James Clarke is a New Zealander who started working at Abbey Road as a software engineer. Because he came from this kind of background he was more prepared than most to regard everything he dealt with as scientific rather than emotional information. To that end he was talking to sound engineers in the canteen at Abbey Road one day in 2009 and asked whether it would be at all possible to take mixed recordings and, so to speak, “demix” them. What he was wondering was whether it would be feasible to take classic records, which had been recorded on two or four tracks and then mixed down into one mono track, and in some way separate them into their constituent parts. They laughed, saying this was the Holy Grail of sound recordings and couldn’t possibly be done. Once a multi-track recording had been mixed down to either a mono or stereo version there was no way of unmixing the paints. The best you could hope is that you could go back to the unmixed tapes, if such things still existed and had survived the hurly burly of corporate takeovers, and that was very unlikely. During the seventies and eighties nobody at record companies had ever thought they might be dealing with heritage assets.
James Clarke was not dissuaded. He reasoned that if an acute human ear could hear separate instruments on a recording it ought to be possible to develop a program which could similarly separate them. He first applied his work on the proposed re-release of The Beatles At The Hollywood Bowl. This was a live recording that had been made in 1964 when the screaming was at its height.
Clarke set to work. By looking at the signal as a spectrogram he was able to visually identify the vocals, the different instruments, and the screams.
By looking at the signal as a spectrogram he was able to visually identify the vocals, the different instruments, and the screams. He could see where each fell on the spectrum. Then, by treating the screams as though they were just another instrument, he was able to reduce them in the mix. He was able to put them in the background of the mix, bring the group to the front, and change the picture the sound presented.
This was the appliance of science to the suck-it-and-see world of record production. The further he got into this new field the more he began to speak of deep learning, neural networks, and non-negative matrix factorization. He set himself the task of isolating the single element that is George Harrison’s Gretsch Country Gentleman from the elixir of life that is “She Loves You.” To do this he modeled hundreds of different performances of the song in order to accurately plot the dynamics.
In the course of this he discovered that once the Beatles had recorded a song they didn’t stray far from it in performance. He then developed an algorithm which could read these performances and separated the original instruments into tracks, now given the medical-sounding term “stems.” Once he had Harrison’s part it took him nine months to clean it up a few seconds at a time. A piece of Roman marble unearthed on a historical site could not have been more painstakingly brought into the light. Having done this, he played it once more into Studio Two and then recorded the results as though the very air in that by now sacred room would impart some quality to it which nothing else could.
Clarke unveiled the results in the course of a lecture at Abbey Road in 2018. His audience were the kind of people who are drawn to a technical lecture at a recording studio. The reaction underlined that Beatles scholarship is now as schismatic as Judaean politics in Life of Brian.
Some accused him of having spoiled his case by using a version of George’s solo from the German-language version of “She Loves You.” The muttering continued in a million forums.
(Excerpted from Abbey Road: The Inside Story of the World's Most Famous Recording Studio, written by David Hepworth -with a foreword by Paul McCartney) and published in August 2023.
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