To express the full extent of their genius, the Beatles spent hundreds of hours in the studio experimenting. Since then, some have devoted entire books to their production secrets. For our part, we offer a ten-song breakdown of the Fab Four.
1. Half-speed recording on “In My Life”
We start this technical sweep with one of the Beatles’ most famous studio tricks: the “Half-Speed” recording, featured on the iconic “In My Life, ” the standout track from the 1965 album Rubber Soul. Written by John Lennon and inspired by his own life, “In My Life” is a melancholy ode to love and the passing of time. During the recording of the song in London, even though all the instruments had been recorded, something was missing in the bridge. John asked his producer, the iconic George Martin, to find “something that sounds baroque” as a reflection of the plunge into the past embodied by this track.
Martin wrote this Bachesque piano solo, but didn’t feel capable of playing it at the requested tempo. To “cheat, ” the producer and his sound engineers recorded the solo on a tape running at half speed. When they played the tape back at normal speed, the solo gained an octave and sounded twice as fast. In the process, the timbre of the piano changed slightly, as had the attack, giving Martin’s solo that metallic look and incisive sound.
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2. The cutting and random assembly of tape loops on “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”
This coup was courtesy of George Martin and his engineer Geoff Emerick. They selected a number of recordings of fairgrounds and calliopes (those famous steam-powered carts that played music through compressed-air whistles) tunes. Then they cut out bits of the tape of these recordings with scissors and put them together randomly. The result was a textural effect that was both coherent and messy, giving the track its most beautiful psychedelic face.
It’s a technique within the reach of any music-production software user today, but back then, it was no easy feat. Let’s just say that instead of chiseling away at Wav files at the tip of their mouse, George Martin and his crew embarked on a veritable operation of magnetic tape mutilation, letting their creativity run wild.
3. Reverse tape playback on “I’m Only Sleeping”
It won’t have escaped fans of the album Revolver (1966) that the guitar solo on the track “I’m Only Sleeping” is upside down. Here, it’s the result of meticulous work by George Harrison, who is said to have spent nearly five hours recording guitar tracks, then constructing a solo by asking engineers to run the tapes backward. In the song, the solo is made up of two similar tracks, one recorded with a fuzz effect and the other brighter. Harrison’s idea was to give the song “a dreamlike mood and charm” to go along with Lennon’s line that the song was “a simple reflection of his love of laziness.”
Once again, the mechanics of reversing tape playback may not seem surprising by itself. But what’s interesting here was the time taken by George Harrison to compose the solo forward to ensure that it would be believable in reverse. That detail might seem insignificant but lends a certain cachet to the maneuver.
4. The double-track recording on “Tomorrow Never Knows”
With this process, Townsend pioneered the “flanging” technique. Mechanically, the engineer plays on the speed of two similar tracks and creates a “phase cancellation” phenomenon, where the two copies of the same waveform are slightly offset, creating this “rounded” sonic illusion like the sound of an aircraft engine.
5. “The Ringo Tone” on “Ticket to Ride”
Many detractors spread the rumor of a weak link in the band, a simplistic, low-tech drummer. But on closer inspection, the gossipers are acting in bad faith. This “simple” sound, wrongly disparaged, is one of the pillars of the band’s identity, the fruit of close collaboration between Ringo and George Martin. Unlike drummers of the time, who were mostly influenced by jazz drummers’ tunings, Starr tuned his drums differently. The alto and mid toms were tighter, the bass drum and floor tom less so. To muffle the sound, he removed the front skin of the bass drum and added blankets. He also had a habit of using all sorts of objects to dampen the sound: tea towels draped over the toms, a pack of cigarettes, tape or even John Lennon’s harmonica to soften the sound of the snare drum. Finally, the resonant skins of the toms were removed to flatten the sound all the more.
6. The saturation without an amp in “Revolution”
“Revolution” was the B-side of “Hey Jude”. At Lennon’s instigation, the Beatles launched their first song with a political connotation, capitalizing on the revolutionary climate sweeping the planet in 1968. The song was not considered to be commercial and was treated as second-rate. Yet, here again, our Beatles demonstrated their creativity in the studio. From the very first seconds of the track, the listener is gripped by the saturated guitar tone and the crackling fuzz effect. What’s interesting here is that this famous fuzzed guitar sound wasn’t generated by an amp.
7. The string recording on “Eleanor Rigby”
Two years before the revolutionary anthem embodied in “Revolution, ” the Fab Four released the opposite extreme: “Eleanor Rigby.” The second track on the Revolver album, it’s a feat of minimalism and subtlety, a tragic ballad about suburban loneliness set on a bed of classical strings and devoid of rock instruments to speak of. Paul McCartney was inspired by Vivaldi and the classical music he listened to with his partner at the time, British actress Jane Asher. Instead of bass and guitar, a string octet took over the space (violins, cellos…). But once again, it’s George Martin who was responsible for the crisp result.
Inspired by the soundtrack to Bernard Herrman’s terrifying Psycho (1960), Martin swapped the traditional warmth of string instruments in pop ballads for more active, percussive sounds. To achieve this, the strings were recorded as close up as possible thanks to a microphone nearer than normal to the instruments and recorded both with and without vibrato. The strings were also compressed with a Fairchild 660 limiter to control dynamic variation. In this way, the sound of the strings was doubled and stood out clearly. They were no longer accompanying instruments but protagonists of the piece, competing with the space occupied by the voice.
8. Paul McCartney’s obsessive practice on “Oh! Darling”
A smooth studio session isn’t necessarily just about technique. Often, it’s a question of interpretation. During the recording sessions for Abbey Road in 1969, Paul McCartney wanted to record his best possible performance on the song “Oh! Darling! Every morning, he arrived before the other band members and tried to record his voice as raw and spontaneously as possible. Alan Parsons, the man behind the scenes on this album, describes McCartney’s obsession: ”He’d come in and record the song every morning for days on end. If he didn’t like the take, he’d stop dead and start again the next day. According to him, his voice on a second take was nothing like that of the first."
In the case of “Oh! Darling”, it’s not really the story of a studio technique but of a trade secret. No plugin is capable of restoring to a singer’s voice the spontaneity of a first take with the alarm clock voice, and McCartney’s obsession with getting THE right take is a reflection of bewildering perfectionism. Was it really necessary, though, is hard to say.
9. The cacophonous frenzy on “Yellow Submarine”
Let’s put aside McCartney’s perfectionism and Martin’s millimetric arrangements for a few minutes. Two months after the release of the White Album, the Beatles put out “Yellow Submarine”, their tenth studio album, which isn’t really a studio album, since it’s the soundtrack to an animated film released seven months earlier. The album featured six Beatles songs, and seven instrumental pieces composed exclusively by Martin. On this opus, the Beatles are having fun, and this is reflected in the album’s title track. McCartney wanted to write a children’s song with simple lyrics and a catchy chorus. He entrusted Ringo Starr with the song’s interpretation. And the least we can say is that the recording session was not a relaxing one.
The secret behind the production of Yellow Submarine, and what gives it its character, is a collective affair. On June 1, 1966, having completed the recording of vocals and rhythm tracks, the band planned to record a multitude of sound effects. In front of an annoyed George Martin, the Beatles were joined by Brian Jones, Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull and actress Pattie Boyd.
In a studio that smelled of marijuana, a dozen people embarked on the most bizarre recording session in the band’s history. The “instruments” recorded were unconventional. Brian Jones tapped a glass, the Beatles’ driver shook old iron chains, Paul McCartney shouted and cheered an imaginary driver while John Lennon blew bubbles. Sound engineer Geoff Emerick remembers Lennon placing a relatively waterproof microphone in a condom and dipping it in a bottle of water, all in an attempt to record an “underwater voice.”
In short, what’s interesting to note here is that a team made up of some of the most illustrious musicians on the planet at the time, backed by one of the most renowned producers, showed an uninhibited and thoroughly recreational side to their production, a year before the band split up.
10. The ATOC on “Paperback writer”
“Paul is one of the most innovative bass players I know, ” said Lennon. On the song “Paperback Writer” on the 1966 album Revolver, it wasn’t just McCartney’s talent that gave us that particularly heavy, punchy Motown-style bass sound. Sound engineer Tony Clark, in charge of mastering the track, refers to the use of a “huge box with flashing lights that looked like a Cyclops’ eye.” This box was an innovation known as Automatic Transient Overload Control (ATOC).
At EMI Studios in London, McCartney abandons his Höfner violin-shaped bass and played on an amplified Rickenbacker using a speaker as a microphone. Positioned opposite the bass speaker, the moving diaphragm of the second speaker created the signal. This technique produced an unusually powerful bass sound without the risk of causing the needle to jump during mastering. The technique was also used on the track “Rain”, one of the loudest Beatles’ tracks in terms of volume according to sound engineer Geoff Emerick.
