In the late 1980s, Ernst Jorgensen, then an executive at the Danish BMG affiliate, posed a cheeky question at an international conference. “Why do we treat Elvis Presley’s catalog so badly?” The response from the American label head who was running the meeting was immediate: “If you’re so smart, why don’t you do it?” “Is that so?”
Jorgensen has since released Memphis, a just-released box set of recordings from Tennessee, the state Presley called home, from his groundbreaking 1992 collection, The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll – The Complete 50’s Masters. He has been in charge of Presley’s reissues up until now. most of his life. Then, once the technology was ready, Jorgensen began ambitiously using AI to create Presley’s masterpieces from the 1950s, starting with Presley’s groundbreaking recordings from 1954 to 1956 at Sun Studio. I look forward to rebuilding it.
Presley’s Sun Studio sessions with guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black were recorded live to single-track mono tape by label owner Sam Phillips, so an actual remix of the song was always impossible. there were. However, AI demixing technology that can separate instruments from a single track continues to advance. Jorgensen recently asked Emile de la Rey, who did the sound for Peter Jackson’s documentary Get Back, to test remix “Good Rockin’ Tonight” using Jackson’s proprietary AI technology. . The resulting “complete separation of instruments” along with the removal of tape hiss was far superior to the machine learning methods that have been widely available to date, so Jorgensen is waiting for access to that level of technology. Once he has it, he says: Because even the recording of the sun is very simple. We have acoustic, electric, and slap bass. But when you open it up, it’s still like a new revelation. It got thinner and I thought, “What, is that all you have? ‘There’s nothing like that.’
Jorgensen has spent decades finding and digitizing Presley’s master tapes, some of which were never available. He had to use second-generation or lower sources for some of Sun’s songs that the label didn’t send to RCA, including “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” and even worse. However, the outtakes from those sessions were lost forever. “There was a tape called ‘That’s Alright’ and another selection,” he says, “but it didn’t say what the selection was, and the tape was destroyed.” There are also tracks missing from Presley’s RCA-era recordings from later that decade. “In 1959, the president of RCA Records had a bright idea to save the company money on warehousing costs. So they threw out about 10,000 or 20,000 tapes containing outtakes from Elvis sessions. ”
Editor’s picks
The Memphis box set did not use AI, but did include remixed versions of classic songs, including “In the Ghetto,” “Suspicious Minds,” and “Kentucky Rain.” The overdubs were removed by producer and engineer Matt Ross. span. “These are some of the greatest musicians to ever back Elvis,” Ross-Spann says. “And you can hear every little nuance, and you can actually hear Elvis’ voice, and you can see how it sounded in the room while it was being recorded.” – We used analog equipment as much as possible at Grooves Studio, including an actual physical echo chamber for vocal processing.
trend
Ross-Spann remixed a live recording from Memphis in the ’70s, which presented some technical challenges. “When Elvis is walking around and singing by the drums, it can be a big deal,” he says. “So the vocal mic is all drums. And when he goes to the crowd, you hear the girls screaming. But for me, it’s more exciting than that.”
The final section of the Memphis set includes selections from Presley’s last recordings, the 1976 so-called Jungle Room sessions. The song was written the year before Presley’s death at a time when he was in decline, but it has a surprising number of highlights, including the over-sung but emotional “Danny Boy.” “They show a more focused Elvis than people realize,” Ross-Spann says. “You could tell how enthusiastic and motivated he was during the recording process.”
