levine has said in interviews that Gold Star didn't really even own more than two or three condensers until pretty late in the 60s, and that for Brian, the only condensers in the room might have been a U67 over the drums and a U47 on the percussion. THAT SEEMS LIKELY

So, in listening to the discrete tracks from the three-track, does something like "Here Today" show a marked increase in leakage compared to "I Just Wasn't Made for these Times"? THE TRACKS SOUND DIFFT. BUT NOT AS IF A BUNCH OF CONDENSERS WERE BEING USED AT SUNSET. GOLDSTAR AND WESTERN SOUND SIMILAR AS WELL. BIGGEST DIFF. IS IN THE REVERB AND THE ADDITIONAL NOISE ON THE TAPES MADE AT GOLDSTAR.

To my ears, those two tracks sound very different, but it's hard to tell what makes up the sound without hearing the building blocks of it.

And then how does Western fit in to that spectrum? SEE ABOVE


One last thing:  If you have the Phil Spector back to mono boxset, any idea what the Small Diaphragm condenser over Hal's set is on the pages with all the musician's pictures?  Craig, if you're reading in, do you care to hazzard a guess if you have that? I'LL HAVE TO LOOK

Thanks, Mark.  I appreciate what you're doing to preserve the knowledge of what guys like Chuck Britz did.  You and Alan Boyd are guardian angels.

I'd be more confident in something like the Waves IR-1. My issue is perhaps with the sampling - if the sample was made using a starter pistol to excite a room such as the Putnam chambers at United/Western, and those results were recorded and sampled directly from that room then shaped by the end user, that would be perfect. I'd expect great results, and obviously great results have been created using those samples. But I'm not as sold on sampling an echo or reverb from, say, a vintage recording and applying that to a track, suggesting that that is a simulation of the original room. If you take it from any commercial CD, even one stage away from the raw master tapes, wouldn't you have certain parts of the mastering/transfer process coloring the sound of that room? If I take a reverb from a Beach Boys outtake, I'm not getting the pure sound of that room...rather I'd think I'd be getting the sound of my own track as heard through whatever processing the Beach Boys track has received in the process of putting it onto CD. It's not the same as applying the sampled sound of the actual live reverb room.

Maybe I'm stuck in the past, but I still need to be convinced that a properly-applied rackmount reverb wouldn't be a more pure sound than a sample from a recording, in the way the track interacts with that reverb.

Sampling a chamber with a starter pistol will give you the sound of the chamber but not what it sounds like when used as an effect on a recording. To do that you need the speaker and the microphones which is why you use the frequency sweep to sample the chamer.

I am also not convinced that a talkback "pop" will give an accurate sample although in the case of Goldstar's chamber it is certainly worth a try.

Mark

In case you missed my question....please let me repost it.

Mark,

the song Soulful Old Man Sunshine (on the Endless Harmomny soundtrack) alternates between stereo in the chorus and fake stereo during the verses.  Could you explain why this is the case?
More generally, could you explain what tapes and tracks of this song exist, and how you came up with the finished mix?  Were some sections already mixed in 1969? If no original mix or test mix existed, how was the strucutre of the song decided? Do all the instrumental sections exist on multitracks, i.e. would a true stereo instrumental mix have been possible?

Thank you in advance.

The tape was a two-track that came from Rick Henn and was something he put together from old ruff mixes. Only the original tracking date with some overdubs exists on multi-track. The tape with the vocals is missing.

Mark

Interesting discussion, and some cool innovative ideas on capturing the room sound through something like a talkback mic click.

But has anyone done an A/B comparison sending a track through any average rackmount studio reverb unit set to the "large room" or similar setting and compared the quality of that sound to one of these convolution reverbs?

Or is a basic convolution reverb doing essentially the same thing as your average digital reverb would do, only giving you specific parameters to match some specific rooms that have gained a legendary reputation?

I may be a skeptic until I hear more evidence, but I almost see signs of salesmanship in some of the claims, like those guitar salesmen who might crank a lesser-quality guitar through a really nice tube amp, hit an open A chord,  and watch as the buyer's eyes get really big...

I'm not saying the convolution reverb isn't a great tool, but I'm not convinced you couldn't get the same effect with a decent rackmount reverb. Convince me, please!

Conventional digital reverbs use algorithms to simulate the sound of a real acoustic space. Some do it better than others but none sound exactly the same as a real acoustic space. Convolution reverb programs are capable of sampling an acoustic space (or a digital or analog reverb) and then recreating it.

I bought Altiverb soon after it came out and I now also own the Waves IR-1 convolution reverb and frankly I almost never use anything else. Having real chambers and acoustic spaces available just sounds better to my ears (for whatever that's worth!) And they aren't all that expensive to boot...

Mark

I guess you missed the question, so I post it again. It´s kind of important to me to know that:

In the SMiLE-booklet, Brian is credited with "music, vocals, keyboards". On which parts did he play the keys?

I don't recall.......but several sections throughout.

Interesting thread. I've had Waves' IR-1 Convolution Reverb for awhile without using it, so I'm trying it out now as I'm typing this message and it sounds wonderful. A great function is that you can have any reverb sound reversed by the push of a button. I've never used a reverb unit with this impulse response function that King of Anglia brought up, so this is all really exciting.

Yeah I have that one as well. Really great sounding although the interface isn't as good as Altiverb. I bought the new Waves APA unit so I could run more plugins at higher samplerates and they were offering the IR1 for free. Sadly when I upgraded to Pro-tools 7 the APA stopped working and I am still waiting for Waves to come up with a software fix.

Mark

I used a talk-back mic "pop" from a Good Vibrations sessions. Had a bit of tape echo on it as well as chamber. Also a couple of stick count-ins from GV again. Not long enough reverb tails on them but still good.
I haven't searched around for a good, long, clean click yet, but I'm sure they're somewhere.

I use Acoustic Mirror which comes bundled with Sony Soundforge. It's a bit more user friendly than the Convolution plug-in on Audition and has envelopes, filters etc...

I find that equalising (remove bottom end) and some hard-compressing is necessary for getting decent impulses.

Interesting idea which will produce some sort of reverb pattern although I doubt it will be what the chamber actually sounded like. Normally the impulse is either a frequency sweep or a starter pistol which is considerably louder than the talkback "pop". Also in the case of a chamber a sweep through the speaker would be much more accurate than a popI will give it a try and see what it sounds like. BTW Altiverb comes with three of the Western chambers which are all good. EMT plates were also used a lot at Western and Sunset, but not at Goldstar.

Mark