What's the Beef with Beatles "1"?

You guys missed John's joke.

You guys must have never read the Playboy interview with Lennon. He said therein "we skipped a note, just to see if anyone would notice". The missed note is there at Lennon's instigation.
Also, the (original) guitar intro beginning only in one channel was also on purpose. They "fixed" that too on several reissues.

It's like repainting the background of the Mona Lisa so that the two sides of the landscape match, it is totally totally wrong.

The lp version of this comp nearly damaged my Magnepans as they goosed the extreme lower frequencies in several spots.

 

John's kiddin' around. On earlier raw mixes of "Day Tripper" you can hear a tape glitch on the track with the tambourine and guitar on it that was later punched out on mix down.

I always loved the original guitar intro only starting in one channel.

 

Craig dude you're a sick man .....Avedon must be spinning in his grave!!!!

 

There's no way to do that and still remain a redbook CD playable on a standard CD player.

The CD is 79m:10s which can be done easily with regular CD's these days, and is not the first time it's ever been done. The PCM stream does not have to be data-compressed to do it.

 

But... If you take the same songs from the Singles Box and EP Collection (plus "The Long And Winding Road"),they do not fit on one CD.
Those songs total time exceeds eighty minutes.

 

Hell, anyone can easily fill up 79m 10s on a CD burner at home.

Reading all of these posts, I guess I forgot just how bad Beatles "1" is. I got rid of it after juat a couple of days and forgot all about it.

I keep LIBN because I prefer the new version, but not for the sound.

 

But, the mono mixes may run slightly slower, and there may be more time at bthe end of the files from those collections. I doubt they time-compressed anything.

 

No it's not - an engineer bumped the record button and erased part of the guitar/tambourine track!

 

That mix of Day Tripper IS weak. I just AB'd it to the version I have on the UK Red album (vinyl). I particularly dislike the added echo on the vocal track.

 

I have read that interview a gagillion times and don't recall that statement. I will have to go get it and see. IF it's in there, which I doubt, it's revisionist history. That's NOT a missed note. It's a dropout.

 

Back to MONO!

 

I've always considered it a "wrong" note. A fader was quickly dropped to cover it up. A "punch - in" fixes it nicely. Only the problem is... the "punch-in" was done years later!

 

I did a quick A/B comparison this afternoon of these tracks. The slight attenuation in the high end of GB and TLWR is audible to me, but I think most non-audiophiles would never notice that. The mutilation of George's vocal on FYB is heinous! Who OK'd this to be released like that? For the slight level of hiss reduction they got, why did they even bother?

Derek

 

If you ask me, "Penny Lane" sounds the best on 1967-1970; much better than '1' and 'Magical Mystery Tour', anyway!
"Love Me Do" with Andy White sounds great on '1' and so does "From Me To You" to some extent. "She Loves You" sounds the best on 1962-1966. "Get Back" sounds the best on 1967-1970. For some odd reason, the Past Masters Vol.2 disc sounds dreadful compared to that. I could go on and on...........

 

Yes, if you listen to rough mixes of Day Tripper, you can hear a "tape glitch"--actually, a pop/skip sound--right where the dropout is. So, in a way, the dropout is both intentional and unintentional: it was intentionally dropped out of the mix by the engineer, but then pop/skip itself was never intended.

I don't think it is a big deal that Peter Cobbin, Peter Mew, Alan Rouse & company decided to fix it. It certainly was a glitch, a didn't add anything to the song. If anything, it interrupted the rhythm and flow of the record. It was not an integral part of the song and not a welcome mistake--it was a poor attempt to eliminate a "pop" from the master. The fact that the master has been fixed so many years later is, to me, a welcome change.

 

I do not think they shortened the songs on "1" to make them fit. The difference you are seeing is most likely attributable to the length of silence between each track. Just a guess.

 

It sounds to me like a punch-in, actually. And given that there is basically stuff happening on that particular track non-stop (i.e., the tambourine), it was impossible to find a "clean" spot to do the punch-in without creating some sort of problem, without having to go back and re-record the entire overdub from the beginning.

The second drop-out, before the fade, happens because someone accidentally sings "yea" after the first "Day tripper" (as opposed to the second, where it was supposed to go).

Personally, I don't mind the corrections either. I'm glad, however, that the original mixes (both mono and stereo) are still out there, though. That's my general feeling on the issue - so long as the originals are still available, I don't mind "corrections" being made. (See also my discussion on this topic on a previous thread about the "corrections" to the first Doors album.)