Are the SW remixes good?

[Bruno Sampaio Barbosa]

Not quite sure what you mean here, so let me just ask: do the Steven Wilson remixes compress everything? Are the drums more present and the instruments more separated because everything is brickwalled?

I mean that Yes remixes from Wilson sounds FLAT for my taste, the separation of the instruments is very good, but the overall sound is very insipid, lacks force and punch. They don't have Mastering. A pretty good Mastering can bring the Wilson Mixes some warmth, more harmonics and fuller sound. By the way, i don't like blickwalled sound, i like a good analog mastering with dynamic range.

[rickawakeman]

I have Relayer, Fragile and GG's Octopus and have been enjoying them.

[bondegezou]

So I just got the Yes album from Rhino and Fragile/Close to the Edge from Atlantic and was wondering if I made a mistake not buying the SW remixes.

Bit late to worry about it now! But, yes, personally I think the Panegyric releases are fantastic. Not just for Wilson's remixes, but for the array of bonus material, like "All Fighters Past" on Fragile, an early version of "The Revealing Science of God" combined with "Siberian Khatru".

Henry

[Phlakaton]

Aqualung is amazing.

[olivetti]

I love his Yes work,and that of KC, Gentle Giant and XTC,however these are not remixes, but are remasters.Remixes are altering original volumes and panning rather than remastering, which basically cleaning up the audio,and altering eq etc.
However i must state i think his recent Steve Hackett remasters sound bloody awful.

Wilson dont do remastering!
They are remixes!

[Svetonio]

SW remixes are great.

[at least 100 dead]

Aqualung is amazing.

^^^
This.


As far as the Yes remixes are concerned: Somewhat perversely, I prefer the flat transfers of the original mixes as they sound closest to the way I remember the vinyl.

[JeffCarney]

I've heard quite a few and haven't cared for any of them. So much so that the curiosity is pretty much gone and I doubt I'll buy any in the future.

I guess I just don't enjoy digital remixes of analog recordings.

[grego]

Its a question of taste I think.
Of course they are good, but do you like them ?

I got GG The Power and the Glory SW-remix, but prefer my LP version. I feel the SW-mix is a bit too clinical somehow, but admit that I discovered new details especially with the drums.

I agree, too clinical. The point is, that his perception of sound, quite modern, sometimes collide with sound 'pictures' of albums that he choose for remixing. Gentle Giant's TP&TG is fine example - sterile, smooth sound on Wilson's remix, and kicking, agressive, sharp sound of vinyl original.

[grego]

Check the vinyl Aqualung and Wilson's CD. Lack of punch indeed, the flute on Cd sounds without physical attack - as if the flute is a keys register. Wilson adds hi-res, that's good, but Barre's guitar on Aqualung sounds really fat, not flat - and I hear the polished, flat sound on SW's CD.
And I would never forget my purchase of Discipline - I was going to cashier, keeping in mind the guitar solo on Matte Kudasai. When at home I put the Cd on, I cannot believe my ears. First I thought I felt asleep for a few seconds, and put the track on again. No solo! I was just speechless...
Playing Lizard, I hadn't heard the mighty cluster mellotron chord - rariest thing ever, on Prince Rupert Lament. Wilson simply wiped it off. Well, man...who does he think, are buyers of all this stuff? Neophytes?)

[bondegezou]

I note Wilson's Fragile remix just won Reissue of the Year in the 2015 Prog Readers' Poll, with his Octopus #2!

Henry

[zombywoof]

Funny, I thought Aqualung was one of the absolute worst ones. It seemed to have the life and grit tweezed out of it.

[Bruno Sampaio Barbosa]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpl3l7RcOQk

[Phlakaton]

Funny, I thought Aqualung was one of the absolute worst ones. It seemed to have the life and grit tweezed out of it.

Well... the grit was certainly tweezed out. Now I can hear it! :P

[Bruno Sampaio Barbosa]

Mike Mettler: So how does one go about making an admittedly “beautifully recorded and beautifully mixed” progressive masterpiece sound even better?

Steven Wilson: My goal is always the same: Be as faithful as you possibly can to the original mix, and don’t try to modernize it or improve it in any way — but allow for the fact that you’re going back to an earlier generation of tape. Remember that every kind of mix, every vinyl master, and every copy master is a further reduction in sound quality. But by using the original tape, I inherently knew I was going to get more tone out of the music and more out of the recording itself than anyone had been able to before.

Mettler: Producer Eddie Offord sure gave you one helluva template to work with.

Wilson: What I think a lot of people love about Eddie Offord’s original mix is the sense of energy and thrust the music has, which is partly the musicians and the way they play. But it’s also partly the fact he was mixing it to the red the whole time. He heavily saturated and compressed his mixes. He drove the tapes so hard that you get this sense of compression — not like mastering compression, but more like analog tape-mixing compression. I’ve always shied away from that because I like the dynamics of the music to breathe, and I don’t like that congested quality you get when you push things very hard.

So my new mix has taken a new tack, a more relaxed approach to the amount of compression. I tried to preserve more of the dynamics. There’s a lot more air, space, and depth that wasn’t present in the original mix.

The thing about Yes and Eddie Offord is that the mixes really are performances. And what I mean by that is, very often when you do a remix, you set a level for the drums, you set a level for the bass, the guitar, the vocal, etc., and usually that remains fairly static throughout the mix. Not on the Yes mixes. Every little guitar phrase, every little vocal nuance, every little bass lick, and every little drum fill has potentially been pushed up in the mix manually. What that means is that you can’t just set your levels and let the mix run through. You have to literally analyze every few seconds, every few bars of music. I had to constantly compare back to the original mix: “Ah, they’ve lifted that little drum fill out!”, “Ah, they’ve lifted that guitar phrase out!”, “Ah, that vocal part is fading into reverb there.”

And I didn’t really do a lot of EQ, either. What’s on tape is pretty much recorded as they wanted it, so I didn’t mess with the tone of the instruments, the amount of bass, or the treble, or anything like that.

It has a slightly modern sound to it almost by default, because you have this extra clarity you don’t get from old analog mixes. Some people don’t like that. They prefer the kind of top-end rolloff you get with analog tape – and I totally understand that too, which is why we put both the old and new stereo mixes in these packages.

Mettler: I know there’s been some criticism that CTTE sounds “flat” because you were more interested in preserving the overall performance dynamics. My view is that people have to trade clarity for flatness – it’s more natural.

Wilson: Analog has this top-end rolloff, this inherent murkiness where all of the harmonies kind of get distorted, but in a pleasing way. In a sense, the music feels more like it’s glued together. Whereas when you work in the digital domain with pure beautiful transfers and you’re combining all of the instruments, you’re not going to get those kind of natural harmonic distortions. Some people use this word “clinical,” which I don’t agree with, but certainly there’s separation there that you simply won’t get in analog tapes. But there are extremes.

[Trane]

the only SW remixes I got are three Crimson ones (Red, Tongue & Discipline), mostly acquired for the video contents

Simply not interested in buying the SW, even if inherently superior (which remains to be proven). I'm not going to rebuy everything once more because SW thinks it should be done his way.

[JJ88]

I suppose his are literally just alternatives, which is fair enough. What I think went particularly wrong with the Nick Davis Genesis remixes was the mastering, which is sometimes unspeakable.

[bondegezou]

I suppose his are literally just alternatives, which is fair enough. What I think went particularly wrong with the Nick Davis Genesis remixes was the mastering, which is sometimes unspeakable.

The Panegyric Yes series all come with a flat transfer of the original mix and a needle-drop of an original vinyl, as well as Wilson's remixes (stereo and 5.1, and instrumental versions of the stereo mix) and all the extras from the Rhino versions and various further extras. So, if you have the requisite technology to play them(!), you get everything and a choice of which to listen to. If you want the new bonus tracks but want to stick with the original mixes, you can. If you want it to sound like the vinyl, but you're interested in those instrumental versions, you've got 'em both.

Henry

[JeffCarney]

[B]

Wilson: Analog has this top-end rolloff, this inherent murkiness where all of the harmonies kind of get distorted, but in a pleasing way. In a sense, the music feels more like it’s glued together. Whereas when you work in the digital domain with pure beautiful transfers and you’re combining all of the instruments, you’re not going to get those kind of natural harmonic distortions. Some people use this word “clinical,” which I don’t agree with, but certainly there’s separation there that you simply won’t get in analog tapes. But there are extremes.

Analog does not have top-end roll off. I believe that he is painfully incorrect about this.

No idea what he thinks he's doing, but when he does these remixes, all he is capturing is WHAT IS ON THE ANALOG TAPES.

He's said that he doesn't EQ anything, so that top end he's capturing is simply being sampled by digital.

The only thing I can figure is that maybe he was meaning to refer to vinyl, and I'm not sure I'd agree there either. But analog tape is feeding everything to his remix work. That's what he's capturing. Unless he is arguing that 2" multitrack tape (from where his transfers of tracks are taken) has higher frequencies than when the final master is mixed down to 1/2" or 1/4" tape. If so, I think this should be clarified.

[Paulrus]

I just listened to SW's 5.1 mix of Fragile and overall I think it sounds great. As in "close your eyes and let it all just wash over your brain" great. There's a few places where I prefer how the original/Rhino versions handled things, but what's nifty is that with these releases you get all that too.

And for the record I didn't care as much for his remix of Close to the Edge. Next up is Lizard.

[infandous]

the only SW remixes I got are three Crimson ones (Red, Tongue & Discipline), mostly acquired for the video contents

Simply not interested in buying the SW, even if inherently superior (which remains to be proven). I'm not going to rebuy everything once more because SW thinks it should be done his way.

He gets asked to do them, he doesn't request to do them. So it's the original artists asking him to do it "his way". Personally, I've not heard much of them, and don't really care. I have the Lark's remix and I think it sounds great. I also like the original. To me, remixes are just alternate ways to listen. The thing I like about remixes is hearing stuff that got buried in the original. I'm not invested in vinyl, so maybe that is part of it. I do know that analog can have a more pleasing sound to a lot of people, but I just don't hear it. Of course, I've been listening to loud music and playing in bands since I was teenager, so I have no doubt my hearing has suffered.

[yamishogun]

Wilson: What I think a lot of people love about Eddie Offord’s original mix is the sense of energy and thrust the music has, which is partly the musicians and the way they play. But it’s also partly the fact he was mixing it to the red the whole time. He heavily saturated and compressed his mixes.

But that is exactly why I loved what Eddie Offord did for Rush's Vapor Trails. That should have never been remixed.

[StevegSr]

Mike Mettler: So how does one go about making an admittedly “beautifully recorded and beautifully mixed” progressive masterpiece sound even better?

Steven Wilson: My goal is always the same: Be as faithful as you possibly can to the original mix, and don’t try to modernize it or improve it in any way — but allow for the fact that you’re going back to an earlier generation of tape. Remember that every kind of mix, every vinyl master, and every copy master is a further reduction in sound quality. But by using the original tape, I inherently knew I was going to get more tone out of the music and more out of the recording itself than anyone had been able to before.

Mettler: Producer Eddie Offord sure gave you one helluva template to work with.

Wilson: What I think a lot of people love about Eddie Offord’s original mix is the sense of energy and thrust the music has, which is partly the musicians and the way they play. But it’s also partly the fact he was mixing it to the red the whole time. He heavily saturated and compressed his mixes. He drove the tapes so hard that you get this sense of compression — not like mastering compression, but more like analog tape-mixing compression. I’ve always shied away from that because I like the dynamics of the music to breathe, and I don’t like that congested quality you get when you push things very hard.

So my new mix has taken a new tack, a more relaxed approach to the amount of compression. I tried to preserve more of the dynamics. There’s a lot more air, space, and depth that wasn’t present in the original mix.

The thing about Yes and Eddie Offord is that the mixes really are performances. And what I mean by that is, very often when you do a remix, you set a level for the drums, you set a level for the bass, the guitar, the vocal, etc., and usually that remains fairly static throughout the mix. Not on the Yes mixes. Every little guitar phrase, every little vocal nuance, every little bass lick, and every little drum fill has potentially been pushed up in the mix manually. What that means is that you can’t just set your levels and let the mix run through. You have to literally analyze every few seconds, every few bars of music. I had to constantly compare back to the original mix: “Ah, they’ve lifted that little drum fill out!”, “Ah, they’ve lifted that guitar phrase out!”, “Ah, that vocal part is fading into reverb there.”

And I didn’t really do a lot of EQ, either. What’s on tape is pretty much recorded as they wanted it, so I didn’t mess with the tone of the instruments, the amount of bass, or the treble, or anything like that.

It has a slightly modern sound to it almost by default, because you have this extra clarity you don’t get from old analog mixes. Some people don’t like that. They prefer the kind of top-end rolloff you get with analog tape – and I totally understand that too, which is why we put both the old and new stereo mixes in these packages.

Mettler: I know there’s been some criticism that CTTE sounds “flat” because you were more interested in preserving the overall performance dynamics. My view is that people have to trade clarity for flatness – it’s more natural.

Wilson: Analog has this top-end rolloff, this inherent murkiness where all of the harmonies kind of get distorted, but in a pleasing way. In a sense, the music feels more like it’s glued together. Whereas when you work in the digital domain with pure beautiful transfers and you’re combining all of the instruments, you’re not going to get those kind of natural harmonic distortions. Some people use this word “clinical,” which I don’t agree with, but certainly there’s separation there that you simply won’t get in analog tapes. But there are extremes.

This is some of finest audiophile logic that I've heard in many, many years. I've said for ages that CTTE was congested, dense and flat sounding and never cared much for Mr. Offord's production, until just now. Recording a band always involves sacrifices in sound recording, EQing and mastering, and it's now hard for me to think of anyone else that captured the "dynamic" of Yes on analog tape.

(Remaining gripe: He could have used a little more echo on the backing vocals.)

[JJ88]

I'm really not sure. Reading his comments about Offord's work on CTTE, there's a sense that he feels that 'I can do it better'...specifically the comments about compression.

[Phlakaton]

But that is exactly why I loved what Eddie Offord did for Rush's Vapor Trails. That should have never been remixed.

If you're joking... my bad. If not. Who's Eddy Offord?