Insiders-What Is Up With California Girls?

I believe Al Jardine said they would slow the tape down a semi tone and record vocals? Makes sense as the 3-Track Backing would be in one key and transferred to 8-Track. The engineer at Columbia probably Bruce Botnick slowed down the tape a semi tone, so that it would be easier for the boys to sing to. I guess Brian has even said that he hated California Girls due to the Vocals being behind. So when Mark Linett went to make the first Stereo Mix in 2000 he had a Stereo Track in one key and a set of Vocals in a different key. Trying to match the speeds of the two tapes would have been an arduous task, which is why the 2000 Stereo Mix is bad. Remember how much trouble he had with the Pet Sounds Stereo Mix in 1996? Mark must have had better tools and he fixed it in 2002 for Sounds of Summer.

Awhile back, I tried to sync the 'God Only Knows' stack-o-vocals with the mono backing track just for the heck of it, and the same issue occurred for me. I kept finding that I had to mess with the amount of dead air in between vocal lines (e.g., between 'If you should ever leave me' and 'though life would still go on believe me') just to make the two tracks sync up.

You are correct. Sandoval’s stereo mix is very much reminiscent of the original mono single mix. Drums are more out front and there is more separation of the horn section. Background vocals are more prominent and up front like the single mix, as well.

These sources are all from different transfers, so they would never sync up.  The vocals track is a transfer from one of the SDSN 8-track comp reels, the backing track was transferred from the 3-track.  And then of course the mono master is an 8-1 reduction from the 8-track to a different tape.  No matter how perfectly maintained and dialed in a tape machine is, it'll never play exactly the same every time.  And taking into account that for something like the 3-1 transfer from the three-track instrumental to the 8-track for vocal overdubs, or the mono master mix, it's a tape to tape reduction, so there is another generation of tape in there to further create some variation.  It's not like the digital world where any copies or bounces will sync perfectly.

The second thing at play here is that the Beach Boys were just plain old not singing with good time on this one.  The stereo mix that "fixes" that is actually retconning the Beach Boys to have better rhythm than they had that day.

I think the youtube one is from the SOT set. Maybe we need a mono mix from the 8-Track master (meaning Brian's mono mix that he sped up when mixing the three track onto one track of the 8-Track).

The joys of analogue tape…