Happy Fourth!
Don't forget A Hard Day's Night opens nationwide this weekend! Anyone have any plans to go?
A list of summer screenings can be found here.
'A Hard Day's Night' Reborn
Click to view"If you listen closely...there, 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 don't 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. "There's a slight distortion you get from something transferred over several generations of audio. I'll show you." Hullings, the Audio Supervisor for the Criterion's 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 Day's Night.
"That green bit there is the crackles and pops you're 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 Nineties...we had it all. And that distortion is in every one of the recordings! It's 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 company's president, who laughs and shakes his head. "That's the sound of the crowd behind the Beatles screaming. Don't even get me started about the screaming."
More at the source.