Abbey Road's work on 'The Beatles: Rock Band' project
In addition to the Remastered catalogue, the highly anticipated The Beatles: Rock Band video game was released this week to great acclaim. Abbey Road's Surround Mastering and Restoration Engineer, Simon Gibson, describes his work on the project.
For The Beatles: Rockband game, which gives players the opportunity to perform Beatles songs in a virtual Abbey Road Studio Two, Simon worked closely with Giles Martin and Paul Hicks, who were responsible for producing and mixing the individual songs for the game's developers, Harmonix. Simon used the Cedar Retouch software in new and innovative ways to help isolate the individual instruments and voices within a recorded mono tape track. 'Many of The Beatles' earlier recordings had the different musical lines recorded on only two or four tracks of the tape,' Simon explains, 'meaning that two or three instrumental and vocal lines are often found recorded together. In order to use these songs within the game, we needed to be able to have individual control over the instruments and voices, which meant splitting them apart'. By zeroing in on the exact frequencies of the bass guitar, for instance, Simon could use Retouch to effectively 'rub out' these notes. Subsequent work by Paul Hicks isolated the individual instrumental lines for the game. This novel way of using Retouch proved to be extremely laborious, but yielded great results. Simon's work has made it possible for the majority of The Beatles catalogue to be available for use in the game 'one of the main requirements for getting the go-ahead from the remaining band members.
