Sunday, May 13, 2012

The Beatles' "Peace of Mind" - crystal clear at last!

Well, okay, using "The Beatles" in the title of this post may be a bit deceptive.

For years, the mysterious track 'Peace of Mind,' allegedly a home demo from the Sgt. Pepper era, has appeared on countless Beatles bootlegs, usually in muddy quality. Several years back (on a newsgroup, I believe), I found a MUCH clearer copy of this song from an unknown source; it had numerous digital glitches, but the vocals and guitar were more distinct than ever before. It sounded as though you were in the room with.... well, whoever sang it.

I re-posted this copy here and there, and it seemed that no one had heard it so clearly before. So, to preserve this rare find, I am posting it here - even cleaner than I originally found it! I've used Nero's click/crackle removal filter to tone down the more obvious flaws, muted the left channel (which was mostly hiss and glitches), and copied the right channel over to the left. (On a minor note, I added a couple missing seconds back to the beginning, albeit from a lower quality copy.) I hope the result is pleasing.

http://www.mediafire.com/?gral16uu1dqgojb

There is one side effect to this newfound-clarity though...... with the vocals being so clear and prominent, it's actually much more obvious than before that the vocalists AREN'T the Beatles!

EDIT - Since it's wonderfully trippy in spite of the flaws, here's the file before I wiped the left channel. The right channel was out of phase in the original two-channel file, so I corrected it here. http://www.mediafire.com/?9aew0ibjc6i5b1r