fortuneandserendipity said:

The first priority should be to back up the tapes with digital copies, so nothing gets lost. With enough people on the job it shouldn't take too long. Hell, if need be get Robocop on the case.

not take long?? theres thousands of tracks along with rehearsals , videos, movies, live shows

luvsexy4all said:

fortuneandserendipity said:

The first priority should be to back up the tapes with digital copies, so nothing gets lost. With enough people on the job it shouldn't take too long. Hell, if need be get Robocop on the case.

not take long?? theres thousands of tracks along with rehearsals , videos, movies, live shows

When the Lotusflower website came about, I had the impression that this was process was beginning by something I had read, but do not quote me on this.

Now, I do not believe it was done. From the engineers that talk about the Vault, it sounds as though it was not organized or arranged in a cataogue sense.

justAmeda said:

fortuneandserendipity said:

The first priority should be to back up the tapes with digital copies, so nothing gets lost. With enough people on the job it shouldn't take too long. Hell, if need be get Robocop on the case.

Or hire some of us org members to sort through it! I don't think we would have a lack of folks willing to brave the vault or vaults!

I agree: Just get us Org members involved. We would have the job done in no time flat.

nelcp777 said:

databank said:

A complete inventory of all the tapes and files should be the priority, it's a gigantic work but I fail to see how it can be avoided on the long run if the estate want to be able to find their way through the vault. What we know of is only the tip of the iceberg, particularly after 1995.

I would imagine the inventory and cataloguing of the Vault(s) is in process. I believe there is a time requirement that Bremer has to meet on the asset inventory. This was mentioned in the Estate sticky.

I wonder if those who are doing the inventory are overwhelmed by the content and volume? I do not mean this in a negative way.

Man, it just hit me, how messed up would it be if Prince over hyped the vault and there was not nearly the volume of material that we were lead to believe?

There is a "deadline" for filing the Estate's Inventory, BUT it would be no problem if the Administrator of the Estate would ask The Court for more time. This is done frequently.

nelcp777 said:

luvsexy4all said:

not take long?? theres thousands of tracks along with rehearsals , videos, movies, live shows

When the Lotusflower website came about, I had the impression that this was process was beginning by something I had read, but do not quote me on this.

Now, I do not believe it was done. From the engineers that talk about the Vault, it sounds as though it was not organized or arranged in a cataogue sense.

they need someone like one of us who knows what to look for ...and what would be worth releasing

LewArcher said:

My general idea for an initial vault release

.

Most of that stuff we already have so why wish it as a vault release?

fortuneandserendipity said:

The first priority should be to back up the tapes with digital copies, so nothing gets lost. With enough people on the job it shouldn't take too long. Hell, if need be get Robocop on the case.

.

Analog stuff needs to be digitized in high quality (24/96 or higher).

Digital stuff nees to be copied just to be sure.

Looks like one of the vaults is open and being cataloged. From a story published on July 17 in the San Francisco Examiner.

Soul Asylum’s Dave Pirner finds kinship with fellow Minnesotan Prince

by Tom Lanhan

http://www.sfexaminer.com/soul-asylums-dave-pirner-finds-kinship-fellow-minnesotan-prince/

After the untimely death of Prince, the Purple One’s vast Paisley Park recording vaults were opened, reportedly revealing four collaborations: one industrial, one hardcore, one slow jam, plus a collection of Chuck Berry covers.

There’s one problem: “I have no idea what all that is,” Pirner says. “I just hope I get to hear it some day.”

Were Pirner’s vocals grafted onto other mixes? He’s not sure.

When he was still in Minneapolis, he would often accompany Bland to Paisley Park Studios, where he regularly nodded hello to Prince in passing.

The artists never officially recorded together; their sessions were always in different rooms.

“But I do know that Prince recorded one of my songs, ‘Stand Up and Be Strong,’ and Michael played on it,” says Pirner. “And through Michael, he had actually asked for my blessing, and I was like, ‘Hell yeah, Prince can have my blessing! He didn’t even have to ask!’”

deerpath said:

Looks like one of the vaults is open and being cataloged. From a story published on July 17 in the San Francisco Examiner.

Soul Asylum’s Dave Pirner finds kinship with fellow Minnesotan Prince

by Tom Lanhan

http://www.sfexaminer.com/soul-asylums-dave-pirner-finds-kinship-fellow-minnesotan-prince/

After the untimely death of Prince, the Purple One’s vast Paisley Park recording vaults were opened, reportedly revealing four collaborations: one industrial, one hardcore, one slow jam, plus a collection of Chuck Berry covers.

There’s one problem: “I have no idea what all that is,” Pirner says. “I just hope I get to hear it some day.”

Were Pirner’s vocals grafted onto other mixes? He’s not sure.

When he was still in Minneapolis, he would often accompany Bland to Paisley Park Studios, where he regularly nodded hello to Prince in passing.

The artists never officially recorded together; their sessions were always in different rooms.

“But I do know that Prince recorded one of my songs, ‘Stand Up and Be Strong,’ and Michael played on it,” says Pirner. “And through Michael, he had actually asked for my blessing, and I was like, ‘Hell yeah, Prince can have my blessing! He didn’t even have to ask!’”

oh sheet ....

I wonder how many "finished" songs are in there??? If they are half finished and get the MJ and Biggie finished treatment...that will really suck balls!

deerpath said:

Looks like one of the vaults is open and being cataloged. From a story published on July 17 in the San Francisco Examiner.

Soul Asylum’s Dave Pirner finds kinship with fellow Minnesotan Prince

by Tom Lanhan

http://www.sfexaminer.com/soul-asylums-dave-pirner-finds-kinship-fellow-minnesotan-prince/

After the untimely death of Prince, the Purple One’s vast Paisley Park recording vaults were opened, reportedly revealing four collaborations: one industrial, one hardcore, one slow jam, plus a collection of Chuck Berry covers.

There’s one problem: “I have no idea what all that is,” Pirner says. “I just hope I get to hear it some day.”

Were Pirner’s vocals grafted onto other mixes? He’s not sure.

When he was still in Minneapolis, he would often accompany Bland to Paisley Park Studios, where he regularly nodded hello to Prince in passing.

The artists never officially recorded together; their sessions were always in different rooms.

“But I do know that Prince recorded one of my songs, ‘Stand Up and Be Strong,’ and Michael played on it,” says Pirner. “And through Michael, he had actually asked for my blessing, and I was like, ‘Hell yeah, Prince can have my blessing! He didn’t even have to ask!’”

Weren't these songs listed in the fake items found in the vault list that was posted a few weeks back?

databank said:

deerpath said:

Looks like one of the vaults is open and being cataloged. From a story published on July 17 in the San Francisco Examiner.

Soul Asylum’s Dave Pirner finds kinship with fellow Minnesotan Prince

by Tom Lanhan

http://www.sfexaminer.com/soul-asylums-dave-pirner-finds-kinship-fellow-minnesotan-prince/

After the untimely death of Prince, the Purple One’s vast Paisley Park recording vaults were opened, reportedly revealing four collaborations: one industrial, one hardcore, one slow jam, plus a collection of Chuck Berry covers.

There’s one problem: “I have no idea what all that is,” Pirner says. “I just hope I get to hear it some day.”

Were Pirner’s vocals grafted onto other mixes? He’s not sure.

When he was still in Minneapolis, he would often accompany Bland to Paisley Park Studios, where he regularly nodded hello to Prince in passing.

The artists never officially recorded together; their sessions were always in different rooms.

“But I do know that Prince recorded one of my songs, ‘Stand Up and Be Strong,’ and Michael played on it,” says Pirner. “And through Michael, he had actually asked for my blessing, and I was like, ‘Hell yeah, Prince can have my blessing! He didn’t even have to ask!’”

Weren't these songs listed in the fake items found in the vault list that was posted a few weeks back?

yes ..maybe they werent fake it turns out...

luvsexy4all said:

databank said:

Weren't these songs listed in the fake items found in the vault list that was posted a few weeks back?

yes ..maybe they werent fake it turns out...

Nonsense, Pirner's WTF reaction shows they were.

As an archivist (I'm about to get boring here), the first priorities are digitizing the music and placing the physical copies in cold storage to save the physical format (tape, 8-track, record, etc.). Content and form should be the first two things to preserve. I'm sure something was done when the vault was created - like climate control or something.

It would be hard to remain neutral working with those materials, but it does help. I think I would destroy something just from the tears I'd cry.

It'd be interesting to know what kind of a system Prince himself had implimented in the vault.

We talk about the estate needing to dig through everything but I doubt Prince just threw tapes into the room. When he wanted to fish something out, he was able to find it. So there must have been some kind of in-house cataloging system.

It seems odd nobody has really spoken about it to any real degree.

Noodled24 said:

It'd be interesting to know what kind of a system Prince himself had implimented in the vault.

We talk about the estate needing to dig through everything but I doubt Prince just threw tapes into the room. When he wanted to fish something out, he was able to find it. So there must have been some kind of in-house cataloging system.

It seems odd nobody has really spoken about it to any real degree.

I'd love it if he were proper old school and filed tapes according to the amount of overdubs that were performed on each tape, like a basic input output attention system -

if only there were some form of sonar that could map the alignments of ferric or chromium dioxide particles without disrupting their position, we could build up a "heat map" of most worked-on vault tapes without mistakenly erasing the lot of them.

AlgeriaTouchshreek said:

Noodled24 said:

It'd be interesting to know what kind of a system Prince himself had implimented in the vault.

We talk about the estate needing to dig through everything but I doubt Prince just threw tapes into the room. When he wanted to fish something out, he was able to find it. So there must have been some kind of in-house cataloging system.

It seems odd nobody has really spoken about it to any real degree.

I'd love it if he were proper old school and filed tapes according to the amount of overdubs that were performed on each tape, like a basic input output attention system -

if only there were some form of sonar that could map the alignments of ferric or chromium dioxide particles without disrupting their position, we could build up a "heat map" of most worked-on vault tapes without mistakenly erasing the lot of them.

or just digitize them. Could freight them all to Utah and have a big Jehova Witness / Mormon theological discussion while you're spooling into an ADAC

I wonder if there is a person who knows of a device that takes one ribbon of magnetic tape and converts it to an easily partitionable sequence of sample event tables. Hmmmmm.... who could it be?

Because this 80s Netflix flange is doing my nut in - you are seriously going to fuck it up if you don't ask a professional tape to disk transfer expert.

"But he loved the Boss Flange pedal! It performed most of the drum programming for him!"

No. Get a professional in, get Netflix to talk to their staff about substandard digital content.

Yada yada yada.

I still believe that the first thing to be released should be a DVD/Blueray of his last two concerts in Atlanta. I'm sure the DVD would sell like crazy...

markg66 said:

I still believe that the first thing to be released should be a DVD/Blueray of his last two concerts in Atlanta. I'm sure the DVD would sell like crazy...

has the "perfect" sound of atlanta hit the streets yet? supposedly 7/7 the boot cd was available

Let's say, for discussion's sake, that the estate issues are cleared up quickly and Warner gets to work quickly on organizing, cataloguing, assessing, and re-mastering Prince's entire output, both released and unreleased. Presumably they'd settle on a plan for how they want to release this stuff. How to do it? Keep the albums as-is and put the unreleased/rare stuff on separate releases? Take a more conceptual approach, making "deluxe" editions of the albums with tons of bonus material? Open a digital garden of streaming audio? Take a purely chronological approach, with box sets covering the whole career in chunks? Career-spanning box set compilations with a mix of released and unreleased material? There is no good answer.

For comparison's sake, I'll bring up how some of my other favorite acts (some still living, some passed) have been anthologized:

**
1. The Beatles
There is actually relatively little alternate Beatles material to fuss over. There are the BBC Sessions (a sort of studio/live hybrid, in most cases), the highlights of which have been released on two volumes already. Aside from that is the Anthology series, which, over six jam-packed CDs, tracked The Beatles’ history through outtakes. It’s great, but it’s almost never as good as the albums/singles themselves, and there’s no order to it other than chronology. The albums themselves (the U.K. versions) exist in muliple mixes and have been released by themselves, with no bonus tracks. There's other stuff in the vaults, but it starts to scrape the bottom of the barrel, quality-wise, if I understand correctly.

Beatles are an ineffective model for Prince because his output is so much more voluminous than the Beatles'. But I could see a series of Prince box sets covering all his unreleased or rare output, but it's hard to contextualize it without the "proper" album alongside.

2. Miles Davis
There have been some deluxe editions of albums, but mostly with Miles it’s about the Columbia box sets. They’re arranged chronologically-slash-stylistically, but it’s fortunate that the eras and styles tend to match up pretty well.

I think the decision-makers in the Prince camp now could take this approach, but it's difficult with Prince in this case because he didn't do as much live multi-person tracking as Miles, or at least not as many finished live arrangements. If Prince began a track in 1988 but clearly didn't finish it 'til '94, where does it go in the chronology? Both places? It starts to get tricky.

3. Bob Dylan
The Dylan officially-released outtake project started first with a few cuts here and there on complications, then about 1/4 of "Biograph," then a dedicated Bootleg series starting in 1991. It started first as an overview of outtake highlights, then stylistic jabs (live shows, overviews of eras, etc.), but it’s now morphed into comprehensive chronological overviews of whole eras (BS11: Basement Tapes and BS12: The Complete Cutting Edge come to mind, along with the four Copyright Extension collections from Europe, easily available online to those who care).

Again, this more recent approach works better for Dylan (like Miles), 'cause they did so much live-to-tape finished tracks and very little studio trickery.

4. Elvis Costello
Starting around 15 years ago, Rhino started re-releasing all of Elvis Costello’s albums, each with a disc of bonus tracks. Other than some complete live sets that are great, it could be argued that this series of volumes really covers, very well, the ephemera that Elvis Costello’s catalog has to offer. The albums are solid, some b-sides are solid, and some outtakes and other stuff.

To me, simple Prince album reissues (with bonus tracks) wouldn’t cut it. Too much material presented without proper context would be a disaster.

5. Michael Jackson

There have been deluxe editions of each of Mike’s albums (sometimes several times over), but he’s also had two whole new albums assembled since his death, and I know a ton of semi-finished material sits in some sort of repository somewhere. But let me point this out: it’s obviously true that the two posthumous albums, Michael and Xscape, were heavily edited and pieced together without Michael’s artistic input.

There are hours and hours of Prince tracks that someone (or many someones) could fool with to make “new” Prince music, but that would seem disingenuous to me.

6. Frank Zappa

This one's been a bit of a free-for-all, with a mix of FZ-planned projects, full live sets, rehearsals, and compiled albums popping out since Frank passed. Now Gail has passed too, and the sons are feuding, so who knows what the future has to offer (or if there's anything else of quality waiting in there, unreleased. Most of the posthumous stuff is bland or unlistenable).

I hope that Prince's legacy is handled more even-handedly than this.

7. Smashing Pumpkins

This is the approach I hope Prince's people take: lengthy, huge, comprehensive boxes with deluxe, remastered editions of all the albums, released chronologically. It seems like the obvious choice here, but I don't have a ton of faith that it'll come to pass this way.

**

What other approaches am I missing? Are there other artists who have been anthologized in other ways that work well for you as a fan?

For the record, I'm predicting that the actual Prince anthology situation be a messy combination of the above approaches, with a ton of fan-favorite bootleg recordings staying unreleased, some messy and inartful remixes, confusing liner notes with no clear info, very little regard for the fans, very little regard for PRN's wishes, and general chaos & disorder.

To add more discussion topics to my above, way-too-long post:

In regards to the people who get to work mapping out the posthumous release-project moving forward, what do you think should be their first priority?

1. Re-mastering the existing albums with a comprehensive reissue series? (I would potentially love a reissue series, but I really hope the rare and unreleased stuff happens soon).

2. Getting all the OTHER released material (b-sides, 12-inch extended mixes, remixes, digital-only tracks, other random stuff) collected on proper albums? (I would love this, because it's a shame how difficult it is to collect all his music, what with all the singles and one-offs).

3. Getting the movies and live concert films restored and reissued? (I would definitely be a fan of this, to potentially get P&R Live in Syracuse, Sign O' the Times, Lovesexy Tour, the 1990s home videos, etc. out in high-quality digital versions).

4. Focusing on finished Prince projects (full albums, etc.) that he either abandoned or didn't get around to releasing yet?

5. Or focusing on completely unreleased, unheard material?

Interesting, if not fascinating discussion. We're dealing with an unprecedently massive catalogue here, which is why there is no perfect solution. Another issue is that P usually recorded songs for the sake of recording them: many weren't connected to any project at all: this makes the "rerelease + bonus CD's" appraoch limited.

What we know is that Prince liked to compile proper studio albums with outtakes so, when possible, I'd keep that approach: try to make cohesive collections that sound like real albums from specific eras. Those "albums" could even contain previously released non-album tracks, such as b-sides.

On the other hand, reissues could also focus on including all related, already released material, without any outtakes. I'd love to work on mapping such a project (deciding what goes where based on release dates and recording dates), but I assume the estate will want to add a few xclusive outtakes to boost sales. Unreleased albums that were complied by P in his lifetime could be released as such as well.

Now there is a large quantity of alternate versions of songs, unfinished songs and minor songs that may be of interest for the hardcore fans without justifying a proper physical release: for those (whatever is left from reissues and compiled posthumous "albums"), I think digital is the way to go, for only in that format could we go with an album that contains, say, 5 different cuts of Computer Blue, which would be of interest only to us.

But first and foremost, as I said earlier, what is needed is a complete INVENTORY of all existing material, with title and recording/reworking/mixing dates. Only then can anyone decide what the right approach would be. But such an inventory would necessitate a team working full time on it with engineers for preservation, and it'll take months of full time work at the very least. Whomever gets to do this will be the luckiest people on earth!

problem is only people like us r aware of the deluxe versions that could be released.....like what metallica r doing now

A problem with deluxe versions might be that a lot of new fans, or not hardcore fans, already bought his albums after his death.

Would they be interested to buy a deluxe version of PR when they paid for the original in April/May?

Deluxe versions?

.

Forget these.

They will not happen within five years. And if they happen within five years they might not look like the James Brown deluxe stuff. (depending on heirs, the record company involced, etc)

.

There's enough interesting stuff (to fans!) (i.e.: not fams) for years of records.

.

Alternates. rehearsals, unknown stuff, etc.

databank said:

Interesting, if not fascinating discussion. We're dealing with an unprecedently massive catalogue here, which is why there is no perfect solution. Another issue is that P usually recorded songs for the sake of recording them: many weren't connected to any project at all: this makes the "rerelease + bonus CD's" appraoch limited.

What we know is that Prince liked to compile proper studio albums with outtakes so, when possible, I'd keep that approach: try to make cohesive collections that sound like real albums from specific eras. Those "albums" could even contain previously released non-album tracks, such as b-sides.

On the other hand, reissues could also focus on including all related, already released material, without any outtakes. I'd love to work on mapping such a project (deciding what goes where based on release dates and recording dates), but I assume the estate will want to add a few xclusive outtakes to boost sales. Unreleased albums that were complied by P in his lifetime could be released as such as well.

Now there is a large quantity of alternate versions of songs, unfinished songs and minor songs that may be of interest for the hardcore fans without justifying a proper physical release: for those (whatever is left from reissues and compiled posthumous "albums"), I think digital is the way to go, for only in that format could we go with an album that contains, say, 5 different cuts of Computer Blue, which would be of interest only to us.

But first and foremost, as I said earlier, what is needed is a complete INVENTORY of all existing material, with title and recording/reworking/mixing dates. Only then can anyone decide what the right approach would be. But such an inventory would necessitate a team working full time on it with engineers for preservation, and it'll take months of full time work at the very least. Whomever gets to do this will be the luckiest people on earth!

I totally agree that taking inventory and preservation methods have to be the first priority.