Rediscovering Rod Stewart and FACES: Sometimes I have a fun job.....

Sometimes I have a fun job.....

I've been working on the FACES/"A Nod Is As Good As A Wink" Gold CD this past couple of days and am enjoying it! Bill Inglot and WSM really came through on this one; the album was recorded and mixed in Gt. Britain at Olympic Sound in Barnes by Glyn Johns and the actual mixes wouldn't be in the USA. But, the Warner Bros. vault messenger delivered the real Olympic mixes to me along with the DOOBIE BROS/"Minute By Minute" mixes from Sunset Sound with engineer Don Landee's original mixing and mastering notes still taped to the inside of the boxes.

For me, finding the real master tapes is MOST of the problem in remastering stuff. In this case (and actually in all cases involving Warner Bros. Records) it was a snap. I vividly remember the day back in 1999 that the WB messenger delivered me 56 reels of live Frank Sinatra recordings which looked brand new even though they were done in 1961-62. They just have a good system at WB and it makes my job much easier.

At any rate, the minute I cued up the FACES/Nod master I couldn't help smiling; such a great sound: Powerful, rich, warm yet really rocking. It sounded nice on the AcousTech Mastering playback system but I was really looking forward to playing the songs back on my vintage system at home, knowing that the album was actually mixed on the same monitors that I am using in that system: Tannoy 15" Dual Concentrics. Sure enough, it sounded PERFECT to me when played back on this system. Glyn's mixes almost always avoided Dolby A back then. His way was to mix everything at a high level, like plus 9 up from 0 db. So he let the tape recorder do some of his work for him; it saturated the tape nicely without having to use too much compression and totally removed the need for Dolby noise reduction. I remember WHO'S NEXT was at +9 as well. Just pins the hell out of our VU meters though, heh.

So, I am going to do in mastering what I did with WHO'S NEXT and ROD STEWART/"Never A Dull Moment"; bypass the mastering console and just use the playback tape deck to feed our new A/D converter and straight on to the CD master. It should yield excellent results.

 

Steve Lang. The tape man!

 

Who is "Kinney" (on the Faces box)?

 

Kinney Corp. owned WB at that time (1971).

 

That's one of the reasons I do it. I want the entire mastering process demystified. I'm also hoping that other remastering engineers when they read this will lay off of the excessive signal processing and let the sound of the original analog tapes shine through.

 

Someone had a question as to what LFB meant (as scrawled on the Olympic Sound FACES tape box.

It means "Low Frequency Blend" and that was written by the engineer at the Mastering Lab when they cut the original USA LP lacquers. Probably everything under 100 cycles was summed to mono for ease of stereo cutting. Bass only coming out of the left or right channel can really eat up available lacquer time.

Worst example of this LFB is the USA Capitol RUBBER SOUL album. Bass was summed to mono around 200 cycles. Drove me crazy coming out of the vocal channel!

 

thanks Steve

 

Here is a beautiful pair on eBay right now. As you can see, the price is stiff..

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=14993&item=5729769853&rd=1