I initially intended to keep these as personal files for myself but have decided to share as I don't see any reason not too.
- FREE AS A BIRD, REAL LOVE, GROW OLD WITH ME COVERS.png (1.42 MiB) Viewed 1138 times
So to give a brief explanation of what is going on here, my first intentions with this project was to create cleaner versions of "Free As A Bird" and "Real Love" inspired by the recently released "Now And Then". I was able to rip John's voice from the more up to date and clean demos that we have now in comparison to what Paul, George and Ringo had back in the 90s. Now this is something that has been done by fans many times before, including by several on here, but what I think makes my attempt different than most is that I chose not to alter John's voice from the demos all that much.
There was no cleaning up or fancy effects added to enhance his vocals, it's just a straight rip from the original recording and then overlaid with the 1995-6 instrumentals (not the 2015 remasters, as I personally prefer the originals). I did this just because I like to hear the rough vocals, in my head I imagined that this is simply how it would sound if the guys were given better quality audio to work with when they did Anthology. Basically these mixes are as simple as I could make them, there were no drastic alterations made.
After I finished the Anthology tracks, I decided I would have a crack at "Grow Old With Me", which as many know was not attempted by the three surviving Beatles but was covered by Ringo a couple of years ago and is the basis for my attempt. I will go into more detail on this track further down this post.
I will say though that if these tracks do have one obvious flaw is that I was not too considerate with mixing in the vocals to maintain low volume in some places. Free As A Bird for example has a few parts near the end that are louder than average for the track and this is immediately noticeable in Audacity when looking at the waveforms, but I don't think that it matters too much. Had to be done sometimes as John's voice was not always audible. There were also a few cases where some glitches or clicking can be heard in the instrumentals, which I choke up to either being errors with the recordings or leftover vocals that were not removed by the AI that I used but not sure. Again not really noticeable unless you know where to look.
So anyways, here are a few notable features that I feel that I should mention about each track:
Free As A Bird
1. Vocals are from Free As A Bird Demo Take 1 by John Lennon.
2. Instrumental is from the original Anthology release.
3. I got the isolated back vocals from one of Lord Reith's releases (Thank you Lord Reith)
4. Does not feature "Turned Out Nice Again" line in forward order, just the original reverse. I did try to add in the line as it is on the 2015 remix but I could not do so cleanly so chose to exclude this idea sadly.
Real love
1. Vocals are from Demo Take 5 Overdub.
2. Instrumental is from the original Anthology release.
3. Isolated Back Vocals taken from one of Lord Reith's releases and Isolated Stems on YouTube (was provided with a lossless download)
4. Pitch was altered for John's vocals and Paul's overdub to better match the original track, the unedited vocals did not sound too great in my opinion. If anybody wants an unaltered version feel free to message me.
5. Better flow between the overdub and the backvocals. Listen to the "waiting for you" and "waiting for love" lines on the original and this version, John's voice ends before the back vocals do on a couple of occasions so I extended his vocals a little bit with a few tricks. Purely a personal choice to do so.
Grow Old With Me
1. Vocals taken from Lord Reith's Grow Old With Me "Imagine" Mix. Not sure what the original take of this was by john, not too well versed on this sort of stuff (sorry guys). Feel free to correct me, I've only ever heard this take mixed as a double track which this is not.
2. Instrumental is from Ringo's 2019 cover of the song (with Paul of course).
3. Back vocals were isolated by me with Ultimate Vocal Remover.
4. The pitch was altered slightly for John's voice to be a little deeper to match both the tone of the instrumental and Paul and Ringo's vocals. Ringo of course covered the whole song but I only included his voice at a reduced level in the sections where Paul sings to make it seem like they are both singing background vocals to John's main.
5. Custom made Guitar solo (kinda) from George Harrison added in alongside Joe Walsh's original just before the final verse. This is probably by far the most notable (hopefully not controversial) part of the whole project. I had the idea to isolate George's guitar in one of his solo songs and then try to mix it in here. Having played around with a few tracks, I settled on using various parts from "Give Me Love" and arranged them in a way that would compliment Walsh's guitar in the Ringo version. The result is something that I think sounds alright, if you can get past the jank of hearing the Give Me Love original messed around with. Of course the whole reason I did this was to make the track more "Beatlesy" I guess. Two Beatles played on the Ringo version, and we have John's demos, but George took no part in ever making something for this song. For it to be a Beatles track I wanted something from him, so I did what Paul and co did when they sampled vocals from "Because" for "Now And Then" and reused older material. I hope you like it. At least I can say that George actually played on this track although involuntarily, there are no custom covers done in his style here. Joe Walsh did of course try to do this in the Ringo version, and rather than remove his parts which may or may not have been possible (and unnecessary in my opinion, I think he did great), I tried to make it seem like George was playing along with him so it is not really a "solo" as such.
6. I included a cameo quote from George at the very end where he tells us what it all means, you will have to give the song a listen to hear what he has to say!
7. This is in my opinion one of the closest things you can get to having an official Beatles version of this song. John on lead vocal, Paul on Bass and back vocals, Ringo on Drums and back vocals, George on Guitar and vocal cameo plus a few more friends involved, pretty cool right?
The Cover Art
I thought that it would be cool to give the songs their own unique covers in the Now And Then Style. Seems like it would make sense if this was an official release in some alternate universe. They are completely custom made by me, all it took was tracking down the original font and some editing in paint.net and Adobe Illustrator. Hardest part was removing the original text to replace it with mine but I did it with some trickery, I bet you won't even notice. Should overall fit nicely alongside Now And Then. And hey if you don't like the songs you can always keep the art!
Download Links:
hxxps://mega.nz/file/rUY1HQ6a#ufB1aVZc6 ... BUOdxPX_mI
Summary
Well anyways thanks for stopping by. I will be keeping the download link working indefinitely but will not be monitoring their availability too frequently so I encourage others to share these files around should it go down. I only really made this account for this one purpose so won't be around here too often to do so myself I think. Hope I leave a lasting impact, thanks!
-King Elessar
