How were masters protected before digital?
On Jun 23, 7:00 am, wrote:
I assume that the master tracks of the Beatles, etc. have all been
transferred to more durable optical digital - i.e. CD or DVD. But back
in the days when tape was all there was, what measures were taken to
protect/backup masters?
I can't speak for others, but I've studied the Beatles tapes...
Most of the recordings were done on reels of EMItape, either 2-track,
4-track, or 8-track. The short answer is that all generations of tape
(session, premix, mono/stereo masters and backup copies of masters)
were, from 1965-on, stored tails out in a played condition, in a
plastic bag inside a box in EMI's cool/dry tape library. At some
point, Beatles tapes were moved to a locked cabinet inside that
library.
The early sessions were recorded on 2-track. The group sometimes
"overdubbed" by recording across to another 2-track while adding live
instruments or vocals. The finished mono or stereo masters were
sometimes physically edited from the best parts of several takes.
While there have been very few dropouts on Beatles tapes, a few of
these edited masters show signs of dropout at the splice points. A
good example is She Loves You (for which the session tapes no longer
exist): The existing mono master, in addition to showing slight
changes in the balance of instruments, also has at least two serious
dropouts at the edit points.
At least one of the original session tapes, from the Please Please Me
album, is missing.
In the middle years, sessions were recorded on 4-track. These basic
tracks would be mixed across to one or two tracks of a second 4-track,
and the open tracks used for overdubs. And this process might be
repeated a second or even third time. It was these discrete 4-track
tapes which were "recombined" onto digital to make new 6-, 8-, 10-, 12-
or more track masters for the Yellow Sub Soundtrack and Anthology
projects.
Starting from the midway point of the White Album Session, it was 8-
tracks. On at least one occasion, the 8-track master was physically
spliced to use parts of two takes.
EMI did not use noise-reduction on the Beatles tapes. It is amazing
how well they have held up over the last 45 years, and how good they
still sound.
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