Ringo listens to remastered Sgt Pepper album

From the photo session: The Beatles with Adam, the son of photographer Michael Cooper.

If you’re looking for news about the upcoming anniversary edition of “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, here’s a story which guitarist/bassist/vocalist Keith Allison posted on his Facebook page yesterday:

“A couple months ago I was at Ringo’s home. We were in his man cave watching tv, when a delivery from England came in. It’s was from Giles Martin, George Martins son. What’s this? It’s the Sgt. Pepper album remastered. I said, “I haven’t listened to this in I don’t know how long.” Ringo exclaimed, “You haven’t heard it in a long time? I haven’t listened to it in decades.” So we decide to listen to it on his high def top of the line system. So here we are sitting on the sofa, facing the Tv, muted, but with soap operas playing. We listened to every track together. I thought, this is a historically great moment. Sitting here with my friend, listening to Sgt. Pepper, that he’s on as a Beatle, and that he hasn’t listen to track by track, since it came out”.

“Only two copies of the remastered Sgt. Pepper album were sent out, one to McCartney and one to Ringo, to be approved by them both. So what did Ringo think? He thought it was great! Why? Because it originally was recorded on a 4-track with a lot of over dubs, which buried the drums. Now, the drums have been lifted and come through as they should. He was pleased. You’ll be glad to know it was remastered at EMI Studios where it was originally recorded.”

So, I guess Allison confuses remastering with remixing. This probably means that Giles Martin has gone back to the original session tapes of the takes that were used and transferred them to multitracks, remixed them anew using the original overdubs, only no “bouncing down” this time. The sixties “bounce down” technique was to combine two or more tracks and transfer to one new track, thus freeing up space for three more tracks on a four track tape. This method would mean degrading the sound somewhat, due to tape noise.

Using the original session tapes to recreate the mix would then be a way to avoid that “dulling down” of the audio. Then of course, it’s the placement in the stereo picture as well as the volume of each instrument or vocal which we don’t know will be the same as the sixties mix. Several of the Sgt Pepper songs were successfully remixed with a new stereo image for the 1999 album “Yellow Submarine Songtrack”. We hope the full album has gotten this treatment this time. It seems that the official word is on it’s way, if this image posted on The Beatles’ website and social media today is anything to go by:

Sgt Pepper uniform colours, posted by official Beatles accounts.