If you listen closelythere, right there. Did you hear that? Ryan Hullings moves his mouse back to the play button and clicks, and the single most recognizable opening chord ever a modified F chord, played against a Gsus4 and a D bass note (but dont just take our word for it) rings out loudly from the computer in his office at the Criterion Collection. Faintly in the background of this fanfare, however, something that sounds like crying seagulls can be heard, as well as a slightly crunchy edge to the notes. Theres a slight distortion you get from something transferred over several generations of audio. Ill show you. Hullings, the Audio Supervisor for the Criterions DVDs, presses another button, and the monitor is suddenly filled with bright, multicolored lines, zig-zagging up and down a heat map, essentially, of the first sound you hear in the Beatles classic film (as well as its title song) A Hard Days Night.
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That green bit there is the crackles and pops youre hearing, Hullings continues, pointing a small cluster of green lines near the top of the screen. The natural instinct is to go in and clean it up. But I thought, well, just to be safe, let me listen to a few other sources. So we compiled every single version of the song we could get our hands on: the original 1964 LP, the mono remasters, the stereo remasters, the remasters from the Ninetieswe had it all. And that distortion is in every one of the recordings! Its part of the source, and the last thing we wanted to do was mess with the source. It adds a very human element to it. So we left it in.
And the seagull noise? Hullings shoots a look across the room at Peter Becker, the companys president, who laughs and shakes his head. Thats the sound of the crowd behind the Beatles screaming. Dont even get me started about the screaming.
Celebrating its 50th birthday on July 6th, Richard Lesters gonzo take on a typical day for John, Paul, George and Ringo at the height of Beatlemania still brims with a sense of urgency and lightning-in-a-bottle vitality; take out the period-specific details and early Sixties Pop Art references, and it could have been made this year. Having acquired the rights to A Hard Days Night (it was a Miramax property through most of the Aughts), Janus Films turned to Criterion, its home-entertainment sister company, to produce a stem-to-stern 4K restoration for both a home-video and a theatrical release, one timed around the films golden anniversary on July 6th. (The DVD/Blu-Ray is already on shelves; the film will be opening in over 100 theaters during the July 4th weekend.)
In terms of the picture materials, they were, according to Becker, in pretty good shape. The bulk of the film was transferred from the original negative. The first and last reels are missing, but we were able to use preprint materials. Thankfully, when it came to cleaning up the visuals and getting all of the elements up to snuff for the Digitial Cinema Packages (DCPs) they would be sending out to theaters, everything could be handled in-house. And Becker already had somebody specific in mind for the audio remastering job: Giles Martin, the son of Beatles producer Sir George Martin.
The first phone call I got was from Criterion, some time around last July or August, Martin says, calling from Abbey Road studios. The second was from Paul [McCartney] he wanted to personally reach out and see if I was interested.Id sort of talked to everybody about what Id liked to do, saying Okay, well remix the songs, but Id like to have a look at the audio and see whats there as well. And I could almost sense the phone being banged down and people thinking, Oh, no, whats he going to do?Dont let Giles touch it, hell modernize everything. Hesgoing to sample Ringos drums, isnt he?!?'
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Instead, Martin whod already proven his mettle by doing a 5.1 surround-sound mix on Beatles music for the Love project and working on the George Harrison documentary Living in the Material World expressed an interest in emphasizing the immediacy of four young men playing rock and roll at that exact moment in time. The idea, he says, was not to go against the you-are-there feeling of Lesters movie by cleaning up studio recordings; it was to retain the essential urgency of those early records and complement the movies portrait of a quartet experiencing both forward momentum and a musical rush. My thought with A Hard Days Night was: Just make it sound direct, Martin declares. Capture the energy there. It needs to sound very in-your-facebecause the band was very in-your-face at that time.
You watch that first scene andtheres George, tripping over his own feet, he continues, laughing. There arent a lot of rock movies where the lead guitarist falls down and the band just carry on. But that really epitomizes the Beatles at that point: Theyre running toward something and regardless of what happens, theyre just going for it.Thats what their recordings sound like and thats what you want to capture.So when youre remixing a film like this, you really dont want to touch much. These were four guys who performed and sang really bloody well together. They are in their early twenties; they didnt do a lot of takes at this stage. You want to feel as if theyre just bashing this out in front of you, not doing anything by halves.
Martin knew the musical aspects of the film were in good shape (The tapes were all at Abbey Road Studios and they sounded fantastic). As for the other elements, well The music was in the best condition, and lets just say it went downhill from there, the producer chuckles. My engineer, Sam Okell, and I went on a research trip and tried to get the best sources we could. Elements like my fathers underscore for the filmwe had to hunt down the three tracks of that.The dialogue and effects recordings, we had to find those as well and then piece everything together. [Sound designer] Alastair Sirkett tried to track down all the original sound effects, so if we wanted to put a train sound in the surrounding mix, we could use the actual train sound used in the movie when it was released. So yes, it was a painstaking process. But worth it.
Once hed assembled everything he needed and committed to doing a 5.1 surround mix, Martin dived into the process of turning the movie into a testament of the Beatles ability to rock out there was just one thing standing in his way. Yes, thestereo mixes, he says, with a sigh. The version I originally worked with, youre hearing John and Pauls voices coming out of the left side, when youre used to hearing them in front and center. So I used what you might call a mono stereo mix, in which I restored all of the vocals to the center speaker. For something like A Hard Days Night, which has a lot of splashy cymbals, it actually works better than with vocals coming out of one side and drums on the other. But 5.1 Surround is actually more mono than stero, so its the ideal way of hearing the band. Our version of Cant Buy Me Love rocks more than it does in the originalhe said arrogantly!
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The results, Martin says, were met with approval by both Lester and the surviving Beatles (Otherwise, I wouldnt be talking to youId be doing them over, he joked), as well as Becker, whos aching for audiences to see and hear the film in its spruced up form on a big screen. As Hullings had been in close contact with Martin during the process, he was well aware of the difficulties in syncing various elements up and how pieces of the puzzle had finally started coming together. But even he was surprised by hearing the end result. Giles would say that he couldnt have done this type of mix a year ago, because the technology hadnt caught up yet, the audio supervisor says. But when you listen to what he did, you dont hear the technology at work. You dont even hear Giles fingerprints on the material. What you hear is the human element.
He cues up the opening chord and listens to it again, distortion and all. If you ran this through a software program, it would have taken it automatically. But now, when this plays in theaters and on your DVD player, that crunch caused by someone in a studio manipulating that chord a long, long time ago will still be there.