Kevin Howlett interviews Sean Magee

For “From Me To You”, a Norwegian sleeve was duplicated.

The Beatles just published an interview on their YouTube account, where Kevin Howlett and Sean Magee are having a conversation about the process of making new originals to press the 2019 Beatles singles from. 

Ever since the original “Ringo-version” was lost very early on, later releases featuring this version of “Love Me Do” has had to rely on needledrops from an original single, starting with Ron Furmanek’s Canadian “Love Me Do” single, which was used for the Capitol album “The Beatles Rarities” in 1980. Later releases of the Ringo version has occurred on “Past Masters”, “Mono Masters”, the 1982 20th anniversary 12″-single and the 2012 50th anniversary single (after having mistakenly used the Andy White-version on a first pressing). It turns out that the source record they wanted to use for “Love Me Do” this time, had some distortion in the harmonica solo, so Magee had to drop in about a second from a Swedish pressing.

There was also a drop in volume on “She Loves You”, so Magee had to resort to fixing that in the digital domain. Apart from that, the only other songs that has been mastered digitally was “Free As A Bird” and “Real Love”, but those were recorded digitally from the beginning, by Jeff Lynne.

Preparations for remastering was however also done digitally with each single, before cutting the actual tapes. All the efforts had as a goal to make the listening experience as close to listening to the original the sixties pressings as possible.