Revolver (Premium)

Every once in a while, two of my interests overlap, or collide. Such was the case with the recent remixing of The Beatle’s classic album Revolver, the perfect synthesis of technology and music.

It’s not controversial to state that The Beatles are the most popular and beloved musical act in history, and the most influential. But I’m going to make the argument that The Beatles are, if anything, underappreciated, that their influence and expertise extend well beyond music to include songwriting, general writing, collaboration, experimentation, and the proper use of new technologies to advance our understanding of what’s possible. In short, what The Beatles accomplished in just a few short years was literally genius, and in many more ways than most understand.

You can see this genius on display—along with their human fragility—in Peter Jackson’s incredible Get Back documentary. Released about a year ago, Get Back resets the narrative on the waning days of this band, correcting the story told by the original Let It Be documentary that was taken from the same video recordings and released in 1970. That film focused on infighting as a way to explain why The Beatles broke up. But Jackson’s more expansive and nuanced documentary tells another story, that the band was, at that time, still a collaborative force, and that its members weren’t just friends, but that they loved each other quite a bit. As a Beatles fan, this was a revelation and a godsend.

There are only two reactions to Get Back: you either thought it was too long, or you wish that it could just keep going and going. I fall into the latter camp, and while I’ve always been fascinated by how music is made, I’m particularly interested in how these unique people did so. All four went on to some level of success as individuals, of course. But there’s never been anything quite like the four of them together. Before or since.

And the scope of The Beatles’s discography, there are of course the albums that really stand out. Here, we can quibble over which of them is “best,” but my two favorites—I go back and forth—are Rubber Soul and Revolver. That said, the 2022 remix of Revolver has, for now, put that one over the top. (Surely, a similar remix of Rubber Soul, and of all of the band’s other albums—is coming.)

I’m not really writing about this to discuss the music per se, though I have listened and relistened to this remixed Revolver again and again. No, this is about the technology that Giles Martin, son of renowned Beatles producer (and “fifth Beattle”) George Martin, used to make it happen. Giles Martin has been involved with recent era Beatles album remixes for the past 20-ish years, I think, with the first peek at what was to come arriving in the form of Love, an album created to accompany the Las Vegas show of the same name. (Both are also incredible.)

But a recent technological breakthrough has rendered the 2000s-era Beatles remixes temporary holding patterns, soon to be replaced with better—dare one say, perfect—replacements. Peter Jackson, the filmmaker behind The Lord of the Rings movies, owns a company that created a technology that can remove discrete parts of an audio recording as individual parts. This so-called “de-mixing” has been compared to someone handing Peter Jackson a cake and him handing you back the eggs, flour, sugar, and other ingredients in their original forms, which is, of course, an impossibility. But that’s basically what Jackson’s company did for audio. It’s a technological breakthrough. And unlike some seemingly similar audio advances, like Dolby Atmos/spatial audio, this breakthrough is objectively superior to what came before. There’s just no arguing against it.

We’ve all seen the movies and TV shows where law enforcement is watching a blurry video of some crime and the lead investigator tells the geek working the playback device to “enhance it,” and some miraculously perfect image emerges. And we all probably know this is impossible for the most part, even today. Coincidentally, the movie I’m currently watching on the elliptical trainer at the gym is The Fugitive, an early 1990s Harrison Ford thriller in which there’s an audio version of this impossible feat: Tommy Lee Jones’ character asks the geek to enhance a recorded phone call so that they can more clearly hear what’s happening in the background, and the team quickly figures out the call was made from a payphone at a particular corner in Chicago. Sigh. Right.

Anyway, we have that technology now because Jackson’s company developed it for that Get Back documentary. (Which, again, is incredible.) And he’s allowed Marting and Abbey Road Studios to use it for remixing The Beatles’s albums, starting with Revolver. And, for now, he’s only allowing it to be used for this one thing. I assume that will change, and my mind is already reeling when I think about the other albums that could be similarly remixed, to both good and bad effects. If you care about music, everything is about to change.

And you can see that change in Get Back and, better still, in Revolver.

The thing is, when The Beatles recorded this album in the mid-1960s, the only recording technology they had available to them was a four-track recorder. And that meant that these albums had to be recorded in such a way that multiple voices and instruments were on one track, together. (And given the technology of the day, there would also have been recording bleed-through, where other voices or instruments being recorded on another track would be heard on other tracks too, if faintly.)

The Beatles, as innovators, tried to work around this limitation with loops and by imitating multi-track recording with diminished results: one four-track recording could be added to a single track on a second recording and added to other four-track recordings, creating a master recording of 16 “tracks” or whatever. I assume the ultimate (Beatles) example of this is Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but whatever: by this phase of their career, The Beatles were creating music they could not—and would never be able to—duplicate live. The songs were just too complex.

The problem with four-track recording is that it’s too easy to screw it up. My favorite example of this is the first few Van Halen albums, where Eddie Van Halen’s guitar comes wailing out of only one speaker, with the rest of the band on the other side and the vocals in the middle. I get why the producers wanted to focus on Eddie, but it always sounds off, especially with headphones. And The Beatles albums suffered from this same problem, though not as acutely.

Until now. Thanks to Jackson’s incredible technology, Giles Martin was able to isolate every voice and every instrument and give each its own track. Actually, it’s even better than that: Each individual part of Ringo Starr’s drum set is given its own track. And then these separated elements are mixed together into an incredible spatial mix that puts all of the voices and instruments in place, correctly, as close as possible to what it would have been like if we could have sat in front of the band in the studio and watched them make the music.

Sounds and background vocals that were previously felt but not heard come to life. The sheer spread of the music, for lack of a better term—sorry, I’m not a music guy—is smile-inducing. The original stereo recording never really sounded dull before, but it does now. This mix is definitive. It’s … incredible. (It’s also accompanied by many outtakes and previous versions of songs which are likewise incredible, for different reasons.)

What the remixing doesn’t do is change the songs: no one has modernized a guitar sound or whatever. Instead, these songs are all obviously the same songs. They just sound better.

What this doesn’t accomplish is what I think future song remixing—not of The Beatles—will: this doesn’t suddenly give these recordings the modern pump and thump that we can feel and hear in more recent songs. We experience this most obviously via our Sonos Play:5s and Sonos Sub set up in the sunroom: it is very clear that many modern songs are created specifically to sound incredible via this kind of sound system, and older recordings—The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, whatever—often sound a bit thin by comparison.

But there is also this notion I have—and I’ve been meaning to make a playlist like this—of songs that sound better than they should. Two from the 1980’s come to mind: Voices Carry by ‘Til Tuesday and Beds Are Burning by Midnight Oil. These songs always sounded “better” than most music of the day—sonically—to me. And they crank on the Sonos system. The whole house shakes.

Revolver has one song that reaches this place, that matches the sonic reach of some modern music and falls into that “sounds better than it should” category: Eleanor Rigby. It’s always been incredible. But with the orchestra spread out properly across a broad soundstage, this song is transcendent. It’s … incredible. My god, the violins.

Look, I obviously don’t have the words to express how great this is. But I implore you to listen to it. Even on an average car system—like the rental we had recently while our car was in the shop—it sounds amazing. But with headphones or something like the Sonos, it’s next level. And an incredible example of how technology, which is often more about doing something rather than questioning whether it should be done, can be used for good.

I cannot wait for more of these albums to be remixed. What an incredible gift.