The Beatles
January, 1969
"A/B Road" session tapes
Also known as The Nagra Reels
COMPLETE SET version 1.1
83 CDs
2187 tracks
97 hours, 44 minutes, 7 seconds
Twickenham Studios (Part 1)
Apple Studios (Part 2)
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Background info, from Doug Sulpy's "Complete Beatle's Audio Guide"
From Doug Sulpy
2006 Edition
THE "GET BACK” SESSIONS
I'll make this easy for you.
You need Purple Chick's "A/B Road" series. Period. No doubt, using one of my previous books as a template (at least I hope he did - I'd hate to think of two people going through all that work!) Purple Chick has compiled every extant moment from the Nagra A and B rolls and edited them together in sequence.
In January, 1969, virtually every moment of The Beatles' rehearsals and recording sessions were captured on audio tape as part of the project that ultimately became the film "Let It Be." For the first part of the month, at Twickenham Film Studios in London, The Beatles' performances were only preserved on small 16 minute long mono tapes (known as "Nagra" reels) that were recorded for use as the film soundtrack.
Two different tape recorders were running (usually off of the same sound feed), resulting in what was termed "A" and "B" roll Nagra recordings. The "A" rolls generally ran the full 16 minute length of the tape. The "B" rolls were more fragmentary, but often captured performances or dialogue missed while the "A" roll operator was changing reels. In addition, once the sessions shifted to Apple Studios on January 21st, Glyn Johns began recording multi-track tapes of The Beatles' sessions which, again, sometimes captured performances not heard on either the "A" or "B" roll Nagra recordings.
In 2004, Purple Chick collated these recordings, and issued them in a series of CDs called "A/B Road."
These are now the most readily available source for the "Get Back" sessions material.
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Further history on the Nagra Reels (source of this giant set)
By ALLAN KOZINN
Published: January 13, 2003
To read the statements made by British and Dutch officials after the arrest of a group of bootleggers in suburbs of London and Amsterdam on Friday, one would think that the police had apprehended a band of thieves who for the last three decades had been sitting on a vast trove of long-lost master tapes from Beatles recording sessions. There is an element of truth in what they say, but also a good measure of exaggeration. Whether the seizure of these tapes should be regarded as good news -- and for that matter whether it will have any effect on the thriving trade in Beatles bootlegs -- is another matter.
What the police seized was a collection of 500 to 550 reels of tape, each running about 16 minutes. They were recorded during the sessions for the Beatles' ''Let It Be'' album -- originally to be called ''Get Back'' -- from Jan. 2 to Jan. 31, 1969. But they are not the multitrack session masters from which the album was made. Those are safely in EMI's archives. Instead, they are monaural recordings made on a pair of Nagra tape recorders for reference purposes by a film crew that was documenting the sessions for a proposed television documentary. When the television plan was scuttled, the film was released theatrically as ''Let It Be.''
It is unquestionably an important collection. Unlike normal session tapes, which usually include only performances, the Nagra reels, as these tapes are known, run continuously and capture everything: rehearsals, discussions, arguments, clowning and loose jams on Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry classics as well as older Beatles tunes and oddities like the theme from ''The Third Man,'' all in addition to the nose-to-the-grindstone work of making an album. No other set of Beatles sessions is so thoroughly documented.
These tapes are well known to collectors. Instantly recognizable because the film crew is regularly heard announcing slate and roll numbers, the material was the source for some of the first Beatles bootlegs in the early 1970's. Until the early 90's the trend in Beatles bootlegging was to compile collections of the most interesting performances and discussions. More recently, bootleg labels began releasing these tapes more systematically: unedited, in chronological order and with reel numbers and recording dates fully documented.
These tapes have also been the subject of two books: ''Get Back: The Unauthorized Chronicle of the Beatles' 'Let It Be' Disaster,'' by Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighardt (St. Martin's, 1994), and ''The 910's Guide to the Beatles' Outtakes: The Complete 'Get Back' Sessions,'' a comprehensive catalog of the material by Mr. Sulpy (The 910, 2002).
As originally proposed, the idea for ''Let It Be'' was elegantly simple. Having completed the White Album a few months earlier, the Beatles were to convene at the Twickenham film studios in London to rehearse an album's worth of new songs. The rehearsals would be filmed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, an expatriate American who had directed their promotional clips for ''Paperback Writer'' and ''Rain'' in 1966, as would the highlight of the project, a concert at which the Beatles would perform their new material.
What the plan did not take into account were the increasingly fractious relations among three of the four Beatles. John Lennon, more interested in his collaborations with Yoko Ono than in the Beatles, wanted either to involve her in the band or to distance himself from it. He brought a handful of songs to the sessions, and is heard in a few hilarious monologues (including one about how masturbation ''doesn't make you go blind, only very shortsighted'') but is often passive and uninvolved.
George Harrison, by then a prolific songwriter, was disgruntled about his paltry representation on the Beatles' albums, which were always dominated by the music of Lennon and Paul McCartney. He was also uninterested in performing in concert, and irritated by what he regarded as Mr. McCartney's condescension in telling him what to play. At one point Harrison walked out, effectively (if temporarily) quitting the band, leaving the others to pursue a series of aggressive but fascinating jams with Ms. Ono vocalizing. Mr. McCartney is at times almost despondent about his partners' lack of interest and cooperation. Only Ringo Starr seems to be taking the sessions in stride.
In the end Harrison returned, but only after being guaranteed that his songs would receive greater consideration, and that there would be no more talk of a concert. The project was completed with a series of performances filmed at the group's new Apple studios, and on the rooftop of their London offices.
What makes these tapes crucial to Beatles biographers and musicians interested in studying the band's working process is that they capture it all. The rehearsals often begin with one of the Beatles playing a new song while calling out the chord progression to the others. The group joins in and works through the changes, and ideas for arrangements slowly accrue. Some songs -- ''Two of Us,'' ''One After 909'' and ''Get Back,'' for example -- are tried as everything from sizzling, fast-tempo rockers to country-influenced ballads.
The process of lyric writing unfolds before the listener's ears as well. In one session for ''Get Back,'' Mr. McCartney stops during a run-through and says, ''I've got it -- Jo Jo left his home in Tucson, Arizona.'' Lennon asks, ''Is Tucson in Arizona?'' Mr. McCartney replies, ''Yeah, it's where they make 'High Chaparral.' ''
There is also a good deal of material that, even for the Beatles-obsessed, can be hard slogging -- hours and hours and hours of ''The Long and Winding Road,'' for example. And the discussions, which often last several reels at a stretch, range from the amusingly loopy to the contentious. Several are about the proposed concert. Among the plans suggested are playing in an amphitheater in North Africa, or on a cruise ship on the Mediterranean. When Harrison quits, Mr. Lindsay-Hogg suggests going on with the show and saying that Harrison is ill, to which Lennon replies, ''If he's not back by Tuesday, we'll call Eric Clapton.'' One reel captures a lunch meeting at which the group airs its problems in some detail.
Had these illuminating tapes not already found their way onto the collectors' market, their seizure would be unfortunate, because it is unlikely that Apple, the Beatles' company, will ever sanction their legitimate release. Apple has even tried to stifle scholarly discussion of them. When Mr. Sulpy and Mr. Schweighardt were at work on their first book, they naively sent Apple a sample chapter and sought permission to hear the studio recordings. Apple responded by threatening legal action.
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NOTES ABOUT THIS SET and DDSI numbers
from jameskg
January, 2007
I started trying to collect this set 2 years ago. It gets seeded all kinds of ways. One disc here, one disc there… someone thought it would be nice to encode to .APE on a few I found. Very frustrating to try to collect a set this big that way. Like most people, I only had some pieces and the tracks are always named "Track01.shn, Track37.flac, track0048.shn" etc... just all over the place and really hard to keep up with.
A gentleman named alGo did manage to collect all these though, as they were first being posted.
He notes:
This was all downloaded from easytree and then later dimeadozen. It was upped by PC_Eclipse and later by hexer, and, supposedly, they got their sets directly in flac format from Purple Chick (mmm PC and PC_Eclipse. Never thought of that. Who knows...).
They were seeded in small batches of maybe two or three cds. I've made one directory for each day and then put the correspondent discs there, like it should be.
Some of the uploaded files had defects and patches were uploaded. Those patches are already applied, as was a later patch from PC to one of the tracks. So this is AB road 1.1 instead of 1.0.
In a disc or two an 'unofficial' patch was uploaded and suggested too. I have NOT replaced the original PC track, but I've put them on a directory inside that disc so everyone can judge and replace it where necessary.
Some of the first batches (that started with the apple sessions) were originally in shn format. Personally, I can't stand shn so I reconverted them to flac level 8 using Flac Frontend. Hope no one really minds about it.
So, alGo did a lot of further work to organize this set. I was still unhappy with having to reference a track list document to browse 2100+ files, so I have named all the tracks, combined into a single folder and added FLAC tags. This is the most complete presentation of this historic set, of over a thousand reels, you will find anywhere. All tracks have been meticulously labeled to include all info for easy browsing, including the DDSI take numbers.
DDSI numbers were published by Doug Sulpy when these tracks were initially pieced together and cataloged, in order of recording, for the most part, and presented in the book, "Drugs, Divorce and a Slipping Image (DDSI). Doug will be releasing an updated version of this book soon, and it is my hope that this set will compliment that nicely – you’ll be able to instantly call up a track while you read about it using the DDSI # assigned by Doug.
TRACK TITLE FORMAT IS:
Month.Day - Disc-Track - Title DDSI#.flac
example:
Jan.02 - D1-08 - Don't Let Me Down 2.01.flac
Jan.02 - D1-35 - Sun King 2.24.flac
Not all tracks from Purple Chick were assigned the DDSI numbers,
so some are just in-between takes.
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Attempt at Lineage
It is widely known that the original lineage of this set is not widely known
Roughly, it would be:
A Nagra reel machine >16 min tape >(unsure) >Purple Chick (splicing of A and B reels) >SHN >PC_Eclipse/Hexer >alGo (FLAC conversion) >jameskg (organization, corrections, naming with DDSI #s and FLAC tagging)
I note these here, not for boasting, but for general information. This set has been notoriously hard to complete, especially with any consistent lineage. Here is the chain of custody for this set:
THE FILM ENGINEERS - recorded thousands of audio reels over 4 weeks
<unnamed> - the people in between
PURPLE CHICK - initial compilation and lots of hard work piecing the reels together
PC_ECLIPSE & HEXER - initial individual distribution of the 83 CDs
alGo - initial compiling from the 83 individual Discs to 4 big sets
ROGERLANCELOT - computation of times & track data.
JAMESKG - final compiling and file naming, flac tagging
I have gone through this set with a fine tooth comb and Doug Sulpy’s 2006 edition book’s list by DDSI #s. I found a few anomalies with track #s and DDSI #s and have re-aligned to Sulpy’s book. Something like 100 or so errors out of all 2187 tracks. I’m pretty sure this is as accurate as the documentation has ever been for this set.
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Some notes about compression:
This set has long been the subject of debate… is it lossy or not?
Basically the two arguments go like this:
1) Uncompressed: These thousands of 16 minute reels were recorded on a set of Nagra recorders for possible film use. The tape and recorders used likely didn’t reproduce the entire spectrum from 20 Hz to 20kHz – these were not the tapes used for the albums. The lack of dynamic range on the equipment and media would produce high-end roll off around where we see the MP3 codecs of today roll off, and that makes these tapes appear lossy, when they simply were not recorded full-spectrum.
2) Compressed: Regardless of the frequency reproduction range of the recorders and media (tape), a lot of this set exhibits characteristics of ATRAC compression on a graphic frequency analyzer, like that found on MiniDisc recorders. Old analog equipment wouldn’t produce these kinds of characteristics, so it is likely these tracks went through a MiniDisc recorder at some point.
The dilema: No one… NO ONE seems to have these tracks in any other quality. They all seem to be the same, no matter where you get them from, and now that the original reels have been recovered (see the story above – you were reading, weren’t you ? ), it doesn’t seem that we’ll ever see a cleaner, more pure transfer.
It is my opinion that this set was archived from reels to MiniDisc and the source for the splicing was those MiniDisc transfers. I’d be surprised if a lossless transfer to digital was ever done of this 98 HOURS of audio. Since this seems to be all there is to have, The Traders Den has made a special exemption for this set, to allow it to be posted – just like if a concert was only recorded to MiniDisc and that’s the only way it exists.
It is very rare to notice any of the ATRAC artifacts when listening to these recordings. ATRAC is much more pleasant than MP3, even at high rates, and doesn’t exhibit any obvious “swishy” aliasing on this particular set, at all.
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This set is huge. The md5 checksum strings will not fit on a single post because of the number of tracks (2187!). Neither will the list of the tracks, themselves, for the same reason.
I am attaching supporting documentation as attachments. ALL of these are included in the .torrent, but you can download the attachments to browse while you are running the torrent if you want to see the file names.
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Someone will ask, so here it is:
I did not alter the audio information on ANY of the 2187 tracks in any way EXCEPT for the Love Me Do track on the 28th, Disc 3. Purple Chick's fix for this track was, itself, broken (not redbook CD compliant). Note are in the documents.
I did rename the tracks, as documented above, and I did add full FLAC tags with all info for every single track. Also, ALL ORIGINAL PURPLE CHICK ARTWORK IS INCLUDED! The only 'artwork' I created is the logo 'art' at the top of this post. I have it in a higher res if someone wants it.. it's nice for the folder's picture on your hard drive if you have XP or Vista. Maybe MAC, too?
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>>>>> This set is about 14GB, but don't worry - we have 6 seeders with big pipes, right off the bat. We should have about 10Mb of upload bandwidth to get this off and running at great speeds! (FLAC)
https://mega.nz/file/cjlmWSDR#yfjfeNqC1L-Fm2SslEtNpxaN52WloxB8d4yBOZXZB20
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