Remixing the Past

(Photo found here.)

Genesis producer/engineer Nick Davis has spent the past few years taking his time and remixing the band's catalogue into 5.1 surround sound. I found a recent interview with John Burns, Genesis' producer/engineer back in the early 1970s. He is responsible for how Foxtrot, Selling England by the Pound, and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway sound. Burns was asked: "With Nick Davis going back and remixing those early Genesis albums you were involved with, what are your thoughts on that as a fellow engineer? Does it bother you that another engineer who was not involved with those sessions is essentially going back and revising your work?" And here's the reply:

Well, to be honest, I haven’t heard the new mixes, so I’ll have to wait to comment. I mean, he probably copied it as close as he possibly could. It’s such a different way. I mean, all of these albums were mixed by hand. There were no digital desks or computerization or anything like that. You literally had to move the faders and switch the buttons yourself and echoes and everything else had to be done as is. I generally mixed only by my hands. I didn’t have the whole band with me. I mean, with The Lamb Lies Down, they all buggered off at ten o’clock and left me to mix… apart from Phil a few times. A few times he stayed on and was encouraging.

If I made a mistake, like I forgot to switch a tambourine in or a backing vocal, because there are so many different things on different tracks, I would go back ten seconds, roll tape again, put that switch in, and just edit it together.

Some tracks may have many edits, it depends how clean they were… the bits and pieces on them. With Selling England, which like Foxtrot was only 16-tracks, you had to do that. There are only 16-tracks, but you had tambourines, flying geese, guitar solos and flute all on the same track. So, it was quite a handful to get all the motions together. I’m more interested in getting the balance of the band than kicking the drums where they needed kicking.

Obviously, if it’s none now, digitally, you don’t have to do editing the old fashioned way. Balance is so important. Because it was so hands on, you were leaping around a desk. I used a desk like an instrument back then. You had to play it. It would be 24-tracks with my ten fingers! You’d have to work it. I think Nick has really got his work cut out for him. To try and follow what I did is near on impossible. I could probably remember if I sat behind a desk, but even that would probably take some work 30 years later. I think I would remember, but he doesn’t know what the hell I was doing and the different echoes and different delays…

It must be very difficult to recreate, because we were so limited with equipment, on “The Colony of Slippermen” song, before I cut the album I wasn’t happy with it. So I put it through an echoplex, which is like a delay echo. So, I mixed the echoplex in mono into the middle of the stereo. I put the whole track though it with the stereo out the side but the echoplex signal coming out of the middle. It just boosts it. He wouldn’t know how the hell to do that. He wouldn’t know what I had done. I don’t think the band knew, I just did it. It was two hours before I had to go and cut it. It might have been 16 bars; I’d have to listen to it. The poor guy’s got his work cut out for him!

When asked about this, Davis replied:

all i can say is that i hope he likes it.

i have tried to recreate all the effects i heard, but that doesn't mean i am foolproof. so far the comments of the lamb mixes from the platinum collection have been positive so fingers crossed. for your info- i still do my mixing on an analogue desk. i do not use the computers for mixing at all, just as a tape machine.

I am looking forward to hearing the 5.1 mixes. Reading this reminded me of the controversies surrounding the director's cut of Blade Runner and George Lucas going back and redoing episodes 4-6 of Star Wars films. While certainly not on the same level in that Davis is not adding new instrumentation, the original is being tinkered with and altered. Some of his remixes ended up on The Platinum Collection best-of set a couple years ago and there were some noticeable differences. Minor but they were there. Some of these differences were songs that had longer fades or faded out later so you ended up with more of the song. In others, the drums, which had previously sounded like they were recorded in a cardboard box, are up front and sound more like drums should sound. "Duchess" is a good example of this. The ride cymbal is more prominent and the sound is more open and there's more space between the instruments. Plus there are songs where you can here a tambourine or something similar in the background that wasn't very audible previously. "Keep It Dark" comes to mind here. During the instrumental section at the end, you can clearly hear Collins playing a melody by hitting the rims of the drums with his sticks. It's a sound that is heard early in the song in the verse about the guy being let go because he had no money. There's a burst of synth at 1:10 and it's back to just hi-hat and snare. They re-appear at about 2:27 as Collins intones "...about a world so bright" and he actually plays a little part. "Keep It Dark" is a scenario where the remix works really well, in my opinion. Being able to hear the rim shots clearly adds something new to the song for me. It's minor, but it adds something nonetheless.

Another thing the interview brings up is the notion that whomever mixes an album is actually contributing to it creatively and that the process is an art form. It's one listeners rarely think about. How a song is mixed contributes to how you hear it so, if you're used to hearing the drums way in the background, as with "The Cinema Show", and then you hear them up front in a remix, it changes the song, even if just slightly. In the case of "The Cinema Show", the remixed version has a lot more energy because the drums don't sound like they're just skipping along in the background barely noticed. When Collins hits a snare, it makes an impact now. Plus you can actually hear the bass drums now too, which is great. Overall, it adds to the dynamics of the song quite nicely. I think Davis did a great job, especially in comparison to the remixes of classic Jethro Tull songs that appeared on their 25th anniversary box set.

Most of those songs sound like the only thing done was to bring the drums up front and it doesn't work in every case. "Cross-Eyed Mary" works well. The bass drums now have some balls, the tambourine is nice & clear, and the overall muddiness of the original mix is gone. On "Songs From the Wood", however, this works to a disadvantage. While it's nice to be able to hear bits of percussion and keyboards that were previously hidden, the warmth of the original song is lost when the snare pierces through. And Jeffrey Hammond-Hammond's bouncy bass becomes all muddled in "Cold Wind to Valhalla". So it's really a mixed bag.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see when the new mixes are released.