You have these tapes? I'm a fan of Nino and April. Not a hard-core fan, but I like their harmony and overall sound. They seem to have progressed in the late 60s but I've barely dug into it.
I have a few of the stage tapes for the promo EP that came out before they were going to remix and cut the album. Some of the other guys have the rest among everybody who was also forever trolling the archives in the basement from Jerry Cubbage in the 80s and 90s when he was selling all his leftover-from-the-studios B-set masters and never wiped `em out beforehand.
A number of these would become invaluable years later after the various record label vault disasters (not that their normal curation situation is any less of a disaster but I regress). when box sets and so on were redone from scratch with modern technology that can sync different stage tapes together to make a multi-track master.
So if some label or other sent out a call - probably the whole 2-album set could be put together officially since all I have is my own syncs of material I have as well as other syncs from other lock-up artists for material they have.
Of course when we were doing it with the Poor Man's Pro Tools 20 and 30 years ago it was a case of
a) start the same way they did with the backing tracks
b) take the first ODs one phrase at a time one track at a time and expand or shrink by milliseconds so it keeps the beat
c) repeat also one overdub session at a time one track at a time and maybe if you are lucky after a year a normal person wouldn't be able to tell if it was recorded on a 1-inch 8-track like e g Buffalo Springfield -
For What It's Worth or some of the early Motown - or whether people put it together from multiple half-inch 3-track/4 track.
Anymore you can get CineSync etc type programs that can lock up the post production ADR to the on set dialogue and not have to worry about e g Chinese dubbing on Chinese action movies and do a whole movie in under a weekend.
The same technology is used here to re-sync ``wild'' (no sync tone) overdubs to a basic track that lose all their sync once they are mixed to mono and flown out or flown in.
Two I wish we had more stages to is their
Wings of Love and their
Lovin' Valentine the former of which was put on the back of any number of other soon-to-be-dead singles because it was their own composition.
No fair Googling to find out where they stole the yodeling from the introduction from seven years earlier. (Hint: A famous 1994 Disney movie had the original song from which it was inspired as one of a few themes)
.
On another thread here (and a few other places) I discuss the track layout on the original sound report for all five stages of which only the three stages discussed remain.
In the case of the former, somebody would have to take those three and sync them up to the mono single mix because you can't do an effective fold down of the heavy pan-pot result of the ``stereo'' found here due to too many out of phase artifacts - you need the mono single mix/mono LP mix (different).
In the case of Lovin' Valentine we only have the final 3 track from which the mono single was remixed including the mutes that were neglected to be applied.
All that's around for that is the mono band track and the two mono iso vocal tracks - so somebody w a lot of time on their hands could line both vocals back up in places other than the chorus where they sync naturally.
Another one from there is pure 1959 lounge/exotica for all you wannabe-Martin Denny fans - Don Ralke's B-side to
Teen Beat is
Four Paces East.
'
Nobody's been able to tell in 60 yrs whether it's two completely different but closely related takes entirely with a totally different electric guitar solo or whether the backing track is the same and two different ODs of the electric guitar.
My ears tell me the former because if you lay them up one against the other like some guy did when he mistakenly called it ``
Teen Beat Synched with
Four Paces East'' even if you do the best sync imaginable - there's still slight differences enough in the backing track that will give it a not-even-very-narrow-as-expected stereo stage without the stereo image wandering back and forth (how you tell if it's in sync - whatever the common element is will stay in the center).
Another oddity on that one is the electric guitar overdubs have their parts reversed - beginning section and later section is vice versa on the other take. But if you sync them up - they DO sync well enough to be removed in a Center Channel Extractor digital audio workstation leaving you with now-out-of-sync xylophone and acoustic guitar backing track - which if you re-sync THAT makes a not-very weird stereo.
Which makes me wonder if both takes were put out months apart - one on the back of
Teen Beat and the other one on the back of
Walkin' and Rockin'.
There's also one by late composer Jeremy Slate of his hit track for Tex Ritter
Just Beyond the Moon.
Remaining is again 3 of the 5 stages made -
a 3-channel backing track with bass guitar and steel
then one overdub with that mixed to mono and him speaking it on one track and singing on the other track and then a 2nd OD with chorus girls in the background.
Since the ODs have the whole reel outtakes included, people with more patience than me could lift e g more than one dobro track, more than one bass track etc and come up with something really strange for stereo or quad
.
The dobro track from Take 3 I think has a counterpoint kind of thing going on, and a couple other takes of the choir (all mono of course) so somebody could make a remix out of all that and put the alternates in the rear and make one of those bouncing arcade ball animation videos out of it.
In the case of the Motown, you have to remember - the recorder was 8-track the console was still 3-track so the only thing that happened was instead of having to fly the ODs out to another deck and then fly it back in again - they could just rewind and lay the second set of 3 tracks under the first and then do the backing singers and lead.
So when you see these ``quadraphonic'' Motown - in the best of cases that's the only way they could remix - and why there's no alternates left of any of the earlier stages because only when they got one they liked would they move on to the next stage even tho they were on on the same tape in the same place.
And there's plenty of others where that came from.
.............here it is..
