McCartney, Paul – 1980.XX.XX – Rude Studio Demos – Studio Demos – STUDIO 1CD A

PAUL McCARTNEY
RUDE STUDIO DEMOS
Remastered Edition
Remasters Workshop
RMW 484

Pitch and phase corrected at Remasters Workshop June 2009 from the original 1989 disc on Columbus CD 080 (1989).

There has always been a problem with the material on this CD. It was always very, very out-of-phase due to poor tape transfer. The azimuth was so terribly out of alignment, all the tracks are impaired by wandering phase. This Columbus CD is thought to be the source of these demos. Wherever they are compiled on another CD, it is always from this source, so all instances of these tracks on CD are badly out-of-phase.

Only recently has the technology become available at the consumer level to restore a recording as closely as possible to its original phase. This feature of Adobe Audition 3 is able to retro-correct the azimuth alignment on as many generations of tape deck as there are in the recording lineage. The result is as close as it is possible to be as though you were playing the tape on the deck that recorded it. The soundstage is returned to its intended space, and all traces of phase cancellations are gone. These recordings are now fully compatible with mono; if you were to combine the channels, there would be no phase cancellations – it would just collapse the stereo image. Previously, doing this would have created nasty cancellations. On many of the tracks, before correction, you could already hear the swishing and swirling of wandering phase. That artifact has now been eliminated.

These demos have benefitted greatly from phase correction. They sound absolutely normal now, and have been sped up or slowed down to match A=440 Hz. No further alterations were made. None were required. If the original transfer had been properly aligned and speed corrected, it would have sounded just like this.

Of these recordings, Chip Madinger & Mark Easter say: “…With the (apparent) help of Denny Laine on some of the songs, (Paul) laid down several demos for a projected new LP project that would reunite him with George Martin. An August 1980 compilation of demos was prepared for George consisting of old and new material for consideration…While some of the songs (“Take It Away,” “Ballroom Dancing”) were particularly strong, some of the tunes Paul submitted (“The Unbelievable Experience,” “Boil Crisis”) were bad enough to force George to tell Paul to scrap them and write more; this he did…In 1987, an excellent quality tape of some of this material was released on bootleg as “Rude Studio Demos” (a CD version was issued in 1989 from the same tape).”