The goal of this comp was to present the best and most interesting tracks while also maximizing the listening experience by removing anything I felt got in the way and took me out of the moment. This is not a career spanning comprehensive collection though it does cover a good chunk of their output.
If you're looking for more, head on over to Paul's Albums That Should Exist blog. Shortly after I started working on this he posted two fine collections over there. There might be some overlap between mine and his but each of us took a different approach.
Side One
01 Wouldn't It Be Nice
02 She Knows Me Too Well
03 Surfer Girl
04 Farmer's Daughter
05 You Still Believe In Me
06 Girl From New York City
07 Catch A Wave
08 In My Room
09 Help Me Rhonda
10 Little Deuce Coupe
11 Be True To Your School
Side Two
01 Sloop John B
02 Good Vibrations
03 Fun Fun Fun
04 God Only Knows
05 California Girls
06 Loui Loui
07 Surfers Rule
08 Wonderful
Reality Notes
The Beach Boys have released several vocals only mixes in recent years including the entire Pet Sounds album. There are also many unofficial tracks to be found on various bootlegs. I have a three disc collection that gathers as many of these as possible that I no no longer recall where I found them.
That three disc boot sounds like a mix of vocals only mixes, reverse karaoke (OOPS, Out Of Phase) and what could be surround sound channel isolation tracks. The success rate for isolating the vocals is hit and miss so I went through them all and chose the best and most interesting to fill out this comp.
Once I had my tracklist I took each track and I trimmed and edited each one to remove or minimize any between vocal noise and pre/post song chatter and intros/outros. Even some of the cleanest mixes were tightened up by shortening any long quiet passages to make the listening experience smoother. Overall, eight of the nineteen tracks here recieved internal edits and most tracks had the beginnings and endings trimmed.
I included two songs that I found interesting but do not really fall in the same area as the rest. Good Vibrations features only the lead vocal and prominent jaw harp and sounds like an early take before the harmonies and final lead vocal were recorded. Wonderful, which closes the album, features an isolated overdub track full of strange sounds and noises and some background vocals. I thought it gave the album a nice fun ending.
The three disc bootleg did not have a cover when I found it so I made one for it. I reused that cover here.
Sources
Good Vibrations: 30 Years box set
Pet Sounds: A Cappela
Vocals Only (bootleg)
Nice work! I've been looking forward to this. It's a nice listen. One quibble though: the version of "You Still Believe in Me" sounds inferior to that of the "Pet Sounds Sessions" CD in that some vocal lines can barely be heard here while they can be clearly heard there.
ReplyDeleteDo you mind if I update my files and use some of these? By the way, hearing this inspired me to look for more, and I found some more that it seems neither you nor I have had so far, such as acappella versions of "Don't Worry Baby," "Cottonfields," and "Sail On Sailor." I'll include all those when I update my blog.
Reuse to your heart's delight. Glad you enjoyed it.
DeleteOn a different note, have you considered doing a similar acapella project for the Beatles? I know you're a big fan of them, due to your other blog. I was poking around on Soulseek just now, and I found quite a few acappella versions of their songs, no doubt done in the same way as your raw material here, with stripping from multitracks and so on.
ReplyDeleteActually, I have a dream of sorts, and that's to make as many "unplugged" Beatles tracks as possible, by stripping multitracks down to just acoustic guitar and vocals or piano and vocals. I think that would be a really nice listen for some of their songs, though obviously not all. The challenge though is to find the multitracks to do it.
Glad you like it. Nice catch on "You Still Believe In Me". I tried to keep Pet Sounds tracks to a minimum then started taking songs from the bootleg collection without double checking other sources. Shows how well I know Beach Boys. I'll see if an upgrade is in order.
ReplyDeleteI do have a Beatles 15 song comp of vocals only mixes. Like the Beach Boys collection, isolation success varies but it is an interesting listen. You could also seek out the Rock Band moog files that become multitrack files when loaded into a program like Audacity. Great for remixing. If you don't have/can't find them let me know. I could zip them all up and upload on wetransfer (too big for mega)
Should have read *mogg* files. Basically they are individual ogg files compressed together. Each individual file is a separate track.
DeleteThanks. Actually, I just found the mogg files for the Beatles and I'm cheating them out. They're awesome! I'm surprised I haven't seen other people tinkering with these. I'll definitely do something interesting with them and put it on my blog.
DeleteAside from the 64 or so Rock Band Beatles songs, I've also found some others where people seem to have made good vocal isolations or done other interesting things.
Do you know of or have any other multitracks, by the Beatles or other good artists? According to this, there should be a ton from Rock Band alone:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_downloadable_songs_for_the_Rock_Band_series
But I'm only finding a very, very small portion of those.
I also found some .dff or .dsf. or .dsd files that look like they could be multitracks. But I haven't been able to find any way to open them or convert them. And I found a few quadrophonic files that are interesting, but also very limited stuff (pretty much just Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon).
Multitrack files are great! It's like being able to look under the hood of a car as a mechanic and see what's really going on. :)
By the way, I'm also discovering that sometimes merely taking one channel away from a stereo recording can be really interesting, esp. for mid-1960s records (when there was often wide stereo separation). I'm going to try tinkering with some of those too.
Some info on the .dff, .dsf, .dsd files
Deletehttps://www.blisshq.com/music-library-management-blog/2016/03/15/dsd-versus-dsf-versus-dff-what-mean-audio-libraries/
Basically they are streaming files and dsd is also used on SACD discs. There could be surround sound channels in there. I've never played with them so I could be wrong.
I have the actual mutitracks for four songs from Sgt Pepper. That's about all of the Beatles ones I've seen. There is an 18 disc Led Zep collection called Studio Magic that has a lot of what looks like either multitrack files or surround sound channels and a lot of alternate takes and mixes.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the info. Thanks to your latest tip, I found the Studio Magik files at Soulseek (they have all sorts of stuff). I found a few other curious things there too, like 7 McCartney and Wings songs in mogg format. Still, it's frustrating not being able to access more multitrack versions.
DeleteBy the way, Dan, I just added a new post about the Beach Boys acappella after updating both of my zip files with new songs. I added a link to your version. Check it out here:
ReplyDeletehttps://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2018/05/the-beach-boys-acappella-update.html
Hey Dan, how do I email you? I've got some good info for you. Turns out I was wrong about finding multitrack recordings. I'm actually finding some! Including pretty much all Beatles songs, not just the 60 or so done in Rock Band.
ReplyDeleteI've added my address to my profile. You can email me there. Sounds exciting
Delete