I Am The Walrus (Rockband Remix)

"I Am the Walrus" was the first studio recording made after the death of The Beatles' manager Brian Epstein, recorded September 1967. George Martin arranged and added orchestral accompaniment that included violins, cellos, horns, clarinet and a 16-piece choir. A large group of professional studio vocalists named

"The Mike Sammes Singers", took part in the recording as well, variously singing "Ho-ho-ho, hee-hee-hee, ha-ha-ha", "oompah, oompah, stick it up your jumper!", "everybody's got one" and making a series of shrill whooping noises.The song also features the sampling of a radio in its fade-out.

In the original (1967) stereo release, at around two minutes through the song, the mix changes from true stereo to "fake stereo". This came about because the radio broadcast had been added 'live', off-air, into the mono mix-down and so was unavailable for inclusion in the stereo mix; hence, fake stereo from the mono mix was created for this portion of the song. Obviously, the same trasntuion to mono is heard in the Remaster version.

In 2006, the first-ever stereo mix of the complete song (from beginning to end) was issued on The Beatles' album Love.

This 2010 remix has a few unique features:

- After 40 odd years of lsitening to the track, the strings, horns amd the Mike Sammers singers start to sound a bit too '60's novelty'; they are nice at first, but tend to overwhelm this exciting song.
Hence, we elimiated all the 'extra's from ths Remix, apart from where they are essential (intro & outtro).

- In all released versions Lennon's vocals sound a bit irritating to the ear; as if they have a 'rugged edge'. At first, we thought this was a deliberate effect; however, it is not heard on any other Beatles track. So the next hypthesis was that it was an artefact, introduced when the final mix was made (just like the tranisiton from stero to mono).

Now, using the isloated vocals, we found that the effect is due to the vocals left and right channels being out of sync by ca 2 milliseconds. Immedialtely, the BDJ engineers set out to align the 2 tracks perfectly, and this eliminated the edgy effect form the vocals. Hear it for the first time in this re-mix !

- Last but not least; the close listener will have noticed that there is a guitar part (Harrison) on the Walrus, but it is mostly buried in the mix. Here, we reconstructed the guitar part, and panned it away from the keyboard so it stands out clearly.

And so the Walrus is revived !