Well!
Obsessed since 1972 (2nd grade; first viewing of A Hard Days Night), 20+ year career on tour with the #1 Beatle tribute band, former recording studio owner/engineer…I guess I need to post!
I like the song well enough, and I expect a new round of argument about slide guitar on Drive My Car, and who played it when we get to the gigs in FL next weekend.
But the real inspiration to me will be technical.
Our original bass player died about 13 years ago. One of the ways I got hooked up with the band was working with them in my studio. In addition to radio jingles they had been hired to do, we worked on some remixes on a solo album Gary had made before the band took off.
Originally recorded on analog 2” 24-track tape, I had the ADAT modular digital recorders, so we had transferred the tracks to my system to work on. After all the work we did, we re-released the
album on CD, and I put the ADAT tapes in storage.
As tech marched on, and we all moved to retiring tape and doing everything in the computer, I transferred the ADAT tapes into the computer to be available in the future.
I did (and am STILL doing) this for all my clients, and because God has a sense of humor, there were “issues” with Gary’s project.
ADAT format used S-VHS tape to record 8 tracks, and you could synch up to 16 machines for a total of 128 tracks (if you were doing orchestral or movie soundtrack work), but most of us used 3 machines for 24 tracks, VERY rarely using 32 tracks if the client was insane…
As an aside, Jagged Little Pill is often touted as the shining example of using ADAT.
Anyway, while transferring Gary’s project into the computer system (importantly, AFTER Gary died), the tape that had the vocals on it got “eaten” by the machine, mangling the first minute or so of the song “Hold On to Love.”
If you ever had a cassette deck in your car, you have experienced this. It is an exponentially worse feeling when it is the master tape of the one guy who can’t just pop in and re-record his vocal!
The magical technology that Peter Jackson and his team used on Get Back, and Ron Howard’s Eight Days a Week (they TURNED DOWN THE SCREAMING GIRLS on the Hollywood Bowl tapes!!!!) is a piece of software generally available from a company called Isotope, though the Jackson team has come up with a few tricks to make it even better. Heck, there are versions available on your phone, a “fun” toy for isolating tricky licks in songs your band wants to play!
So, I am inspired to get the software, and try to extract Gary’s lead vocal from the mixed CD, and fly the verse and chorus that no longer exist, back into the mutitrack master.
Dang Beatles, still influencing my daily life 50 years later. Good on ya, lads!
ETA: Just watched the video. Just…holy shit, that is good. Maybe it’s the fact that I have all the family 8mm movies, but the shots of Paul through the studio windows that look like he is watching the playback and just being transported to a place where they really are PLAYING (not just the music) again is just magical. Kudos to Peter Jackson for that.
