REMIXED REVOLVER TO REVEAL NEW LAYERS OF THE BEATLES’ EXTRAORDINARY MUSICAL POWERS. Kenneth Womack, the author of Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles, writes:
As with Giles Martin’s previous efforts, the remixed “Revolver” clearly benefited from his interest in breathing new life into the original, highly compressed mixes propounded by his father in the 1960s. Using new technologies, Martin has succeeded in establishing greater separation among the Beatles’ instrumentation. The result is a musical palette that reveals the extraordinary power of the Beatles’ musicianship in all of its attendant beauty.
Martin chalks up much of his capacity for increasing the band’s instrumental separation to the groundbreaking work of director Peter Jackson’s team at Park Road Post Production in New Zealand. In a jaw-dropping demonstration, Martin played the remixed instrumental track for the “Revolver” track “Taxman,” slowly dropping one instrument after another from the mix until we were left with the sound of Ringo Starr’s snare drum. It was really quite something to behold, rendered even more impressive by the instruments’ stunning clarity and utter lack of generational loss.
I spoke with Beatles historian Jason Kruppa, the host of the popular “Producing the Beatles” podcast, who attributed to the Park Road team’s technological strides to “deep machine learning — basically teaching the machine to hear the difference between certain instruments and voices.” For Martin’s work on “Revolver,” technology has made a stunning difference in our abilities for remixing highly compressed albums.
As Kruppa points out, “There are currently several online tools based on a source code library called Spleeter, the algorithms of which have been trained to do the same thing and some, like Dmucs, are very effective, but they don’t allow the user to do any training. If you upload a file, you’re simply using the tool in its current state. At least one difference with Park Road, as I understand it, is that they are teaching their machine the sound of specific instruments, and even the difference between each of the Beatles’ voices. So it’s much more targeted, and they have much more control.”
The express result of all of that machine learning, of course, is the ability to disaggregate and isolate a particular sound pattern as precise as Ringo’s snare drum on a 56-year-old recording. It’s quite a feat — all but unimaginable even a few short years ago. The pristine, shimmering results of Martin and Okell’s “Revolver” remix underscore the technology’s tremendous potential. I, for one, am excited about what the future portends.
Meanwhile, Analog Plant interviews Giles Martin himself, who says:
The stereo is the original four-track tape, transferred digitally. I’d been working with the Peter Jackson [de-mixing] team in New Zealand about seeing whether we could take elements off that tape so we could create a new stereo mix, which we were doing. It’s a huge, laborious process, but incredibly effective — incredibly effective. It’s like, I can take the “Taxman” drums, bass, and guitar, and the drums sound like drums, the bass sounds like bass, and the guitar sounds like guitar — and they completely phase-cancel. If I put them back together again and play them against the original and switch to phase, there’s no transients, no noise — nothing. So, I know that I’m not taking or adding anything to that, and it just gives you a bit more impact on the mix. I can now de-mix the drums, and have the kick drum and the snare drum separately as well.
If Jackson’s technology can deliver remixes with little or no artifacts, then remix technology has come a long way from what is available to the public via the Spleeter/Dmucs remixing technology, which I’ve used, and I hope this software eventually passes down to the “prosumer” level.