The Cheatles (Chinese Beatles) - Zaiyiqi (Let It Be)

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"The Cheatles - the Chinese Beatles" are a Beijing based non-commercial amateur band, dedicated to charity projects "Sun Village" and "A School for Sichuan", and not to be confused with a renowned Beatles' cover band with a similar English name in Great Britain. No commercial sale or broadcasting of the albums or of the material on this website is permitted. Zaiyiqi -- Audio For long, our plan had been to produce a video-clip the basis of which had to be a good sound track. We chose the song "Zaiyiqi", our Chinese version of" Let it Be", as at our live concerts this was clearly our Chinese audience's favourite, and because the message of friendship and solidarity in Yingchun's lyrics suited the charity purpose of our production. Originally, Martin sang the entire song, but to reinforce that message we chose to have Kai, Peter and Richie sing one verse each, while Martin would sing the chorus with all others as back-up vocals. Tang Dynasty studios in Beijing offered us professional and patient assistance with the sound recording. The following is only for those interested in technical details: Pop-songs are nowadays usually produced by recording one instrument or voice after each other, while jazz-bands prefer to record "studio-live", i.e. the entire band plays together to allow interaction between the musicians (the Beatles' early records where recorded that way too). We developed our own "third way": We used as a base-material a live-recording which CCTV had made of us in the Beijing club yugongyishan and which rendered a good atmosphere but in poor sound quality. We then, one by one, re-played each instrument and re-sang each voice in the studio, thus creating a "copy" of our live-recording with a sound much better than the original, similar to an oil-painter working along his pencil-sketch. Then Feiya joined Peter and Richie in the studio for the back-up vocals which had to be recorded simultaneously so that singers could read each others' mouths. Finally chief engineer Chen Lei, better known as guitarist of "Tang Dynasty" did the mixing and mastering. Soon after posting the song on the net we got comments of young people who had added it to their personal play-lists. Zaiyiqi -- Music Video The task was to combine the following elements: Beatles in the 60's and early 70's, old and new China, family, friendship, and help to the needy. After drafting and discarding numerous scripts we agreed on making a conventional video-clip. This meant to have the musicians perform the same song in different environments and adding only a few acted scenes. The Beatles themselves did not live up to the age of MTV and video-clips but their films, such as "A Hard Day's Night", are pathmaking predecessors to this genre. We succeeded to assemble a team of professionals around film director Wang Dan at low costs. Shooting was done on the roof of Peter's office (as an hommage to the Beatles' last public appearance on the roof of the Apple Building on January, 30th 1969), in Qu Peng's studio and -- thanks to the park management -- on Beijing's Temple of Earth (Ditan Park). Some cuts were taken from our charity concert in Sun Village. The sound for the closing credits was from CCTV's live-recording by having the final phrase "Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends" repeated in a loop.


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