Thoughts from the Beatles’ last new song “Now And Then”.

【The Beatles’ last new song, “Now and Then,” was thus brought to life with the help of AI technology.】
https://wired.jp/article/the-beatles-now-and-then-last-song-artificial-intelligence-peter-jackson/

【New Beatles song “Now And Then” supported by AI released】
https://www.itmedia.co.jp/news/articles/2311/03/news054.html

・After a quarter of a century in the making, “Now and Then,” a new song that will likely be the last song with all four original members of The Beatles, has been released.

・While working on the recording of “The Beatles Anthology” in the 1990s, I attempted to resurrect “Now and Then” from an old cassette tape (recorded by John Lennon playing the piano at his New York home shortly before his death). In the sound recording, John’s vocals were drowned out by the sound of his own piano, but the technology to separate the voices was not yet available at that time

・In 2022, Jackson was working on the documentary film “The Beatles”: from footage from 1969 that captured the making of the album, concert, and film that would later become “Let It Be,” Jackson and his team developed AI technology that could separate any instrumental sound or voice from its source.

・The new song also includes Harrison’s guitar, which he recorded in 1995, but McCartney says the solo part was based on Harrison’s recorded guitar solo, which he played himself.

These are the quotes from the article

Separation technology brings the DJ era and combination era into full swing.

As I have blogged before, the Beatles’ new song “Now And Then” was finally released the other day.

It’s like a Beatles verse, harmony, as you would expect.

It’s only been three days since its release, and already it has over 20 million views.

Incidentally, the Beatles released two other songs after they broke up.

(Incidentally, the last song the Beatles produced before they broke up was “I Me Mine.”)

Real Love

Free As A Bird

I like these two songs very much as well.

After the breakup, these three songs were still made from the old Johns demo tapes, but the big difference is that this time “Now And Then” uses AI!

The separation technique is especially amazing.

If you have a song with drums, guitar, bass, and vocals, it is like separating them by instrument. Isn’t it amazing? To use an analogy, it is like separating the colors that have been mixed once into the colors they were before they were mixed.

Moreover, this time it was a piano playing demo sound source on cassette tape, so one can imagine that the sound quality was quite poor. (In fact, we abandoned the production a long time ago because of the poor sound quality.)

This is John Lennon’s voice isolated from a demo sound source with poor sound quality, but it is a beautiful voice at all.

The latest separation technology, AI technology, is amazing. Not only the separation, but the technology to clean up the sound quality is also amazing.

In fact, even for a musician such as myself, there are tools (software) that allow for a certain level of separation. However, it is still difficult to use them in a full-scale music production.

However, after listening to the Beatles’ sound files this time around, there will eventually come a time when all musicians and the general public will be able to use the wonderful separation and AI technology like this one. (The latest technology will eventually become commonplace)

When it comes to that,

By isolating and extracting only the vocals, anyone can easily create a full-fledged karaoke sound source,

If you want to practice instruments of your favorite songs, you can create a practice sound source by extracting only the instruments you want to practice from the sound source.

Furthermore,

You can also extract only the vocals and arrange them in various ways, such as bossa nova style or reggae style.

By extracting and combining multiple instruments, you can create completely different music.

And so on,

In any case, separation technology is a technology with many possibilities.

Separation also means that we are entering an era in which the question will be how to combine and utilize them, as described above. In other words, the DJ era, the era of combination, has arrived.

With such an era in mind, we might as well welcome the latest in separation and AI technology.

See you then.

Separation technology creates many parts and pieces of the puzzle, but the source of the parts and pieces should not be neglected in the future. That is, current instrumentalists, singers, etc., etc. It is important to have new parts and pieces as well as those from the past.