I know we all share a tremendous amount of excitement about the new boxset released this month. For those who are not aware, Genesis has released a 12 disc boxset from the early years of Genesis, covering the period where Peter Gabriel was their frontman. The albums released are Trespass, Nursery Cryme, Foxtrot, Selling England by the Pound and the holy grail, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.
I have been anticipating this boxset release since the late 90s when I first heard rumors that Genesis was re-mixing all of their albums in surround sound. Well, my expectations have been exceeded. Studying The Lamb over the years, I was hoping that this surround mix would reveal more of the details of what was going on with these tracks.
I have to give Nick Davis (head engineer of the new mixes) a tremendous amount of credit now that I have gotten the chance to dissect the DVD AUDIO surround mix of The Lamb. For the most part, Nick put the keyboards and guitars in the rear stereo field and the drums and bass in the front stereo field. This separation of the instruments has made each stereo field less busy and as a result, the individual instruments are much easier to hear. I know already that this is going to help create even more accurate MIDI tracks for the instruments and should also help my mixing and instrument/amp choices.
As an added bonus to this mix, Nick has put Peter's isolated vocals in the CENTER track (with no music) and now I can add the vocal track to the project with NO BLEED THROUGH issues. The vocals will not have to be squashed with EQ to eliminate the instruments leaks that occurred when I sampled the vocals from the original stereo tracks.
If anybody is interested, I have already found a way to transfer the DVD audio tracks to my DAW and then creating 6 separate mono wave files of each surround channel.
I feel like a kid in a candy store and don't know where to start but I can tell you that this release has rejuvenated my excitement of The Lamb Laid Down in MIDI project.
jkleban@nc.rr.com