![]() 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 As originally proposed, the idea for ”Let It Be” was elegantly simple. 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. 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. More recently, bootleg labels began releasing these tapes more systematically: unedited, in chronological order and with reel numbers and recording dates fully documented. Until the early 90’s the trend in Beatles bootlegging was to compile collections of the most interesting performances and discussions. 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. These tapes are well known to collectors. No other set of Beatles sessions is so thoroughly documented. 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. It is unquestionably an important collection. When the television plan was scuttled, the film was released theatrically as ”Let It Be.” 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. But they are not the multitrack session masters from which the album was made. They were recorded during the sessions for the Beatles’ ”Let It Be” album - originally to be called ”Get Back” - from Jan. ![]() What the police seized was a collection of 500 to 550 reels of tape, each running about 16 minutes. 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. There is an element of truth in what they say, but also a good measure of exaggeration. 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. ![]() These are now the most readily available source for the “Get Back” sessions material.įurther history on the Nagra Reels (source of this giant set), By ALLAN KOZINN. In 2004, Purple Chick collated these recordings, and issued them in a series of CDs called “A/B Road.” 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. The “B” rolls were more fragmentary, but often captured performances or dialogue missed while the “A” roll operator was changing reels. The “A” rolls generally ran the full 16 minute length of the tape. Two different tape recorders were running (usually off of the same sound feed), resulting in what was termed “A” and “B” roll Nagra recordings. ![]() 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. 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. You need Purple Chick’s “ A/B Road” series. tracks 97 hours, 44 minutes, 7 secondsīackground info, from Doug Sulpy’s “ Complete Beatle’s Audio Guide“, 2006 Edition
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