I've been in this town... for about an hour, actually
Sept 16, 2019 17:39:05 GMT -5
Mikie, John Manning, and 1 more like this
Post by zebulan on Sept 16, 2019 17:39:05 GMT -5
Hello. I'm Zebulan. My favorite band is The Beach Boys and my favorite album is SMiLE.
I first heard SMiLE while reading a Wikipedia article (maybe the one about Pet Sounds?). I had just recently started exploring Spotify for some new (to me) music from bands I liked. BWPS was mentioned, so I decided to check it out. At this point I had mostly only heard Pet Sounds, Good Vibrations, Kokomo, and the old surf hits. I recall hearing L.A. when my father played it from Spotify once, but I wasn't paying that much attention and sort of forgot that it was even The Beach Boys.
When I heard BWPS for the first time, I was blown away. It was like a fusion of everything I liked from various musical genres all rolled into one... one... wonderful! I like it when a song is catchy, and when I listened to BWPS it felt like everything was catchy. There is a lot of music that I grew to like after hearing several times, but I loved BWPS instantly. I wasn't entirely sold on Mrs. O'Leary's Cow, but I ended up liking it quite a bit by the 5th time I heard it. I liked the album so much, that after hearing it for the first time, I played the whole thing again. And again. I basically got addicted to the album.
Of course, my sudden interest in SMiLE led me to listen to The Smile Sessions, and I really enjoyed it, but funny enough, I actually preferred BWPS by a slim margin at the time. I think it was mostly the muddier sound (especially in mono) of TSS album reconstruction and the missing vocals on songs like Do You Like Worms and Look. Being used to BWPS probably also played a factor.
There were definitely some things that I liked better in TSS, however. One such thing was the indian chanting and bah-bah vocals in the first chorus of DYLW. I was expecting to have the full vocals as in BWPS, but when I heard just those vocals, it highlighted details I hadn't noticed before. It kind of reminded me of the start of "Hooked on a Feeling"... which is not surprising in hindsight, since the start of that song was inspired by a bootleg of DYLW. And then when I heard the second chorus, the blasting lead vocals and bass line felt so much more powerful, albeit with worse sound fidelity. (It also didn't help that I hadn't discovered that the "normalize volume" control in Spotify reduces audio quality a bit.)
I kept listening to both BWPS and TSS over and over (the crow cries uncover) and soon came to like TSS more. I still like BWPS a lot, but now for better or worse I notice its flaws, and actually, now I notice the flaws in TSS as well, and prefer fan mixes for various reasons.
I also ended up listening to all The Beach Boys albums after Pet Sounds and found that they had made a LOT of really good music that I had barely known about before. I ended up reading tons and tons of online discussions about the album, and I found out about the wide world of fan mixes. I've been lurking around reading discussions about The Beach Boys and SMiLE both here and elsewhere for a long time now, and I've listened to fan mix after fan mix. I've even made my own personal one that I'm considering releasing at some point.
Actually, that's part of why I finally decided to post something here. I can't figure out how to sync tape tracks with high precision so I can isolate certain elements in order to make well-balanced mixes of things like the H&V verses (I'm waiting for the day when someone makes a stereo mix with similar balancing to the original single mono mix), or the Bicycle Rider chorus (Why did TSS include the 2nd lead vocal overdub on a separate track but not the first?). It also doesn't help that I have little to no experience with audio editing.
I also joined because I had some questions about the structure of some songs that I hadn't seen any answers for already online... mostly just H&V, of course.
So hello!
I first heard SMiLE while reading a Wikipedia article (maybe the one about Pet Sounds?). I had just recently started exploring Spotify for some new (to me) music from bands I liked. BWPS was mentioned, so I decided to check it out. At this point I had mostly only heard Pet Sounds, Good Vibrations, Kokomo, and the old surf hits. I recall hearing L.A. when my father played it from Spotify once, but I wasn't paying that much attention and sort of forgot that it was even The Beach Boys.
When I heard BWPS for the first time, I was blown away. It was like a fusion of everything I liked from various musical genres all rolled into one... one... wonderful! I like it when a song is catchy, and when I listened to BWPS it felt like everything was catchy. There is a lot of music that I grew to like after hearing several times, but I loved BWPS instantly. I wasn't entirely sold on Mrs. O'Leary's Cow, but I ended up liking it quite a bit by the 5th time I heard it. I liked the album so much, that after hearing it for the first time, I played the whole thing again. And again. I basically got addicted to the album.
Of course, my sudden interest in SMiLE led me to listen to The Smile Sessions, and I really enjoyed it, but funny enough, I actually preferred BWPS by a slim margin at the time. I think it was mostly the muddier sound (especially in mono) of TSS album reconstruction and the missing vocals on songs like Do You Like Worms and Look. Being used to BWPS probably also played a factor.
There were definitely some things that I liked better in TSS, however. One such thing was the indian chanting and bah-bah vocals in the first chorus of DYLW. I was expecting to have the full vocals as in BWPS, but when I heard just those vocals, it highlighted details I hadn't noticed before. It kind of reminded me of the start of "Hooked on a Feeling"... which is not surprising in hindsight, since the start of that song was inspired by a bootleg of DYLW. And then when I heard the second chorus, the blasting lead vocals and bass line felt so much more powerful, albeit with worse sound fidelity. (It also didn't help that I hadn't discovered that the "normalize volume" control in Spotify reduces audio quality a bit.)
I kept listening to both BWPS and TSS over and over (the crow cries uncover) and soon came to like TSS more. I still like BWPS a lot, but now for better or worse I notice its flaws, and actually, now I notice the flaws in TSS as well, and prefer fan mixes for various reasons.
I also ended up listening to all The Beach Boys albums after Pet Sounds and found that they had made a LOT of really good music that I had barely known about before. I ended up reading tons and tons of online discussions about the album, and I found out about the wide world of fan mixes. I've been lurking around reading discussions about The Beach Boys and SMiLE both here and elsewhere for a long time now, and I've listened to fan mix after fan mix. I've even made my own personal one that I'm considering releasing at some point.
Actually, that's part of why I finally decided to post something here. I can't figure out how to sync tape tracks with high precision so I can isolate certain elements in order to make well-balanced mixes of things like the H&V verses (I'm waiting for the day when someone makes a stereo mix with similar balancing to the original single mono mix), or the Bicycle Rider chorus (Why did TSS include the 2nd lead vocal overdub on a separate track but not the first?). It also doesn't help that I have little to no experience with audio editing.
I also joined because I had some questions about the structure of some songs that I hadn't seen any answers for already online... mostly just H&V, of course.
So hello!
