The Beatles multitracks

As of this writing, you can download a big collection of isolated Beatles multitracks from the Internet Archive. These multitracks have been in circulation for a while, but due to their complete illegality, they can be difficult to find. The Internet Archive is a stable download source, but we’ll see how long it takes for Universal Music’s lawyers to make a move. It’s too bad you have to violate copyright law to share these things, because they are incredibly valuable resources for teachers of music technology, theory, songwriting and popular music history. I use these multitracks in every class I teach, every semester.

The Beatles multitrack collection exists because of a video game, The Beatles: Rock Band, released in 2009 by Harmonix.

The multitracks are MOGG files, the multitrack version of the Ogg Vorbis audio encoding format. You can use Audacity to open and listen to them, and from there you can convert them to WAV or MP3 files. Note that some of these are “fake” multitracks. Harmonix’s production team could work from the original session tapes for the later songs, but some of the earlier ones were recorded straight to two-track tape, so no isolated tracks even exist. For these songs, the engineers had to use sophisticated filtering software to pull out the drums, bass and so on.

Multitrack stems are cornerstones of my music teaching approach. Beyond the Beatles, I also use stems from Marvin Gaye, Michael Jackson, Depeche Mode and Carly Rae Jepsen. So, what do I use these things for?

Critical listening

Beginner musicians can’t always pick instruments out of the sound mass. It takes practice to be able to listen to a full song and just follow, say, the bassline. My students tell me that once they have heard a bassline in isolation, then hearing it in the mixed down track is easy, and it also gets easier to pick out basslines in  songs generally.

Even experienced listeners will have trouble hearing all the details of a single voice or instrument in the middle of a dense mix. If you want to focus on, say, the timbre of John Lennon’s voice, you will have a better time without all the other sounds layered on top of it.

Reverse-engineering

When you listen to a mixed-down song, it is not usually easy to tell what the creative process was like. What did they start with, what did they overdub and in what order, and what signal processing and editing did they do? Beatles songs are uniquely well suited to reverse engineering. The songs are familiar, and the Beatles’ songwriting and production process is better documented than it is for just about any other musicians in history. This means that I can step through a set of stems and say, “Okay, so John Lennon wrote this song on the guitar. The basic track is his guitar along with a scratch vocal, with Paul on piano and Ringo on drums. Let’s listen to that. Then Paul overdubbed bass, here’s that part. Next, George overdubbed his lead guitar parts, and here are those. Ringo overdubbed tambourine, then everybody overdubbed vocals, so here they are.” This is a rare window into the creative process of multitrack recording, which is opaque for people who have not experienced it personally.

Another advantage of Beatles songs is their relative simplicity. I don’t mean musical simplicity, I just mean that they don’t have many distinct instrument and vocal layers compared to current pop songs. A Beatles song will have at most ten or twelve distinct voices and instruments. This might sound like a lot, but most songs on the radio will have fifty or a hundred tracks.

Prepping the Multitracks

Say I want to get the stems for “Dear Prudence” ready to listen to in class. First, I bring the master recording of the song (the one from the album) into Ableton Live and get it warped out, meaning that I align it to the tempo grid. (More accurately, I align the metrical grid to the timing of the performance.) If there are any time signature changes, this is when I get them figured out and marked. Then I bring the multitracks into the session and align them with the master recording. Sometimes there’s a count-in or other material at the start of the multitrack that isn’t present on the master.

Once everything is lined up, I split the audio into song sections and color-code and label them: yellow for intros and outtros, blue for verses, green for choruses, purple for the bridge, and so on. These colors have no special meaning, it’s just an arbitrary system I came up with. I split up and label sections of the stems too.

Having mapped out the song structure, then I create a few MIDI tracks and fill them with empty clips. I split, label and color-code these clips to show chords, key centers and hypermeter. If I really want to go deep into the song, I transcribe it into notation using MuseScore, export the score as MIDI, and bring that into the Ableton session. Then I color-code and annotate all of that too.

Here’s how the “Dear Prudence” session looks at the end of all the preparation.

Here’s part of my “Dear Prudence” transcription in MIDI view.

Remixes

Once I have the multitracks of a song all warped out in an Ableton session, it’s effortless to remix it. Sometimes I do this during class. “Want to hear how John Lennon sounds with Auto-Tune?” “Want to hear how this sounds with Ringo replaced by trap 808s?” Beyond the comedy value, there is a more serious set of possibilities here. I know these songs inside and out from a lifetime of repeated listening, and hearing different versions of them is way more impactful on me as a listener than hearing remixes of less familiar and iconic music.

I especially enjoy the challenge of stem remixes, that is, remixes that only use material found in the multitracks themselves. My favorite stem remixer is The Reflex, who finds ways to make surprising changes to classic tracks without using any additional sounds. In that spirit, I created a stem remix of “Dear Prudence” that you can download here. A Beatles-loving friend called it “phantasmagorical”.

Could I get in trouble for doing any of this? Probably not. As an educator, I have a strong Fair Use argument that my activities are exempt from copyright law, and besides, no one would bother taking me into court in the first place. But what about people who don’t have academic credentials? Should members of the general public be allowed to remix Beatles songs? Sony owns the publishing catalog and Universal Music owns the master recordings. It’s difficult to imagine either of these companies being willing to let people monkey with their intellectual property. There is a spiritual sense in which Beatles songs belong to everybody, but in a legal sense, they very much do not. I don’t think it’s illegal to simply possess or listen to the Beatles multitracks, but be careful if you want to take things any further.