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SMiLe - the real one - is Finally being released

I'd buy it. Are there enough tapes of recordings to mix a complete album? Or will it perhaps be a bit of a patchwork given limitations. I've never heard any of the bootlegs. Regardless, it'd still be wonderful to hear. I thought about getting one of the Beach Boys boxed sets a while back just for the 4 or 5 "SMiLE" tracks on it (or outtake tracks or whatever they'd have been called), but this would seem so much more to my liking.
 
There are dozens of completed versions of nearly every track. Brian couldn't decide which to use ask he was a creative genius and a perfectionist.

That has been the only reason no one has assembled this before. They need the band to agree with the choices.
 
41KIe1Oh7oL._SL500_AA300_.jpg


Huh. I've had this for about five years (?) and thought it was "it", but according to the article Brian recut the album with his touring band of 2004. :think:
 
Yes, that is SMiLe as re-recorded by Brian and his band, not the original recordings made by the Beach Boys.
 
BW's "Smile" is great. But it sure will be nice to hear the bro's singing together (and even cousin Mike too). My guess is that the SQ will be improved over the various bootleg versions. If not, I'll be a bit disappointed. I wonder if the sequencing will follow BW's "Smile" exactly. I'm pretty exited about this. I've even considered splurging for the box set. Probably won't, but this album tempts me to do weird things.
 
The Beach Boys were Capitol Records top artist when they were recording SMiLe and had access to the best gear money could buy at the time. The sound quality on the tapes was as good as possible. The remastered version of Pet Sounds release about a decade ago has a bonus track of "Heroes and Villains" on it which sounds absolutely stunning. The producer who remastered it states that he found many apparently completely finished copies of the song in the archives and just picked one for the CD. He stated he hoped someday to return to the tapes and produce a finished copy of SMiLe.

Brian was working with high end 8 track machines while the Beatles were still working with okay quality 4 track recorders.
 
Aaron German said:
But it sure will be nice to hear the bro's singing together (and even cousin Mike too).
Click to expand...

And don't forget Al Jardine!

It'll be a real treat to hear the original tracks with Brian's voice (back when it was in better form), and of course, it'll be nice to hear Mike's bass vocals and those authentic late 1960's Beach Boy harmonies, even if perhaps there are a few gaps here and there. Supposedly, Mark Linett, one of the people working on this project, figures that all the tracks were recorded (as far as the music goes), but that he suspects there are sections for some recordings where vocals weren't completed.

http://www.billboard.com/#/features/beach-boys-engineer-talks-about-the-smile-1005071622.story

That said... I'm not meaning to take anything away from "BWPS" from 2004 and Wilson's backing band that helped him piece it together and perform/record, because I thoroughly enjoy the presentation and always will.
 
The word on the street was that Brian had completed the individual songs, but he was still trying to complete the playing order and creating the transition tracks. On his own version released a few years ago he created several all new transitions to connect the songs together. I imagine the Beach Boys version will try to use all the random transition pieces he created in the studio back then.

I remember an interview with Mike Love that Brian could choose between three to four perfect takes of some of the songs which were different enough to not just pick one and say "good enough". That's why there were hundreds of different bootlegs with completely different versions of each song. No one knew what he really wanted to do.
 
I was just going off of what the article said. But, regardless, there is without a doubt tons of stuff to work with.
 
It doesn't matter how many times I hear it, SMiLe and "Heroes and Villians" is sheer genius of popular music being pushed absolutely to its limits. God, had this hit the world with this rich of an arrangement in 1967 we would have had a completely different 1970s music culture.

 
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