LDR Album Process Discussion

[shadesofloveduthenandnow 20,610]

So Sunset Blvd IS real

[tulsa jesus freaks 9,370]

2 minutes ago, plastiscguy said:

Asking the real questions... 

he's def trolling

[plastiscguy 63,435]

7 minutes ago, tulsa jesus freaks said:

what is HY what is honeymouns talking about lol

He deleted the tweet... now...

[shadesofloveduthenandnow 20,610]

Hey You?

[Veinsineon 76,621]

1 minute ago, shadesofearthquakes said:

So Sunset Blvd IS real

Yes and it is 111’s favorite song. I hope this information being brought to light doesn’t motivate any other insiders to tarnish my king’s favorite song by leaking it for us all. That would be terrible. It’s so special to my bestie. 

[111 36,669]

1 minute ago, Veinsineon said:

Yes and it is 111’s favorite song. I hope this information being brought to light doesn’t motivate any other insiders to tarnish my king’s favorite song by leaking it for us all. That would be terrible. It’s so special to my bestie. 

[shadesofloveduthenandnow 20,610]

Just now, Veinsineon said:

Yes and it is 111’s favorite song. I hope this information being brought to light doesn’t motivate any other insiders to tarnish my king’s favorite song by leaking it for us all. That would be terrible. It’s so special to my bestie. 

[SNIPPET 38383] Sunset Boulevard (reversed) (full leak when Hollywood’s Dead Final Leaks) (Rosemead EXCLUSIVE)

[TheBoss 13,482]

Off to the Races (Tim Larcombe x Sean Lee Demo) when?

[shadesofloveduthenandnow 20,610]

Just now, TheBoss said:

Off to the Races (Tim Larcombe x Sean Lee Demo) when?

Oh THIS

[tulsa jesus freaks 9,370]

Just now, plastiscguy said:

He deleted the tweet... now...

my guess:

he said HY (whatever that is) and that one person that responded agreeing is probably their friend, why? cause we all know that leakers/insiders can't stand not having the spotlight, cause obviously rn it's on May Jailer, so he did it for attention

just like a ceratin user with three numbers on their username starter teasing stuff (DICWB and FC RN version) right after the mass leaks (and then DICWB leaked ) 

sorry but true 

[BartenderDeco 19,635]

eclipse just gave me an exclusive in the DM’s cause he felt bad

she re-recorded pawn shop blues and disco in 2012 and 2016… sorry eclipse but i had to share to everyone

[shadesofloveduthenandnow 20,610]

Saur what pics are y’all using for your Tropico albums bc the film aesthetic does not match these pre-UV tracks tbh

[The Siren 30,517]

2 minutes ago, shadesofearthquakes said:

Saur what pics are y’all using for your Tropico albums bc the film aesthetic does not match these pre-UV tracks tbh

im just using the tropico ep cover for now

[uvbabe 4,730]

the fact that after btd she said she was quitting because she didn't have anything else to say... she's insane i love her 

[Veinsineon 76,621]

5 minutes ago, shadesofearthquakes said:

Saur what pics are y’all using for your Tropico albums bc the film aesthetic does not match these pre-UV tracks tbh

This or this

10 minutes ago, 111 said:

[LEAK] Sunset Boulevard 

 

 what a surprise that would be 

[LBcita 279]

On 1/4/2023 at 9:26 AM, BlackoutZone said:

I think it's time to talk about the iconic trio of UV outtakes - Yes to Heaven, Fine China & Your Girl. It's a twisted web and I'm not really good with phrasing and explaining such things so it might be difficult for you to understand everything (especially if you have no technical background on how songs are being produced), but I'll try to walk you through it all step by step and if something remains unclear I will try to explain it further!

 

These 3 songs were originally written and produced alongside Rick Nowels and his engineers back in late 2013. We first found out about their existence in 2016 when Eclipse obtained the demos and revealed the titles/snippets. They later happened to spread and leak becoming mysterious fan favorites and sadly as beloved and iconic in the community they are, all 3 are fake...
well, technically.

 

To understand why they are fake I need to give you a full breakdown of what happened.
It must have started with Eclipse getting his hands on an invoice from Patrick Warren who was responsible for recording and engineering Keys/Strings on some of the songs at that time. That listing apart from tracks that were released included Say Yes To Heaven, Fine China and Your Girl which have been fully unknown to the public. He contacts Patrick and using that info tries to get the demos from him, I assume under the suggestion that Lana is considering re-using the songs and tries to get the tracks/parts back. The thing is, Patrick is just someone who records his small part for the mix, he isn't actively working on the song as a producer so he doesn't really have access to all the material. Still though, he had some loose stems/sessions parts I assume, without properly bounced mix, he challenged himself to create mixes of all 3 that would be serviceable for that moment.

 

If you check the original files of all 3 leaked tracks, you'll find in the metadata that those demos were exported in Logic 10.2.2. That version of Logic Pro was released on March 8th, 2016 so any mix could not be older than that and of course the original ones were made in 2013. Not to mention the fact that Rick and his engineers work with Pro Tools, not Logic, unlike Patrick. But this goes even further. Patrick's available stems of the tracks were seemingly so incomplete he decided to create new production and structure for the songs making complete new versions that were unlike what Lana and Rick originally curated. He sent those back to Eclipse alongside the very incomplete stems.

 

This mess doesn't end here. You see Patrick Warren's job is to deliver the stems containing the new parts he was issued to arrange and engineer. Since he is often doing it independently of the rest, he adds a little bit of the song's intro at the beginning of every stem file he bounces so that when Rick receives it he knows how to place it in the mix alongside his parts. It's usually like 20/30 seconds and you can see what I'm talking about, because Eclipse shared some stems snippets from the files he received:
https://onlyfiles.io/f/e0236e30cb224f9e8618fe09ab0b9bc3
https://onlyfiles.io/f/ce703d3a5a204566bd31278eb667e6f7
Thank you @TheBoss for providing these to me

 

The first seconds here are the intros of real Rick reference demos, the latter parts however are already stems/mixes of what Patrick attempted to make in 2016. If you want some more closure, there is something @Say Yes to Heaven mentioned already - Eclipse must have received another pack of the same fashion later in 2016 of upcoming LFL track, Something Real (aka 13 Beaches). If you remember those times well, his exact teaser said "You took the.. #SR". This was most probably, because the singular stems he received as Something Real ALSO contained a few seconds of actual song at the beginning that happened to cut right after Lana saying "You took t..". In the full official credits you can see that Patrick is credited on 13 Beaches for "Waterphone", "Harmonium" and "Synthesizer".

 

Now circling back, while Fine China and Your Girl only had one mix leaked, Yes to Heaven also had this:

 

And this one is also fake, but it's technically closer to being a real thing than the Patrick mix. I don't know if this one was made by Eclipse or someone who got the stems from him, but this must have been made with filtered acapella of the Patrick Warren version, mixed with additional stems he provided and then layered with the looped guitar/drum pattern from the intro that I mentioned previously. But that guitar loop was literally a fundament of very first version of Yes to Heaven (unlike the Patrick mix that begins with strings) so you can imagine how it sounded based on this.

 

The first real version of Yes to Heaven that you have is the one leaked by Music Mafia which is a James Ford demo from late March/early April 2014. At that stage UV was shaping as an album, Rob Orton started properly mixing it and Lana decided to take last attempts to find the right production for the song by asking James Ford to give it a try. Sadly it also got discarded and at that point they just let go of the song (at least for that era).

 

The second real version of Yes to Heaven that you have is from latter part of 2014, 3:31 in length with leading production by STINT. Keep in mind though that while I refer to those versions as James Ford produced / STINT produced demos, they are all based on Rick's demos they got presented to work with. I think it's just easier to name them as such for clear sorting purposes. Even though the song was being worked on in both 2014 and 2015 they still failed to include it on HM as well.

 

It's fortunate for you that those happened to leak, cause Patrick's SYTH was the most different to the real demos from UV. Fine China is also pretty different, while Your Girl early demos (not the final though) are fairly similar to Patrick's mix. I mentioned earlier that both Fine China and Your Girl got mixed by Rob Orton alongside UV so they've been scrapped from the release on very last minute and unlike Yes to Heaven - ditched for good right after.

 

The weirdest thing in all this is that those quick Patrick Warren mixes are great... even though the mixing is clearly rushed and poor. The harmonica break in Yes to Heaven, the organs in Your Girl chorus, that stuff was never meant to be there, but hell it works. This sadly also means that if Patrick only sent those 160kbps mp3 files, the better ones don't exist.

 

That is all for now, unless @111 would like to now come forward and add something that I missed/got wrong. I also do not really believe that you didn't know the truth about all of this back then so I don't understand why you never revealed that the mixes aren't real. I think die hard fans deserve that kind of closure about some of the most iconic unreleased songs.

 

This took me years to figure out with massive help of someone who is also present on this very forum and I have mad respect for, thank you again!p

 

maybe this is 2 months late but who cares, this post by @BlackoutZone bothers me. He concedes it could be wrong (so don't attack), but let me tell you why none of what he said makes...any sense from a music making perspective. I'm going to be relying on actual facts we know from Lana/her team over the years, and on standard industry practice and practicalities. This post will be long, but worth it for the sake of truth.

to start, let's define some terms (these are all in the context of songs, not albums):

Producer - someone who, in some way, directs the actual sound recording of a song (composition of music, in these cases consisting of melodies, lyrics, and chords progressions)//recording project's creative and technical leader. They create or direct the creation of the tracks (stems) that make up a song (vocals, beats, instruments etc.)

Instrumentalist/session musician - someone commissioned by a PRODUCER of a song to play instruments (usually prewritten, sometimes improvised by the musician) for its sound recording

Mixing - the very complex, very difficult process of balancing every track in a song (vocals, backing vocals, digital and live instruments, special effects, etc.) Notably, Lana's frequently mentioned her mixing takes months because of how meticulous she is. Mixing is performed by engineers, in some cases (such as Lana's music) heavily assisted or directed by the producers or artists.
Engineer - here we have both recording engineers and sound engineers, which are different but often the same person, however - basically they're behind all the technical aspects of recording a song. That includes literally pressing record for a session, throwing together a mix for the artist to listen to outside of the studio, etc. Audio engineers work on the actual recording of the song, mixing engineers begin the process most traditionally known as mixing once the artist and producer's song of the vision is complete. (there's an element of mixing that's done by producers, but we're not talking about that).

OWNERSHIP: Legal concept. google Taylor Swift if you need a refresher. What's important to remember is that Lana has owned her master recordings since Born to Die. Established musical term partnerships (such as Lana and Rick or Lana and Jack) often begin the legal aspect's work on an album with a producer and master recording owner (in this case Lana, probably with advance funding in exchange for their licensing deal) entering into a contract for a joint venture. The owner of a master recording has all right to any reproductions of the song.

In a gist, this is typically how a song or group of songs begins. The owner of the recording (usually a label, in this case Lana with her label’s advance money) will contract a joint venture for the recording of a song or songs with a producer. Lana has her relationships established, so while I suspect none of them are taking the contracts to each other, everybody’s got to get paid so somewhere these signatures exist (to prevent say Rick suing Lana for a song’s ownership or something). The producer(s) (ie Lana and Rick/Jack/etc.) begin to create the song (Lana and her producers usually write them as well but that is a can of worms for another time) in its recording by either creating themselves or commissioning others (instrumentalists) to create tracks of music for the song. Ie Change - Lana and Rick created tracks (vocals and piano) pretty much themselves. Or a song from Born to Die (Lana wrote the songs, and worked with producers who created beats (Emile) and helped her record her vocals). Throughout this recording process the people actually pressing (+ new track), (record), (pause etc.) on the computer is a recording engineer, who may also function as a mastering engineer. For example, with White Dress Jack and Lana as producers and instrumentalists were messing around with piano and vocals, and thankfully Laura (engineer) was around to actually press the record button and ensure what they sang into the mic existed digitally.

Now that we have basic terminology down, let's run down who on Lana's team wears which of these hat(s).

Lana Del Rey: Producer (beginning with Pretty When You Cry and Guns and Roses, and nearly every released album track since then *notably excluding Fingertips), instrumentalist (horns on NFR is the only thing I can think of off the top of my head but there might be more)

Engineer* - Lana's known to be (annoyingly, in her own words) meticulous over the mixing process. She's been said to know decibel level differences in the way stems are mixed against each other. The * is because she didn't get an actual mixing credit until the songs with Barrie were used for Blue Banisters. (that's why they sound that way I suspect, not because they were ripped from YouTube - the amount of quality loss from downloading an Mp3 of a unmastered or even mastered song and then remastering it without the stems would make them sound very horrible in my AirPods). OWNER - Lana has owned all her masters since Born to Die, exclusively licensing the distribution rights to Interscope in the US, Universal everywhere else, and Polydor in the UK.

Jack Antonoff: Producer, Instrumentalist, Recording Engineer, Mixing Engineer

Rick Nowels: Producer, Instrumentalist

Laura Sisk: Recording Engineer, Mixing Engineer, Producer (kintsugi) and of course…

 

Patrick Warren: In all of Patrick's work Lana and Rick (beginning with Born to Die and spanning until Lust for Life), he has only ever served as an instrumentalist. There is one song Lana is on where Patrick served as a producer, and it's the time she featured on Cat Power's album. According to Rick Nowels himself: "Patrick Warren has done strings and keyboards on all the Lana records since ‘Summertime Sadness’. He is a big part of the ‘Lana sound’." This is a very important piece of information.

Okay, now we can begin to examine why @BlackoutZone ’s post made no sense. Let’s examine a Lana and Rick iconic album to see why it made no sense.

Honeymoon was made entirely in Lana and Rick’s circle. Kieron Menzies, Dean Reid, Patrick Warren - all Rick’s guys (similar to Laura working as an engineer on every Jack project). The whole album except for 2 songs was recorded at Rick’s studio. Patrick Warren is an INSTRUMENTALIST on every song except for Freak and Art Deco. That’s why we’re using this as an example.

Depending on which instrument provided on any given song by Patrick, it’s highly likely (or impossible not to have been) he either played a live instrument recorded into a mic (piano, strings, kantele), or created it digitally (synth effects on Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood).

Either way, there’s a very good chance these happened at The Green Building - this was precovid, Rick’s studio is filled with instruments and that would be the best way for the producers to get the desire result. There is however, considering Patrick Warren’s success in his own right, he provided tracks that came from his own studio of choice. It’s important to note that he has no writing credits for lyric, melody, or music on any of the songs - so anything he recorded was written by Lana or Rick (or Nina Simone writers etc.). Basically, he was recording music as dictated to him by the composers. He also doesn’t have a producer credit, so he was never ever expected to provide direction as to what sounds should be there, when they should be there, etc.

 

Here’s where @BlackoutZone's theory begins to fall apart. The idea that Patrick Warren, whose worked with Lana since 2012 would, in the midst of going back and forth out of the Green Building to record instruments for Lust for Life, would receive a random email (note: Lana’s publicly stated her team /can’t/ use email because of leakers) and then release Lana’s music is questionable at best, considering their extensive working history. What’s even more questionable is that Patrick Warren would 1) have all the stems of any given Lana song, 2) take the role of producer and himself ARRANGE a partially recorded song 3) throw together a rough mix (balancing eq, plugins, reverb, etc.) of the song and 4) then send it to Lana and her team? It’s laughable only because the sheer amount of 1) the amount of work required and 2) complete disregard of Lana and Rick’s recording process, which he had been a witness to, at this point, for the past 4 years.

 

Let’s take a look to see how mixing for Lana’s team in 2016 actually played out, according to Dean Reid:

"Lana likes to listen to things on her iPod on the beach, and she wants them to sound murky and mysterious. We’re very conscious of that. If we do something that doesn’t fit and that sticks out, we immediately get reactions from Lana or Rick. There is this thing about Lana that if we know she’ll be showing up in half an hour, we have an instinct about what she’s going to like and what not, and so it’s like: ‘Hurry up and make it sound good, so when she walks in the door she’ll be smiling.’ And if she’s not smiling we know how to pull it together really quickly. But she’s in the room for much of the process, and incredibly meticulous about vocal levels, for example. A lot of the vocal rides are dictated by her. She hears 0.2dB differences in volume,”

 

And according to Kieron Menzies: “She’s very involved during all stages. Obviously she’s central to the writing, but she also sits with us during a lot of the production and mixing.”

“We often do late-night rough mixes,” Menzies elaborates, “so Lana has something she can take home, and that we can play in our cars to check.”

 

If Lana, in 2016, the time these fakes allegedly occurred, was sitting in the room for months and months with 2 guys, how on earth would it be plausible for Patrick Warren, an instrumentalist with an extensive history of working with Lana and Rick, be fooled in the way that @BlackoutZone described? It makes no sense at all, and that’s before we look at the sheer impracticalities of it.

 

Mixing a song takes months, and the files are huge. Mixing and mastering are not “basic end steps” as @BlackoutZone described. They take weeks at minimum.

Example: Dean Reid "when we got the first mastered songs back, she was really dismayed by how they sounded, and it turned out to be the dithering down from 24- to 16-bit that was bothering her!"

 

To mix along the way, as Kieron and Dean do, you need to be a part of an ongoing recording process. All of the files are on Rick’s local network of computers (they have a twin setup), and Kieron and Dean have said they never even work on one song at the same time so they don’t step on each other’s toes. These files, by the way, are huge. The stems themselves create data, but the tracks containing stems are massive. For example, Lust for Life (the song) in its final version had 129 tracks of vocals, drums, effects, etc. It’s a five minute song with basic verse chorus verse chorus bridge chorus structure and has 129 tracks. Massive.

So it’s questionable that Patrick, as an instrumentalist, has all of these tracks on his home computer just laying around. It’s even more questionable that Patrick is sitting around mixing files that start in Pro Tools, switching to Logic for some reason and then reconfiguring them back to be reimported? into Pro tools at The Green Building. It doesn’t make any sense. What most likely happened is one of two scenarios, accounting for @BlackoutZone (unverified yet question raising) claim about the metadata export info. I don’t really have an opinion on the likelihood of one over the other, as they could both be true at the same time.

 

Scenario A: During the recording of the song, Patrick worked from his own studio to record live or digital instruments, for some reason not at the Green Building. In order to record his section properly, he was sent rough mixes of certain parts of the song (whether it was just vocal and piano or more meaty versions) and then recorded his sections alongside them using Logic.

Scenario B: At some point during the recording of the songs Patrick was sent rough mixes in the forms of mp3 to take home and listen and hear how his instruments sounded to see if he wanted to rerecord, or because he was asked to rerecord them, OR after the songs were done, he was sent the rough mixes to hear his part, purely as common courtesy and a member of the team.

 

However, in both of these scenarios, it would be a logistical nightmare to send him the entire data file (massive), and there would be no need to do so, since he’s not a producer or engineer. Without the file and with only an exported copy, there’s no way he could arrange the songs into a “fake” mix Lana nor Rick approved of. Because he would only have a sound file. So the idea that Patrick himself was fooled into thinking Lana’s team was asking him for a rough mix is improbable because it is implausible.

 

The only part of @BlackoutZone's theory that could be potentially true is that Patrick was responsible for the songs getting out in someway (perhaps even deception), and/or the strings or some other instrument he provided were in a different section than Lana or Rick wanted. But there’s no actual evidence of that. I could make an entire separate thread about song composition that demonstrates the unlikely nature of this “fake songs” theory as well, but this post is long enough.

 

Perhaps Patrick was the source of the leaks (we may never truly know) - but it definitely wasn’t in the way that @BlackoutZone described, because that would be logistically impossible and also make no sense if you give it 3 seconds of thought into how music is made. This theory is debunked, the songs are not fake. One thing is clear however: @111 is certainly owed an apology.

 

 

*Lastly ownership: the idea that commissioned producers, instrumentalists, etc. would risk the legal consequences of reproducing songs using recordings they have no claim of ownership to is laughable. It’s just not worth it. There is a lot of money in master recording rights, and they’re usually owned by labels with armies of lawyers. Beware any such theories of producers or  instrumentalists getting crafty with sound files they don’t own (or even likely have access to, as in this specific case).

[BartenderDeco 19,635]

may come back… be here

[Veinsineon 76,621]

3 minutes ago, BartenderDeco said:

may come back… be here

 it’s March….. soon to be April 

[honeymo0n 8,621]

the way the ocean blvd post-release thread is nowhere to be seen after all these leaks

[BartenderDeco 19,635]

4 minutes ago, Veinsineon said:

 it’s March….. soon to be April 

April… APRIL FOOLS