Space Ritual Beef

[Star Rats]

>I don`t know the condition/situation of the original tapes used for the
>remastered version but can anyone point out why it wasn`t possible to
>bring in Orgone with a bang? The impact of that riff is one of the best
>moments in the Ritual.

I'm in a good position to answer this for you because I was at Abbey Road
when this was being done and contributed to the re-mastered version.

Here's the deal:

The original 2 track stereo master tape that was used to reproduce the
final version of the Space Ritual was intact and in great shape. The
trouble is that the way you hear the original version is how the master
actually sounds i.e., with fade-ins and fade-outs. This is because of
having to split the soundtrack up into 4 sides.

If the concert was to be avaialable in its entirity, you would have to go
back to the original 24 track, unmixed tapes and re-mix the entire concert
again. There is no way on earth that you would end up with the same
mix/sound/feel of the original Space Ritual. The original Space Ritual has
such an amazing sound, it'd be a shame to put that in jeopardy. If anyone
has ever done any mixing, they will know what I mean.

Now, the original mixdown at Abbey Road was played to me via a CDr when I
was home in the UK by Nigel Reeve (the guy that got these re-masters on the
shelfand who deserves tons of credit). The engineer at Abbey Road (not
Peter Mew) could not get a good fade-in between the two tracks in question
and said that the songs were at different speeds and in different keys
because they were from two different nights.

I couldn't see this myself and went to my local studio with some tapes I'd
made to proove that it could be done. I played the results to Nigel who got
EMI to agree to paying another 500 pounds for another re-mix and to cut
another CD-r (and that wasn't easy either). I got to be in attendance at
Abbey Road when Peter Mew was dumping all the albums onto the hard drive
and he sorted out the fade-in and fade-out quite easily. Whilst I think
it's still about 2/100th second off what I had in mind, it's far, far, far
better than what was originally done.

The other fade-ins worked pretty well and are, for the most part, seamless.
Electronic No.1 and Orgone Accumulator were the only ones that caused
problems (listen to the fade in of 'Shouldn't Do That').

So that's the story.

Star Rats