NAT KING COLE in special Vintage MONO MIXES from Analogue Productions on SACD/CD!

How? In the usual way..

 

Lee,

That is about as exact a replication of the original full-track master tape that is possible today. Sounds pretty amazing for 1956, doesn't it? Too bad everything can't sound like that.

 

That's an echo chamber over at the Capitol Tower studios. Call it echo or reverberation, whatever. Means the same thing these days. Like when you sing in the shower and it sounds better. The echo resonance helps. In the case of a chamber, the sound from the studio is fed in to the chamber through the speakers. It bounces off the wall and the microphone picks up the bounced sound. Just the echo. Then the recording engineer feeds it back through the console and mixes it carefully with the dry pure feed to create a slightly reverberated sound. Beatles records, Elvis, jazz, classical, whatever, if it's recorded in a studio since 1952, there is a 99.9999% chance that echo was added just like the above.

There are other variations like slap echo (Sun Records) delay echo (like on early Beatles records, etc.) but it's pretty much the same idea.

Now it's done with a digital simulation (like the 1980's remixes of HELP! and RUBBER SOUL). Ain't the same.

 

It helps us appreciate the effort that went in to make our favorite recordings.

 

Just to mention it once again, the engineer on Nat Cole "After Midnight" was the late John Kraus, one of the first sessions in the new Capitol Tower Studio in 1956.

 

They had big startup problems in their new studios. They changed a bunch of acoustic things in the rooms and pretty much dicked with them for a year until they were happy. Some old-timers still complained that the old Melrose studios sounded better..

 

Read the above out loud and slowly. It's a miracle we got anything issued but we did! I can at last look back on it now with nostalgia.

 

Yes, Chad was the mover on this, no doubt. Imagine having to explain to a confused record company why three different mixes of the same song were worthy of inclusion on one album? Imagine him talking them into letting us (outsiders) do NEW mixes of this classic material?) Now imagine trying to talk them out of charging for each song three times! He must have or nothing would have happened. The way he got it done was to collaborate with the Capitol people to make the Nat Cole albums part of ONE project. That changed everything. One giant project. Made it easier for us to do what we wanted to do.

Also remember this. Our "project" took so long, by the time it was ready for release, the people at Capitol who gave the "project" a green light were gone and an entire new bunch of people were in place. They must have scratched their heads over it but they didn't try to stop us. In fact, they helped us out a lot. By the time the SACDs hit the Acoustic Sounds catalog some of those Capitol replacement people were also gone and a third set in place. That's the crazy music business; not much job security.