May 12, 1978 Gusto feature: Remixing

 

A nuts-and-bolts look behind the reworking of two albums that I already loved in their original versions. 

May 12, 1978 Gusto feature 

Remix: The fine art of remixing recordings 

          Recordings, unlike some other works of art, are not graven in stone. Even after a record has been issued, the basic musical elements can be shaped and reshaped in a process called remixing. Mixing takes multiple studio tracks (commonly 16 or 24) and boils them down into two-channel stereo.

          Remixing and a second process, remastering, is what sets the second version of the Spyro Gyra album, the reissue on Amherst Records, apart from the first edition, the privately issued disc on the group’s own Cross-Eyed Bear Records.

          Contrary to popular rumor, Spyro Gyra itself instituted the revisions. The group also was responsible for reversing the order of “Leticia” and “Cascade” at the start of side two.

          Saxophonist and producer Jay Beckenstein says he wound up accepting certain flaws in the original record just to get it out in time for Christmas last year. His critique – “Shaker Song” was “confusing,” the backbeat in “Cascade” was “ugly” and record overall was “too boomy.”

          “Some things I couldn’t even stand to listen to,” Beckenstein says. “There was a tape warble in the saxophone in ‘Shaker Song.’ The average listener wouldn’t hear it, but I knew it was there. I sat here 300, 400 times in front of my speakers and every time it came up, I’d go: ‘There it is.’”

          Only “Shaker Song” and “Cascade” were remixed, both with the thought that they might be released as singles. A few extra instrumental parts were added as well. Remastering, putting the taped sounds on records, was done via the CBS pressing plants.

          While Beckenstein could take his music and revise it at will, this was not an option available to Boz Scaggs’ producer Tom Perry when he accepted a request by Atlantic Records to remix Scruggs’ 9-year-old debut album. Atlantic wanted him to bring the old record up to date. In other words, make Scaggs sound more like he does now.

          “With hard-core Boz fans,” Perry says from California, where he’s working with the Emotions, “that record is somewhat of a classic. The question is how do you replace or re-record something that was done at that time.”

          Perry faced a superhuman chore. First of all, he didn’t have a copy of the first Scaggs album. Secondly, the sessions were recorded on eight-track Mylar tape. “If you look at it cockeyed,” Perry observes, “it stretches.”

          He carefully transferred the eight tracks to the middle of a 24-track tape, to preserve them against accident, and then mixed from the Mylar. What he found there was an engineer’s nightmare.

          Recording techniques have changed vastly since 1969. The theory at that time, Perry says, was to put all the drums on the left, the bass on the right, the lead vocals on the left, the harmonies on the right. He found two guitars, a banjo and a piano on one track. Background vocals were paired with the saxophone at one point, then switched to another track.

          “My job was to get Boz’s vocals sounding more like they do today,” Perry says. “I had to bring him more up front. They tried to bury the singer in the old days. Before ‘Silk Degrees,’ I never thought they gave him a good upfront vocal sound.

          “What I did,” he continues, “was take the extreme left and right pans out of the mix. If there were two or three things on a track, I tried to make them as distinct as possible. I put so much brightness into the mix just to try to distinguish the sounds. You can imagine the hiss. The hiss factor by today’s standards was horrendous. And there was so much distortion. I could only go so far.”

          The toughest task in his week of remixing was sorting out the late Duane Allman’s classic guitar solo on “Loan Me a Dime.” The version on the tape was 19 minutes long, almost twice the length of the number on the record.

          “I had no clue to what they did,” Perry says. “There was an edit in the middle of the Allman solo and I had to find it. What I had to do was find the two notes, the one preceding the edit and the one after.

          “There are moments in this business,” he notes, “when you have sheer elation and one of them was when I found that edit. But nobody was around to appreciate it. I dragged in a couple people who were around the studio, but they just looked at me like I was crazy. I figured somebody ought to know what I’d done.”

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IN THE PHOTO: The original Spyro Gyra album cover and the re-released version.

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FOOTNOTE: Spyro Gyra’s search for a major label for their self-released debut album brought them back home to Amherst Records and it did the trick. As for Tom Perry, the remix of the Boz Scaggs record was a landmark effort and confirmed his status as a studio wizard. (To hear the difference, there’s a 2015 re-release of both versions in a double CD package.) I’m not sure how I got hooked up with him, though, since there’s no Buffalo connection that I'm aware of. Probably through the local Atlantic Records promotion man.