Latest / Booked On Rock with Eric Senich / Unlocking The Mysteries Behind The Beatles' Iconic Sound [Episode 201]

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Unlocking The Mysteries Behind The Beatles' Iconic Sound [Episode 201] · Booked On Rock with Eric Senich

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  We're totally booked in rock and roll. I mean, I'll leave you.
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  You're reading little hands this, It's time to rock and roll. Roll up,
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  I totally booked. Welcome back to book down Rock, the podcast for
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  those about to read and rock. Find the podcast to bookdownrock dot com.
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  Musician, producer, engineer and author. Jerry Hammock is a first time guest.
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  He is on the show to talk about his new book, The Beatles
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  Recording Techniques. Step back in time to the iconic EMI Recording studios in London
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  during the revolutionary sixties where legendary music acts like The Beatles, Pink Floyd,
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  and countless others crafted their timeless sound. The Beatles Recording Techniques was meticulously researched
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  by Hammock and offers an intimate understanding of the innovative recording techniques that producer George
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  Martin and groundbreaking engineers Norman Smith, Jeff Emerck, Ken Scott and Glenn John's
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  pioneered a deep dive into their creative process. This is a fascinating read for
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  fans of the Beatles and music, and if you're a musician, producer,
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  or engineer interested in harnessing the same methodologies behind the Beatles music to shape your
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  own musical masterpieces. This is the book for you. Jerry's about to take
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  us back in time and behind the boards for so many Beatles classics. I've
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  included the songs that we discuss in this episode on the show notes page,
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  so check that out and give the songs a listen as we talk about them
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  throughout the episode. Here is Jerry Hammock. Hey, Jerry, welcome to
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  the podcast. Thanks. Eric's nice to be here with you. The Beatles
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  Recording Techniques what a great read. This is a great read for music fans
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  like myself, but also for those who are looking to create that iconic Beatles
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  sound, you know, musicians, engineers, producers. It's a must read.
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  Before I ask you about the book, though, tell us about yourself,
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  your background in music producing, engineering, and your work on the Beatles
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  recording reference manuals too, because those came before this, They did come before
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  this. Yeah, lifelong involvement in music, I mean since I can remember.
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  I've been I've been recording since I was fifteen or sixteen years old.
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  Started wiring with wiring, cross round cassette decks together to be able to do
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  this. The simulated multi tracking sort of thing, tape on tape sorts of
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  recordings and yeah, so I've always been involved in engineering, producing and mixing
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  and making music and multi instrumentalists. So all this is just baked into my
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  DNA, and the Beatles also baked into my DNA for as long as I
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  can remember. There was a point about twelve or thirteen years ago, I
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  think we're coming on that kind of time frame where I had some time on
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  my hands and I was reflecting on how to beat did their did their thing
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  in the studio, because you always get asked whenever I was in a recording
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  session with another artist, they would want a Beatles sound one way or another.
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  You know, give me that McCartney bassed sound, or give me that
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  ringo drum sound. And when you're in a service industry, you always say
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  you got it, I'll do that for you, and then you had to
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  figure out how it was done. And that going down that rabbit hole led
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  to the development of the content for the Beatles Recording Reference Manuals, which was
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  about eleven year project where I I researched every bit of gear that was used
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  in every session, uh, every bit of work that was done in every
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  session and basically reconstructed the whole cat the Beatles entire catalog from first take to
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  remix on every song. So you so you follow them out from the first
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  time they hit tape with it till it's till it's mixed on a song by
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  song basis, and then every single session in the studio, what they did,
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  who was there, the studio gear that was used, the instrumentation that
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  was used, microphones, absolutely everything that was that was done on it.
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  And all this is is this, This isn't speculation, This is all done.
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  I like to say chapter in verse in terms of of it's all it's
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  it's all very well researched. Yeah, man, I could imagine eleven years.
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  You said it's about eleven years on the five books. Yeah, yeah,
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  wow yeah, Yeah, it just turned out that way. It took
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  me longer to write about what they did than they actually spent doing it.
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  Yeah. When did you first realize that you had an ear for this type
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  of thing? Yeah? When you were a kid, did you were you
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  listening for certain things when you heard music? Yeah? I definitely always had
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  a always had an ear that would would dissect music, and I think that's
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  a musician's ear in general, because you're you're like, if you're a bass
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  player, you're always trying to hear the bass part. You're piano player,
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  you're trying to hear the piano part, you know, et cetera, et
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  cetera. So you kind of developed that ear as a as a musician.
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  Funny enough, I was in my pre music years. I want to say,
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  I was no more than ten or eleven years old, and I would
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  diagram recordings. I had this like fantasy of making recordings, and I knew
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  enough about what was going on even at that age to know that they were
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  doing multi tracking, and so I would draw like they're in the reference manuals.
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  I'd draw boxes and say, this is what's going to be on this
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  part of the tape. That's amazing. Yeah, just and how long before
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  you realize, yeah, not everybody thinks like this. My friends aren't doing
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  this though, never crossed, never really crossed my mind, and I've and
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  I've been really you know, busted in my life. To always be surrounded
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  by musicians and really talented people and people that I can learn from and that
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  are generous with their knowledge. It helped me learn how to do this stuff,
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  and you know this. It's nice to be able, you know,
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  through the Beatles to give back. It really is. Yeah, So tell
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  us about the book, The Beatles Recording Techniques. How's it laid out?
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  Because you talk about diagrams, but it's also written in a way that,
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  like I said, just music fans like myself, it's a fascinating read to
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  get the stories and your thoughts behind songs. So how is it? How's
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  it laid out? What can people expect when they get this book? So
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  the idea behind the book is is it is truly primarily targeted toward musicians,
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  producers, engineers, but it does overlap for you know, hardcore Beatles fans
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  that want to know a little bit more details about how they made the music.
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  So what I go through in it is I talk about the tools that
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  are in the studio and modern equivalence to the tools that people working in a
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  digital recording environment now can utilize to mimic the physical andronment at EMI Studios which
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  is now Abbey Road. I start with that, I discuss all of the
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  instruments used in every era of the Beatles recordings, so you know their toolkit.
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  So that's the first stop is understanding is understanding the basic toolkit that will
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  allow you to you know, to start to get there. But then you
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  have to understand why the Beatles music sounds the way it does. And there
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  are certain there are certain kind of key production and arrangement decisions that George Martin
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  made along with along with the band that gave you the kind of the vibe
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  of the Beatles in any one era that they were they working in, be
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  at the early era up through Rubber Soul, be it a Middle era up
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  through Revolver, the psychedelic era of Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour, they're transitioned
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  to eight track with a wide album, and then the late era of Let
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  It be An Abbey Road. Each of those, each of those eras has
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  certain kind of the sounds that you that you can that you can identify if
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  you if you really look into it, the ways that they looked at making
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  the music, and there were also ways that they recorded the music, and
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  so I discussed those things and then I get into the nitty gritty of of
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  mic positions for different you know, for recording every single kind of tone that
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  they recorded from acoustic instruments to amplifiers to uh, you know, just just
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  down the line, and I talk about how you again, how you can
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  achieve these things at home, and finally I get into how you mix and
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  master emulating the way that they the way that they did it at at Abbey
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  Road. And you know, the the bottom line for working like the Beatles
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  is to be working with some pretty significant limitations. And in and in modern
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  era, these limitations have to be self imposed because we have so much freedom
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  now in making music that we don't have to. But if you want to
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  get those if you want to get that sound, I describe to you the
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  ways in which they were limited and how they worked those limitations to get that
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  magic that we that we love. It is interesting the limitations that leads to
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  that leads to using your imagination, creativity, come up with something, don't
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  you know, don't don't lean on on the equipment so much. Just make
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  sure you use your imagination. And that's what I love about the old school
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  recordings especially. Actually I want to ask about the early Beatles recordings that EMI
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  in London because it was an interesting comment you made in chapter four a's we
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  go in the recording process at EMI back in the mid sixties when the Beatles
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  recorded music there now, producers were forced to think ahead and be ready due
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  to the tight scheduling process. So it's true you had to you had to
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  record both sides of a single in three hours. That's pretty much what was
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  expected for the in the earliest part of the Beatles' career. You know,
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  you could think of EMI as a as a factory. A music factory is
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  the way I describe it. And like any factory, you know, they
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  have their tools, they have their established techniques that make that help them do
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  the work that they need to do, which is produce hit records. So
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  the band's role in that is you show up ready to record, and you
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  show up righty to finish a song, you know, and in many cases
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  two songs. You're getting a side done in the block of time that you've
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  got there, which is each studios booked in three hour blocks. So now
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  to prepare for that, the producer of the session would know that X band
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  is coming in. An X band is composed of you know, let's say,
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  in the Beatles case, I've got two guitarists, the bass guitarist and
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  a drummer, and so he would he would have to make a note for
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  the engineering staff of all the microphones he needed, tape machines, he needed,
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  outboard gear he needed like compressors, compressors and limiters if he wanted access
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  to an echo chamber, or if he wanted access to plate reverbs or any
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  special effects that they had, which was very limited. But he still had
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  to make a note that he wanted this because in the background, they had
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  to plumb all of these things that you know, these were these required hard
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  wired connections between gear that sometimes wasn't in the same room. They would use
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  a patch bait that worked across the entire studio complex to be able to access
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  gear that they wanted to use on a session, or they would have to
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  know to bring it into the studio and plug it in, and so all
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  of this in advance. And they also recorded live. That was the thing
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  back at the time, like mostly just one take, maybe an overdub,
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  well one take not so much, not so much sometimes, but the idea
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  was, let's try to record it live. Like nowadays you can multi track
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  recording. You can add this later, you can do a little overdub here.
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  It was it was always the case in the in even before the Beatles,
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  that that when you're making a recording and you were working on tape.
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  So I'm not talking about direct to disc and I'm talking about working on tape
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  now that you're always trying to make like the ideal, like the perfect performance,
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  and that wasn't that wasn't always a live thing. And there are a
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  handful of cases, certainly in the Beatles catalog, where take one is the
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  song, you know, or one full take is the song. But there's
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  equally loads of songs that are that were made in the early days that were
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  the result of edits of the best performances that were then the tape was sliced
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  and pasted together, spliced together, yeah, spiced together. I'm old enough
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  to remember my old radio days splicing the tape together, yeah, which is
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  not easy to do. No, and don't mess it up because because you
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  don't get it back. But you know, again, the idea, it
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  was always to capture the best performance that you could get. Sometimes that was
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  live. Sometimes that involved that involved multiple takes, and even from the beginning
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  they were doing overdubs. There is such a thing and I described in the
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  Book of a Mono to Mono overdub, and so there's mono de mono overdubs.
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  There were twin track to twin track or a twin track stereot two,
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  twin track stereo overdubs, four track of course overdubs in that. And then
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  they got and they also got into whether it called tape reduction remixes, where
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  if you run out of room on a tape, then you'd send all that
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  to another tape and mix it at that time to a fewer number of tracks
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  to open up more tracks for more work. Again, these are really serious
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  limitations compared to today's you know, endless track counts that engineers get to work
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  with. But making those choices, making those commitments and decisions all along the
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  way is what gave the Beatles sound its signature. Yeah, a lot of
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  those recordings, like the old led Zeppelin tracks too, where you hear the
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  mistakes, they keep it in well, times so authentic well, and sometimes
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  with that it's again back in the day, perfection wasn't as much the thing
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  as as the overall feel. And if I've got you know, ninety eight
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  percent of a great take of Black Dog, you know, I'm not going
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  to redo the whole song because there's one part where you know, there's just
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  a little bit of a drag on the groove bottom squeak. Yeah, I'm
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  not you know, you're just not going to do it. And uh,
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  and there's I mean, there's there's lots of questionable performances. And if you
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  go deep into the Beatles Beatles work where that were exposed in like you know
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  when the when the rock band Stems came out for that game. Uh,
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  and you listen to some of the you listen to some of the of the
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  raw performances that are nested in there, and you're like, wow, they
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  kept that, But you have to remember that they were recording to it and
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  listening to it in context. And if it worked in context, then it's
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  good enough and you and you move on. And if it felt right,
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  you know, I had the right, had had the right Uh yeah,
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  I had the right atmosphere to it, then that's it. Then that's something
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  you keep. And a producer's job is to be is to be observant for
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  the takes that you're making that like have that little bit of magic to them.
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  Yeah, yeah, everything, you know, it's accurate enough. But
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  if I'm gonna if I'm gonna fault one way or another. It's going to
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  be the take with a feel is going to always with most, with most
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  I think seasoned producers, the take with feel is always going to be the
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  take that you want over the take that's perfect. So and there's a lot
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  of that in the Beatles catalog. There's a lot of it. Yeah,
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  absolutely, George Martin is a genius? Is he? Is he? The
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  is he the first guy that you you took to as far as production because
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  there's so many of them, there's so many grades out there, you know,
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  certainly, you know again, you know, my earliest memories, the
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  earliest musical memories are our Beatle memories. Shortly after you know, when I
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  when I really started thinking about music. Then I developed the vocabulary of producers
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  and and uh and sometimes he producers and engineers you know, from an early
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  age. And so you know, you've got like Gus Dudgeon, who did
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  all the Elton John early Elton John stuff, is just another just off the
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  charts genius producer. He did Space Oddity for David Bowie as well. Uh
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  yeah, A producer, a producer who has ears and taste and can and
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  can help an artist bring the vision forward. It's it's part of the formula.
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  Well, and I'm going to get into some of the specifics of George
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  Martin as we go through these songs. But what makes a great producer because
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  I know a lot of times George less is more approach with him, like
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  he'd let the song breath a little bit more, or he'd or he'd have
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  the guts to tell the guys in the band, no, no guitars on
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  this, No, you know what, check that kind of thing. You
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  have to make those decisions. Yeah, I mean, you know George Martin's
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  self penned book is all you need is Ears and not quite all you need
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  is Ears. But but it's a but it's an excellent point the idea because
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  for you know, for working in music, it all ends up here.
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  It ends up in our ears, it ends up in our ends up in
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  our ears. And so you're understanding that and understanding what causes confusion when you're
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  hearing it, How how clarity is managed, how confusion is managed, how
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  complexity is managed, how simplicity is managed. Understanding those aspects of sound is
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  what makes a great is what makes a great producer. And then and then
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  also understanding what what emotes and connects with the audience, so so that you're
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  helping the artists tell their story. You're helping them, you're helping project their
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  story to you know, to their audience. Those are those are the hallmarks
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  of are really of a really great producer. Martin had a kind of an
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  ethos in his production technique that I describe as a place for everything and everything
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  in its place. And and that's a very exacting sort of ethos. And
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  as you mentioned, you get to play guitar here, George or John,
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  But when we get to this bridge before the second chorus, I don't we
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  don't need to hear that guitar part anymore. Stop don't play that, and
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  it doesn't play something else, Like I've got to have guitar going all the
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  time. It's you know, what's gonna fit? There might be a piano,
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  what's gonna fit? There might be an organ. And he would always
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  uh, he would always weave that arrangement in that dance in a very effective
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  way. Surprisingly, few elements make up a lot, especially the early Beatles
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  catalog make a very full sound in the earlies. Beetle Early Beatles catalog Surprising
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  sprightly limited number of instruments are doing are doing a lot of work, but
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  it's because it's how they're used. Yeah, but did you see the interview
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  George Martin did with Brian Wilson maybe ten years ago or so, where two
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  geniuses in the same room and he's asking Brian about how he put together good
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  vibrations. It's just that that amazes me what a producer is hearing. Like
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  Brian Wilson, he's a musician, but he's also he's got a producer's mind
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  and what they hear and the absence like some I can try to remember who
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  the producer is, who prefers sometimes when on the drums, no symbols at
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  all, just dry, you know, just like why do they think of
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  that? You know, it's it's just fascinates me those things. Yeah,
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  and in some cases it's to you know, it's to achieve effect, right,
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  you know, you're you're making these choices to achieve specific effects. Uh.
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  You know, back in back in the Martin era, back in the
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  in the Beach Boys era, when Brian Wilson was working in California, they
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  had such limited you know, toolkits to do these things that they had to
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  really think it out. They really had to work out what they were gonna
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  what they were going to do, and how they were gonna how they were
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  gonna get there. Good Vibrations took six months to record. Amazing. Yeah,
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  one song took six months to record, and you know, it shows.
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  It doesn't show in a labored way, like like there's that joke where
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  you know, acting should be effortless and if you see an actor you go,
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  wow, you left everything on the screen. That's not a compliment.
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  It's you know, it's not a compliment. The idea is that we experience
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  this music without really even thinking about it, but it just hits us.
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  And and those six months on Good Vibrations was spent crafting something that just floors
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  us. But we're but we're not thinking about all of the heavy lifting that
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  went into, you know, to getting us there, in the same way
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  with with Sergeant Pepper yep, you know, or or you know, frankly
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  the work of the White album, which is extensive, but you hear it
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  and you don't hear you don't you don't experience it like that. The book
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  Down Rock Podcasts will be back after this. What I did was I put
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  together a playlist of the songs that I want to ask you about. I
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  picked a song, maybe two, out of each album, because otherwise,
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  if I did more, you'd be here all night, and I don't want
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  to keep you. I appreciate you spending your time talking about this, So
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  I picked one song. But anything you want to add about the albums as
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  a whole, you know, feel free. But I picked a song and
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  people can listen along on the show notes page. Click the link. You
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  can hear these songs. So we start with Please Please Me in nineteen sixty
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  three, I saw her standing there, so you say. George Martin focuses
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  on the beat and clean guitars. George Harrison's simple guitar fills span the gaps
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  between vocals, and his solo is bathed in a crisp echo, a great
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  effect. So how are they getting that echo to sound so crisp, Well,
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  it's echo chamber, is what they're using. At the time. That
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  was those were the primary effects that they had was simply an echo chamber,
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  and they were able to They were able to put an equalizer on the on
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  the echo chamber, meaning they could they could they could change the tone of
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  the echo it could be dark and heavy, or it could be light and
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  crisp. And in this case, they they gave us a really light,
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  really light reverb that gives us this really it reinforces kind of the upbeat nature
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  of that particular you know brand of rock and roll that we hear there and
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  and uh again, these are there are simple choices in the way that the
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  song is arranged. Where you've got to where you know, uh, Harrison
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  filling those gaps. Uh. I tend to think of of of the approach
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  that that Martin uses. I step back a couple of generations in recording and
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  think of like single mic recordings. And if anyone's familiar or have seen,
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  you know, movies with with bluegrass bands, or even see even some contemporary
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  bluegrass bands, you'll see them grouped around a microphone, and when it's time
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  to sing, the singer steps up to the microphone and sings. When it's
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  time for the mandolin soul, the singer steps back, the mandolin player steps
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  up right. And that's the sort of dance that Martin does in his production
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  in a in a lot of cases, with the ear with the early beatles
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  is what's important. Now bring it forward not important, get it out of
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  the way and uh uh. And that's the atmosphere of a of a lot
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  of the of the Police Please the album and the with the Beatles album.
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  They're very live feeling, even again if they are still recorded very traditionally in
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  terms of using multiple takes overdubs, what they called edit pieces, Like they
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  get two thirds through the song, like the back half of it wasn't quite
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  strong enough, they'd start with the back third of the song and record that
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  and they'd slice it together, slice it together. And they're doing this without
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  a click track. They're they're matching tempos just because they know the temple they
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  play the song at. Yeah, and for those not familiar with the click
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  track, that is that's just something to keep everybody on the same on the
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  same beat, on the same groove. Yeah, they didn't, it didn't
• 25:56
  exist. Yeah, So that blows my mind when I really think about it,
• 26:02
  is these guys are doing take after take after take. And if you
• 26:04
  if you've had a chance to listen to to any of the of the out
• 26:10
  takes that are out there on the internet, the bootleg out takes or session
• 26:12
  tapes, and you hear take after take after take of some Beatles songs and
• 26:18
  they're just that's almost like right on. Did they have that relationship, that
• 26:26
  chemistry with George from the from the get go, they had respect for him
• 26:29
  and whatever he said, Yeah, you know, we'll do whatever you say.
• 26:32
  And and actually I'm just thinking now, was George was he hired by
• 26:36
  the label? Well, he ran early, He ran Parlophone, Okay,
• 26:41
  so yeah, he ran Parlophone and then uh, you know it was an
• 26:47
  EMI subsidiary label. Okay, so it's owned Parlophone, owned by E M
• 26:52
  I, the you know, the least of their labels, and he was
• 26:59
  and he ran the label. Let's give this little band a shot. Yeah,
• 27:04
  yeah, yeah, yeah, there's the whole story behind all that.
• 27:08
  But uh, he was he produced them by default because he was like,
• 27:18
  you know, he was the lead. He was the lead producer. So
• 27:22
  there there was that aspect of it. When he got when he realized he
• 27:26
  could get a better financial deal, he left Parole Phone and started ai R
• 27:33
  and he leased his service. You know, he he hired his services then
• 27:37
  to do the work on the Beatles album and got a better and got a
• 27:38
  better rate. But yeah, yes, they took to him right away,
• 27:45
  like they there was that chemistry right there, like, yes, knows what
• 27:48
  he's doing, let's do what he said. He did know what he was
• 27:51
  doing. Yeah, he had had successful recordings and continued to have successful recordings
• 27:56
  around the Beatles as well. So yeah, he was a guy who who
• 28:00
  knew how to make a hit record and make good records. And he was
• 28:04
  surrounded by professionals at EMI that also made so they did what they did every
• 28:10
  day. Yeah. Yeah, Now the second album is interesting because we're talking
• 28:18
  with the Beatles, also released in nineteen sixty three. The drums and percussion
• 28:22
  sounds are surprisingly upfront on this album, you say, and I was going
• 28:26
  through each track and I think you could hear the most, probably on Devil
• 28:30
  in Her Heart. You know, you hear a lot of the percussions,
• 28:33
  but the whole album it really stands out. And you note in the book
• 28:36
  that drums and percussions are far more forward in relation to what we hear.
• 28:41
  And please, please me, why do you think that is? Was that
• 28:44
  a conscious decision? I think it was. You know, the engineer Norman
• 28:49
  Smith had a lot to do with shaping the tone of the of the live
• 28:53
  recordings, and when you all of choices that you make as an engineer about
• 29:02
  mike placements, for instance, all of that trend all that translates, but
• 29:07
  it's also in and and in particular the initial choices that are being made about
• 29:12
  the sound around that really drive in these early recordings because these are twin track
• 29:18
  recordings. These are these are only taking up two tracks of audio tape at
• 29:22
  this at this point, even if they're doing overdubs, there's still, you
• 29:26
  know, two tracks of two tracks audio tape. And in many many cases
• 29:32
  the entire backing band is on one track, on one audio track, So
• 29:40
  guitars, bass, and drums are all on one track of tape. That's
• 29:45
  not done anymore. And for people that aren't aware of that, if you're
• 29:49
  doing that and you're making that commitment, then the decisions you made are made
• 29:53
  right then and there. Everything you're deciding about the sound happens right there when
• 29:59
  it's going to date. And so that's so the choices that that uh that
• 30:06
  Norman Smith drove through again his mic placements and his and his initial balances of
• 30:11
  tone and volume relationships, that's what gave it the sound. And and in
• 30:17
  this era he he had, the drums were hotter than they were in the
• 30:21
  police. Please meet Era. So this is a question on him. It's
• 30:23
  maybe a stupid question, but I'm gonna put it. So, all of
• 30:26
  these albums they're in stereo years later. So those instruments, were they all
• 30:33
  and also in one channel or were they able to separate? Yeah, one
• 30:37
  track, one channel, one channel. That's it. Okay, that's it,
• 30:41
  which is which is why you know a lot of uh beetle snobs,
• 30:47
  which I can I can be. I can be many days of the week
• 30:52
  where we'll say that the mono mixes of the early work are the best mixes.
• 30:56
  I was gonna ask you, Yeah, yeah, not that, yeah,
• 31:00
  with only with only with only two tracks and recorded not in stereo,
• 31:06
  meaning not recorded with a full one hundred and eighty degree sound field, but
• 31:11
  instead record as two individual mono tracks. Getting a good stereo image is kind
• 31:17
  of tough, and there was no need to back then. It was for
• 31:18
  am radio, well the well their focus was. Their focus was am radio.
• 31:23
  Their focus was also the consumer focus in the UK was what they called
• 31:30
  the uh the record The record players were called dan sets. They were a
• 31:34
  little just little you know, home turn tables with a single speaker, right
• 31:41
  and so that's what you'r and so that's your that's your consumer format. And
• 31:48
  and just like you know, just like today, if if you're you know,
• 31:52
  you you mix, you mix, or you developed the music to the
• 31:56
  format. The dominant format is still stereo today, but there are you know,
• 32:04
  there are specific recordings that are prepared and mixed for surround sound. And
• 32:09
  now for atmost, which has not only surround but has but has height to
• 32:15
  it. Right at Most, Yes, yes, now, I believe.
• 32:20
  I believe Apple only has music and Atmost that is that I believe. So
• 32:25
  I'm trying to remember if you have like if you have if you have Apple
• 32:29
  or iTunes or whatever, that's the only way you're gonna hear I don't know,
• 32:31
  but yeah, well and you need an atmost system, which yeah,
• 32:36
  okay, kind of price. Yeah, but I do remember the surround sound,
• 32:40
  but you had to have a certain you had to have the setup to
• 32:44
  hear it. But like Dark Side of the Moon is released and surrounding and
• 32:46
  the idea is that you know, the people that had well, the earliest
• 32:52
  iteration of that that I lived through was quad and you know, so for
• 32:58
  speakers, and I remember some early like who mixes and things that were in
• 33:04
  quad and yeah, and those are a lot of fun. But again,
• 33:09
  do these things hold on? Do they? You know, who knows in
• 33:14
  twenty years, well even you'll be talking about any of these kind of formats.
• 33:20
  But STEREO's have long shelf life, and stereo for the high fidelity end
• 33:25
  of it is still kind of a benchmark piece. But in the Beatles era,
• 33:30
  it was mono up through nineteen sixty eight, it was mono was dominant.
• 33:38
  Now quickly and after sixty eight stereo became the format and they left mono
• 33:45
  in the dirt because of FM radio, right, yeah, FM radio.
• 33:50
  Yeah, yeah, But I can see why you would prefer the mono over
• 33:54
  the stereo remix, because it's kind of like those old classic black and whites
• 33:59
  when in the eighties they all of a sudden colorized them. It's like it's
• 34:01
  a wonderful life and color. No, it wasn't made for that to begin
• 34:07
  with. So yeah, I could see that nineteen sixty four is a hard
• 34:09
  day's night. Of course. The most iconic track is the title track.
• 34:14
  An endless debate among Beatles fans about what comprises the first epic chord of this
• 34:20
  song. So what are fans saying it is? And what is it that
• 34:22
  we're really hearing? This is kind of like a Phil Spectro type of thing.
• 34:25
  It's like a combination of things all at once. Well, it is
• 34:29
  this And this is again one of one of the great aspects of George Martinez
• 34:35
  an arranger, is he realized that in many, many cases, it's a
• 34:39
  composite tone that that gets your attention more than any one individual tone or any
• 34:49
  one individual part. So, you know, so this big, you know,
• 34:52
  big crashing chord at the beginning of a Hard Day's Night. There we're
• 35:00
  doing it. I'd have to open up my own book to see to see
• 35:04
  what those are anymore. But you know, you got at least a couple
• 35:07
  of guitars going there. I forget if you've got a piano that's adding to
• 35:13
  it. It sounds like it. Well yeah, but sound can be sound
• 35:19
  deceiving, deceiving. It's so deceiving. But you know, the idea here
• 35:27
  is is the wearing of tones makes them more interesting. It makes them more
• 35:31
  interesting that it makes them more more memorable. Uh. In the solo for
• 35:37
  a Hard Day's Night, we have the well, you know, it's well
• 35:40
  known for for a lot of Beatles fans that that was recorded at half the
• 35:45
  speed that it's played back at because it was a little bit difficult for Harrison
• 35:50
  to do the triplets and do those consistently, So that's an overdub. And
• 35:54
  at the same time that was being played, Martin played the exact same line
• 35:59
  on the piano. And so now we have the guitar, you know,
• 36:02
  so we hear the guitar, but the guitar we're hearing is a guitar that's
• 36:07
  composited with a piano. And he did that in many, many, many
• 36:13
  instances across there, across the catalog where you have and it's it's actually it's
• 36:19
  an orchestral technique. It's an orchestral technique where you'll have multiple instruments doing a
• 36:24
  unison part and they're taking up but they're taking up a different textural aspect of
• 36:30
  it, and they're taking up a different part of the frequency spectrum. So
• 36:37
  you know the texture of a piano, you know, let's just for giggles
• 36:43
  say that in the Harday's Night opening chord, that that is a piano there,
• 36:46
  Okay, And again it's in a book somewhere that I out my copy
• 36:53
  of everybody. The texture of the first the percussion of a piano. You
• 37:02
  know, piano is a percussion instrument. So the hammer of a piano striking
• 37:09
  the string gives you an initial hit that is unlike a guitar getting string getting
• 37:16
  getting strummed. And now you have the combination of those. I've got strum
• 37:22
  and I've got a punch of percussion. And Martin did those sorts of things
• 37:27
  all the time. Yeah, And was it his decision for that opening,
• 37:31
  that dramatic opening, because it's such a great effect to it, whereas if
• 37:36
  you just started right in with it's been a hard day, you know,
• 37:39
  just right in with that, it's not the same as that. I mean
• 37:44
  the narrative. The narrative is that they knew that it was going to this
• 37:47
  was going to be the opening song for the movie, and they want and
• 37:51
  they did want something powerful, right, so so so yeah, there was
• 37:55
  a there's intention behind it. And this is a another you know, this
• 38:00
  is another lesson of the Beatles is is you make decisions with intent. I'm
• 38:07
  doing I'm not doing this. I'm not just gonna doodle along on my guitar
• 38:12
  and then something cool, Oh great, it's what do I want to do
• 38:15
  with it, and now I'm going to try to do that with it.
• 38:19
  So you start in with an intent, with an idea, and you try
• 38:23
  to fulfill that idea. It might not be a good idea, but you're
• 38:28
  not just going in and you're not like throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing
• 38:31
  what's going to stick. That was never the Beatles way. They had definite
• 38:38
  ideas of what they wanted to do, even if those ideas changed. When
• 38:43
  they changed, there was a new definite idea of what they wanted to do,
• 38:46
  and then they would do the work and they were very disciplined at it
• 38:51
  of preparing to get that on tape. So the opposite, did they ever
• 38:55
  have any happy accident moments? Oh, whoa, that's cool. Yeah,
• 39:00
  lots of them. There's lots of them. Uh probably. You know,
• 39:06
  famously in the White album era, you've got long, long, long,
• 39:10
  the Harrison song, and at the end of it where it's getting all kind
• 39:15
  of freaky and acidy. Uh, as the song's tailing out, you hear
• 39:22
  this rattle going on. You hear an organ organ park come up and there's
• 39:25
  this rattling noise. Well, that rattle is a wine bottle that was sitting
• 39:30
  on top of a Leslie's speaker cabinet for the organ. And when you heard
• 39:34
  it hit a certain note on the on the organ, the bottle, wine
• 39:37
  bottle rattled and they and they heard that and went and of course they stopped,
• 39:45
  but they didn't go like, hey, take the wine bottle off.
• 39:50
  They went, hey throw a mic on that wind bottle. So uh yeah,
• 39:59
  and these and again this is the It's part of the engineer's art.
• 40:02
  As far as I'm concerned, is you have your ear out for you have
• 40:06
  your ear out for these things. And if they again, if they work,
• 40:09
  if they work in an interesting way, or they work in a way
• 40:13
  that exposes more emotion, or or you think is going to connect the listener
• 40:17
  more to the track, then you follow that. You know you you follow
• 40:22
  that, You embrace that accident. Was it? Was it? You pagem
• 40:24
  when he was working on the Peter Gabriel album where Phil Collins plays on a
• 40:29
  track and he stumbles on the Phil Collins sound, the snare sound. They're
• 40:34
  just messing around, tweaking with the board. I think you're talking about face
• 40:39
  value within the air tonight. Well, that sound originated when Phil just sat
• 40:45
  in on a track for Peter on a song off of Peter's solo album,
• 40:52
  and Peter Phil was just in there messing around the drums, playing around,
• 40:54
  and they were messing around with a mixer, just getting things set up,
• 40:58
  and and that tone kicked in and feels like whoa, what is that?
• 41:02
  What are you doing? Don't touch it, you know, And then he
• 41:06
  used that for the rest of god for the rest of the eighties, right
• 41:08
  into the nineties. It was just like the definitive sound. Yeah, so
• 41:13
  what's like a certain uh gate reverb? Like, well, what, yeah,
• 41:16
  what that sound was is they had a in in uh most in most
• 41:22
  professional studios, you have a talk what's called a talkback system, and so
• 41:25
  in the studio there's just a mic hanging there that that you can that you
• 41:31
  can talk and communication to the engineer through and the engineer will hit a butt
• 41:36
  we'll hit a button and talk to the studio and you release it and it
• 41:38
  activates the the talkback mic. Right. Well, that that mic has a
• 41:43
  has a noise gate on it, So when you don't you know, you
• 41:46
  don't hear a bunch of you know, noise out of the studio. You
• 41:50
  only hear when people are talking. Well, the that that that mic was
• 41:53
  left open and that's what captured those the drum sound. It's just just massive
• 41:59
  rooms sound that's going through a gate. Yes and uh and uh. But
• 42:04
  when they figured out they liked it, then overnight they had the technician uh
• 42:13
  and they have the tech for the studio get in and wire that into the
• 42:17
  board. Yes, so they could just access it any time they wanted it
• 42:22
  and it was no longer you know, an accident. And by the way,
• 42:24
  it's intruder. That's a song I just looked up quickly because that's on
• 42:28
  Peter's album Melt Melt. Well, that's more where his face melting and smelting.
• 42:35
  Yeah, but that's that's those happy accents scratch yeah right, yes,
• 42:42
  but yeah, those happy accidents. Man, like the Zeppelin one on a
• 42:46
  Whole Lot of Love, that one part where you hear Robert plant fate before
• 42:52
  he sings way down inside you hear him singing it prior to him singing it,
• 42:55
  but very low faded, and that was just an accident of the of
• 43:00
  the tape I think was Uh, well, well, often you'll have to
• 43:04
  guide tracks where where you'll sing all you know, where where if you're recording
• 43:08
  a band live, and the Beatles have This is again if you listen deep
• 43:13
  into and have access to you know, high quality uh you know Beatles performances,
• 43:21
  you can hear in some cases way out in the background you'll hear you'll
• 43:27
  hear John singing or Paul singing, and they're queuing. They're queueing the band
• 43:31
  as you're playing live. You know, So if you're doing Sergeant Pepper,
• 43:36
  they might go it was twenty years ago, and they're off mic, and
• 43:39
  now okay, we're doing and the second verse, they'll sing the first part
• 43:43
  of the second verse, so we know we're at the second verse, and
• 43:45
  we know we're at the chorus. And that's just a way that you play
• 43:49
  together live when you're tracking without a vocal. And I do remember back in
• 43:53
  the radio days where we had reel to reel and karts, you would if
• 43:58
  you if you recorded a commercial on a car and that commercial it's run is
• 44:02
  ended, so now it's time to put something over it, you would you
• 44:07
  put it over the magnet thing, right, and you just keep going back
• 44:09
  and forth, back and forth until it was gone. But sometimes if you
• 44:13
  didn't do it enough, it's a little bit of a faded you hear a
• 44:15
  little bit of the faded, like the remnants of that audio still there,
• 44:20
  and and that I think is also part of that whole lot of love story
• 44:24
  too. But that's old school, man. That's just you can't you can't
• 44:29
  get that. I mean, imagine that just you stumble on something like that.
• 44:31
  And it's funny that, you know, the I can guarantee you Zeppa
• 44:37
  never wanted just to hear that, right, They never wanted to hear this
• 44:42
  is a And that was Eddie Kramer, by the way, too. I
• 44:45
  think that was, Yeah, this is a it's one of it's one of
• 44:52
  my equipples with the with the fiftieth anniversary sets that that job's Martin and Sam
• 45:02
  Oaknell mixed this idea that we're hearing all of this stuff that they never really
• 45:10
  intended us to hear. A big a big example would be the fiftieth anniversary
• 45:17
  remix of A Day in the Life where we hear Mal counting to twenty four
• 45:25
  and we're not meant to hear that. You know, we're not meant to
• 45:29
  hear that. You know, Beatles didn't want Mal's voice on A Day in
• 45:35
  the Life. Now, I'd love to sneak into the photo shots. He
• 45:39
  was pretty would have been happy to know his voices. Now, yeah,
• 45:44
  so but yeah, it wasn't intended. So no, it's not not not
• 45:47
  not intended all at all. It's like George Lucas Star Wars stuff, right
• 45:53
  when he redid all the Star Wars. What are you doing? It's perfect
• 45:59
  way it is. Well yeah, and again we so we as fans,
• 46:02
  and we as fans, we hear these things. To us, they're a
• 46:07
  little easter eggs and and so I get that those things are brought forward out
• 46:14
  of historical interest. But uh, you know again, the the Beatles never
• 46:20
  intended you to hear you know, Mauth, they never intended you to hear
• 46:24
  on the new uh red and blue mixes Red the red one in particular.
• 46:31
  Actually, I think it might besr standing there. You hear a lot more
• 46:36
  of George's guitar, like a lot more of it, and some of George's
• 46:43
  guitar in that song. He's just hanging back there, kind of waiting for
• 46:47
  his lead moments, so he's just kind of scratching away. But those scratches
• 46:52
  were never meant to be Forward's playing. Lennon's playing was forward and then George
• 47:00
  comes forward to filming the gaps, you know, between the vocal parts,
• 47:04
  so he's just kind of like scratching like here comes my now Brendada lick.
• 47:08
  Yeah, whose call was that? Was it George Martin that made the call?
• 47:12
  And the remixing? Uh? Giles? Yeah, yeah, these are
• 47:16
  these are choices, you know, there are choices that they made. And
• 47:21
  and again it's interesting to hear the whole thing that he did, but it
• 47:25
  was also never intended that we hear the whole thing that they did. Speaking
• 47:32
  of creating, you're creating an illusion when you make a recording. Recording is
• 47:37
  you know, even a live recording is not live. You know, you're
• 47:42
  creating an illusion and and for most artists that that illusion is meant to be
• 47:49
  the best of them. The book Down Rock Podcasts will be back after this
• 47:55
  speaking of guitars uh and how they sound, and we'll get back to the
• 48:00
  Beatles' music. But I am a huge Van Halen fan and they were one
• 48:04
  of the bands. On that first album. You hear Eddie's guitar all on
• 48:08
  one channel, Like, what was the thought process of that? Because it's
• 48:12
  strange to hear, you know. And then as the years went on,
• 48:15
  it was more full sound. You'd hear the guitars in both channels, but
• 48:17
  it was like guitars in one channel and then just the echo of that guitar
• 48:22
  on the other side. Well Ted Templeman was the producer for those. Yeah,
• 48:27
  those those choices. Those choices are a lot about about the picture you
• 48:31
  want to present to the listener. And and many producers would argue that mono
• 48:40
  mono directional sounds come across as more live. They have a more of a
• 48:47
  live feel because as a listener, you go like, there's that guitar right
• 48:52
  over there, okay, and there's that you know, and there's that backing
• 48:54
  vocal over there, and there's that violin you know over there, and so
• 48:59
  it aws your attention to those things. And with a small band, you
• 49:04
  know, with a with a three you know, three or four piece band,
• 49:07
  Van Hald essentially a three piece band, right, Yeah, that's not
• 49:12
  unheard of at all. That that the way that you set up a three
• 49:15
  piece band on tape or or or or for a recording is is I've got
• 49:20
  my drums taking up a good portion of the mid frame of my stereo field,
• 49:28
  and I'll throw my bass to the left and my guitar player to the
• 49:30
  right, and you always know where they are. He thought his car stereo
• 49:36
  was broken when he first banging the speaker. Is that, you know?
• 49:42
  And uh and and then you know, it's very common to break out a
• 49:47
  little bit and to add just a little bit more unified depth by by either
• 49:53
  a little bit of a delay on the on that guitar that's in the exact
• 49:58
  opposite channel, or a little bit of reburb on it. But for many,
• 50:05
  many, many listening experiences, that doesn't matter that much because once you
• 50:10
  get a certain distance away from your you know, stereo, if you're you
• 50:16
  know, like behind me here, you've got stereo monitors here in this vintage
• 50:23
  e in my studios mixing room. If you back off of these monitors,
• 50:29
  if you walk away from these monitors, not the position that my friend over
• 50:31
  here is in. Folks, Folks only listen to the audio version. You
• 50:37
  who is that? Do you know who that guy is? Yeah, if
• 50:40
  you're watching on YouTube, let know. But he wasn't paid enough. We
• 50:45
  never are. But you know, if you step away far enough from even
• 50:51
  from that you know that image there, you get a mono image. So
• 50:55
  a lot of the way that we experience music in the world and even in
• 50:59
  our in our homes. Again, unless we're sitting right between those speakers,
• 51:02
  we experience it in mono. And so what's most important are the overall volume
• 51:09
  relationships between the different sounds rather than the placement of them necessarily. From nineteen
• 51:17
  sixty four is Beatles for Sale. We have eight days a week. Interesting
• 51:21
  notes on this one. We hear a phadon in the beginning, a rare
• 51:23
  choice for the era. I've always wondered what led to a song just in
• 51:27
  general having a slow fade, and why was it decided? Here? Do
• 51:30
  you know why they decided to do that? I don't know why, but
• 51:36
  you know, if you think about it again in context of its time,
• 51:39
  and you think about it in context of AM radio, and you think about
• 51:44
  it in context of an AM radio DJ. This having this little roll up
• 51:51
  to get people excited and to introduce the song, right, it gives them
• 51:58
  all of that. It gives you as a as a DJ, the opportunity
• 52:01
  to hit the post. And here's the Beatles with eight days a week.
• 52:06
  Two I need right, it's a hit the post, baby. It's the
• 52:08
  old top forty radio thing. You gotta hit the post. Yeah, Yeah,
• 52:13
  that's cool. So maybe it was just designed, yes for could have
• 52:16
  very well been designed just for that purpose, for to allow for that kind
• 52:21
  of drama, because for a DJ, that's a fun thing to be able
• 52:25
  to do, right, Yeah. And I always thought maybe it was just
• 52:29
  maybe the band was jamming and they just started rolling tape and it's then you
• 52:32
  fade up. But I mean that could be in other examples, but in
• 52:35
  this it's it's likely. Yeah, it's it's it's designed for for the DJs.
• 52:39
  Yeah. The next album is nineteen sixty five's Help on Yesterday. We
• 52:44
  really get an idea of how important George Martin was to the Beatles sound.
• 52:47
  Here can you talk about a string corp tet arrangement? And how this is
• 52:52
  the one where he makes that call like he excludes the drums, the bass,
• 52:54
  guitar, solo and backing vocals. It's like check your egos at the
• 52:59
  door, right It really, it really was, And to me this was
• 53:06
  a real turning point in terms of the maturity of the Beatles as recording artists.
• 53:13
  If ever, there was a demonstration of what we're going to do here
• 53:16
  is serve the song. What's best for the song yesterday is the is the
• 53:22
  first absolutely clear example of I know you're a band, you know, I
• 53:29
  know there's four guys in the Beatles. You know, we could probably do
• 53:34
  an arrangement of this where everyone gets a chance to play, but that's not
• 53:37
  what's best for this song, and the and Martin advocated for that, and
• 53:44
  the Beatles, you know, bought into it, and I think it opened
• 53:50
  I think it opened up their thinking and changed their thinking going forward about about
• 53:57
  what it what it meant to be a Beatles song. All of a sudden,
• 54:02
  almost anything could be a Beatles song as long as they all had a
• 54:09
  say, they had a voice. But they didn't need to have a performance.
• 54:15
  They just needed to have a voice. Is this a song that was
• 54:19
  played with the drums and guitar and bass live in Germany? Or am I
• 54:22
  thinking of a different song yesterday? Yeah, there was a song I'm trying
• 54:29
  to think of more in my head. The the the Tokyo performance. Okay,
• 54:37
  I feel like and look, there are Beatles fans out there that's probably
• 54:39
  there. They're like they know the answer to this. Yeah, but it
• 54:42
  was Leave it in the comments. Leave it in the comments because I know
• 54:45
  it was on YouTube and it was like a rare instance of where the whole
• 54:50
  band's playing it, But on the studio it's it's different. It's not including
• 54:54
  all the guys in the band. So there you go. Yeah, leave
• 54:57
  it in the comments. We'll well, we'll get spance on that one.
• 54:59
  Yeah. Sixty five's Rubber Soul, which includes Norwegian wood. And this is
• 55:04
  the debut of the sitar. You say, there's a lesson to easily translate
• 55:07
  to today's music making on this song, with its use of the sitar,
• 55:10
  it's an example of choosing unusual sounds and textures. Can you explain this?
• 55:15
  I think I have a quote from the book here two. You say,
• 55:19
  over time we've come to associate the sound of a sitar and pop music as
• 55:22
  an artifact of the sixties Western youth culture's embrace of Eastern spiritualism. But here,
• 55:28
  in its debut, it's more an example of choosing unusual sounds and textures.
• 55:30
  This lesson easily translate to today's music making. Can you explain that?
• 55:36
  Yeah, The idea with the sitar was that it was not only something that
• 55:44
  George was interested in and starting to get excited about as an instrument, but
• 55:50
  it led an atmosphere to the track that wasn't there, wasn't there before and
• 55:58
  wouldn't be there without it, you know, Norwegia would would not sound the
• 56:02
  scene without that without without that instrument. And for for modern music makers,
• 56:09
  uh, there can be one or two choices that you make in your arrangement
• 56:15
  or your instrumentation that that are sounds that aren't familiar, and those those are
• 56:24
  opportunities to really to really peak your listener's interest. You know, there was
• 56:30
  an era when uh and and I think I want to say it's in the
• 56:37
  seventies where one of the kind of the production goals of everyone that I everyone
• 56:42
  that I was exposed to and people that I'm working with, was was I
• 56:47
  want to sound that no one's heard before. You know, I want to
• 56:52
  sound on this song that no one has heard before. And uh And so
• 56:55
  you you know, you'd mess up an existing sound, or you'd you know,
• 57:00
  or you'd find a new patch for your modular synthesizer something that you could
• 57:05
  wire together, or you'd you know, you you'd use some unusual percussion instrument,
• 57:12
  or you're you know, you're cores something backwards or sideways or whatever.
• 57:15
  It happens to be to get to get sounds that weren't hadn't been heard yet,
• 57:22
  and uh and uh again, these are things that if you use them
• 57:27
  wisely within your your arrangement, your instrumental arrangement, you can get a lot
• 57:32
  of mileage from just one different voice that comes in and and Norwegian Woods to
• 57:39
  me is a great example of that of that one voice that comes in that
• 57:45
  that catches you in a different way, and that's that's the sitar in this
• 57:49
  case is Robert Soul where you start to get like the revolutionary ahead of its
• 57:53
  time Beetles around this point or is it more? I know, Revolver gets
• 58:00
  a lot of credit for being like the first quote unquote classic rock sounding album.
• 58:05
  It's like that's the sound of classic rock. Yeah, yeah, I
• 58:09
  would hang that more on Revolver than Reversul. Rever sol is. Rever sol
• 58:15
  is sort of the perfection of the early era of of of Beatles' work.
• 58:22
  It's a it's just it's just a you know, kind of a little it's
• 58:29
  like a pop masterpiece of that of that school of writing, that school of
• 58:34
  playing, that kind of uh, limited instrumentation approach. When they get to
• 58:43
  yeah, when you get to revolver. All of a sudden, they're they've
• 58:46
  they've broken out of the of the four track they're needing on a routine basis
• 58:53
  to do these tape production remixes and have and have more than four tracks of
• 58:59
  audio in order to capture their ideas. They're still with Rubber Soul. They
• 59:06
  are still predominantly getting their ideas out within those four tracks that they that they
• 59:12
  were working with. It is amazing, though, how quickly they evolved and
• 59:17
  progressed. You know, you're talking about from like sixty three, like two
• 59:21
  three years time. All of a sudden, boom, they're on their way,
• 59:24
  like all of a sudden, it's it's experimentation and all these things that
• 59:30
  they do. And it was a short time. Yeah, it was happening.
• 59:37
  It was happening all around them. And we we tend to look at
• 59:43
  the Beatles out here in twenty twenty four as an island of pop music in
• 59:49
  the sixties, and they weren't by any means. They were part of a
• 59:52
  they were part of a bigger scene and they were and within that scene you
• 59:58
  have lots of artists that were experimenting and there were and they were exposed to
• 1:00:02
  lots of types of music. They were just reflecting that back in their in
• 1:00:07
  their own way. And because they were the biggest band, you know,
• 1:00:10
  biggest band in the world, a lot of a lot of consumers believed that
• 1:00:17
  those ideas were born with the Beatles, but they were just part of you
• 1:00:22
  know, they were just part of the fabric of music that was going on
• 1:00:25
  then. They were a big part of the fabric of it. But like
• 1:00:30
  any like any artists, artists today, it's it's been. It's the same
• 1:00:37
  story. You don't have to think too far back when early two thousands when
• 1:00:46
  Coldplay was dominating the charts, and if I guarantee you you listened to a
• 1:00:53
  cross section of pop music from two thousand and two to two thousand and seven,
• 1:01:00
  and you think about it, you're going to hear Coldplay all over it.
• 1:01:02
  Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's a healthy competition. But it's also,
• 1:01:07
  yeah, this sounds working, so we gotta let's make that sound.
• 1:01:10
  But also like with the Beatles, when they heard that sounds, it's like,
• 1:01:15
  well, we got to do something, we got to step it up.
• 1:01:15
  So that that's what's cool about that era in the sixties is like everybody's
• 1:01:20
  listening to everybody else and saying, boy, look what they're doing. We
• 1:01:23
  got to do something better. And again, I just have a I have
• 1:01:29
  a kind of a positive belief on this that as artists, we love that.
• 1:01:37
  We love when other people are doing cool things, and we want to
• 1:01:39
  do cool things too, and when and when you hear someone do something that's
• 1:01:45
  like, oh, you know, oh I love that, So you know,
• 1:01:47
  I love that. What can I do? What can I do?
• 1:01:51
  Either like that or in the spirit of that, now you had you had
• 1:01:59
  the Stones after the Beatles, that always seemed like a fast following sort of
• 1:02:05
  act right in some in many cases, you know, following them into the
• 1:02:13
  into the pop stuff, in the writing in the early days right after they
• 1:02:16
  you know, first they're a blues band, but then they're more of a
• 1:02:20
  pop band. They start writing their own tunes. The tunes they're writing are
• 1:02:24
  trying to keep up with the Beatles. You have the most obvious one of
• 1:02:30
  the st her Satanic Majesty's request after Pepper comes out. But I was even
• 1:02:36
  thinking the other day of didn't Beggar's Banquet come out the year that the White
• 1:02:40
  Album came out? Oh yeah, right, Well, Yeah, because it's
• 1:02:45
  it's it's after the Beatles break up that the Stones start to really really pick
• 1:02:52
  up steam and you hear that classic Stone sound. But yeah, Beggar's Banquet
• 1:02:59
  would have been let's see, Begger's Banquet came out in sixty eight. Yeah,
• 1:03:04
  that came out, so even here, you know, Beggar's Banquet is
• 1:03:08
  a white album. So you know, all of these guys were playing off
• 1:03:15
  of each other, and they're all, you know, they're all they're influenced
• 1:03:20
  by each other. They're influenced by the sounds they're making. You know,
• 1:03:23
  the Beatles, the Beatles, they knew what was going on in San Francisco
• 1:03:30
  during the sixty seven, you know, sixty seven, sixty six, sixty
• 1:03:34
  seven. They knew what was happening there. They were bringing it their own
• 1:03:37
  version of it into Revolver and Pepper, right. They knew what the Beach
• 1:03:43
  Boys were doing, They knew what was coming out of there. Capitol Records
• 1:03:47
  had a relationship with the EMI Records, so they had access to these things,
• 1:03:52
  and they were friends with these guys. And and again that that goes
• 1:03:59
  on, and that goes on to this day. Uh, and it's and
• 1:04:02
  it's a it's a wonderful thing. You know. We we uh, none
• 1:04:06
  of this is done in isolation. No arts made in isolation. You know,
• 1:04:10
  we're we all you know, we're all standing on the shoulders of giants,
• 1:04:15
  as they say, we all are. And uh, yeah, so
• 1:04:18
  the Beatles weren't the giants. The Beatles were standing on shoulders too. Yeah.
• 1:04:25
  Well they well they were inspired by uh, Buddy hot Well, Chuck
• 1:04:30
  Berry and Elvis, Elvis, the girl groups. They love what the you
• 1:04:36
  know, the Charell's and the Marvelettes, and they they love that stuff.
• 1:04:42
  And yeah, they're there early. Their early stuff is you know, there's
• 1:04:45
  lots of girl group stuff going on, their motown stuff that they loved.
• 1:04:49
  Uh. You know, again, they reflected it. They reflected it back
• 1:04:55
  to us. Uh. I'm sure you you've read in many books about the
• 1:05:00
  Beatles that idea that that they reflected early American rock and roll back to us
• 1:05:05
  in a way that we had forgotten about, you know, the energy that
• 1:05:10
  was present in you know, gene Vincent and in Carl Perkins and and Elvis
• 1:05:16
  that had been forgotten after you know, after Elvis went to went to war
• 1:05:21
  and Perkins got in an accident and Buddy Holly died and you know that had
• 1:05:27
  been forgotten. The Beatles brought us back that energy. Uh and and they
• 1:05:31
  brought it back sometimes in the many times in the form of cover songs of
• 1:05:35
  American you know, pop from that early era. Yeah, yeah, what
• 1:05:41
  was the first song they It was the first single they released. What was
• 1:05:45
  it? Was that a cover song for the Beatles? Yeah? What was
• 1:05:50
  the fair? What Loved Me Do? Was there very first song? Okay,
• 1:05:56
  and then yeah let me do it, please please me. But but
• 1:05:58
  again, they you know, they did cover you know, they did cover
• 1:06:00
  acts. They covered loads of you know, loads of early rock and roll.
• 1:06:08
  Yeah. When they ran out of when they ran out of uh of
• 1:06:12
  original songs, come Beatles for Sale. They broke open the Carl Perkins catalog
• 1:06:17
  and and uh you know and uh yeah, honey doat all of a sudden
• 1:06:21
  shows up, right, the matchbox shows up and uh yeah, that's just
• 1:06:30
  couldn't be any clearer that what they're you know that they were they were influenced.
• 1:06:34
  They weren't. They weren't just the influencers. They were influenced. It's
• 1:06:41
  just you know, the Beatles had a way of taking those things, taking
• 1:06:45
  those influences and making something greater out of them. The book Down Rock Podcasts
• 1:06:50
  will be back after this. Jerry Hammick is here to talk about his brand
• 1:06:56
  new book, The Beatles Recording Techniques. So we moved on to Revolver from
• 1:06:59
  sixty Tomorrow. Never Knows is the one song when I ask you about that
• 1:07:01
  seems it's a song that many artists have covered, at least the ones that
• 1:07:04
  I'm familiar with, like Phil Collins covered it, Lett in Color covered it,
• 1:07:10
  David y Roth I remember covered in one of his solo albums, And
• 1:07:13
  it's a song constructed on two chords, and it just makes it pretty easy
• 1:07:16
  to cover right right, right exactly, and it doesn't sound like anything that
• 1:07:21
  would be considered a masterpiece yet it is. Can you share with us all
• 1:07:25
  the things that we're hearing on this track? Well, what makes it exceptional
• 1:07:30
  in terms of a recording is the use of the tape loops and this originated
• 1:07:38
  in what was known as the music concrete movement, where you're using found sounds
• 1:07:45
  and industrial sounds and you're and in this case primarily found sounds to create texture,
• 1:07:51
  to create movement, to create percussion, and the Beatles again knowing what
• 1:07:59
  was going on on the avant guard of music with this brought that into their
• 1:08:03
  into their pop music. The backing groove for Tomorrow Never Knows sounds like a
• 1:08:12
  tape loop. It sounds like a drum loop or something like that. But
• 1:08:15
  yeah, but it's not you know, it's not it's it's lives on that
• 1:08:20
  one. Oh it's great, it's just it's it's just such a deep groove.
• 1:08:27
  But yeah, what makes that, what makes it unique is the fact
• 1:08:30
  that a it's it's this drone that has all of these unexpected textures and all
• 1:08:41
  these unexpected sounds that come up to catch your attention and and and fill you
• 1:08:47
  know, and fill the void, right, and yeah, just realized in
• 1:08:54
  a in a completely original way for pop music of that of that era.
• 1:08:59
  That was the first song that they recorded for the Revolver sessions. Go figure
• 1:09:02
  that. Yeah, that was the one they started with and that's where they
• 1:09:08
  started. Wow. Yeah again again as you were mentioning to think of the
• 1:09:16
  strides and creativity that they made from album to album, it's remarkable. And
• 1:09:26
  you know, Tomorrow and Tomorrow Ever Knows is just is just a wonderful example
• 1:09:30
  of that of just throwing all expectations to the wind. And by the time
• 1:09:38
  they stop touring, this is when it gets real interesting. You know,
• 1:09:43
  by the end of August of sixty six, they played that last show in
• 1:09:45
  San fran right, Candlestick Park, San Francisco, And now, like I
• 1:09:49
  said, let's just use all of our time. This is kind of like
• 1:09:51
  with Brian Wilson, when Brian Wilson gets off the road, it's like that's
• 1:09:55
  when he really takes off too, because it's like, Okay, I'll be
• 1:09:57
  home writing my music and reallyocusing on that. All of my time is going
• 1:10:01
  to be put into the studio and uh yeah, that's we get Sergeant Pepper's
• 1:10:06
  Lonely Heart Hearts Club Band. Yeah, there was no there was no need
• 1:10:11
  for them to be thinking about the songs now in relation to performing them.
• 1:10:16
  Then that was a and that was also a fundamental change, so kind of
• 1:10:20
  yeah, it kind of like took the just like it took limitations away from
• 1:10:27
  them, like we can do whatever we want. We don't have to worry
• 1:10:29
  about whether we can play this in concert. Yeah, and you know,
• 1:10:32
  and certainly the technology wasn't there for them to do it. They were having
• 1:10:35
  like on their last tour, they were playing like nowhere Man live and it
• 1:10:41
  was very challenging for them to play that and sing that live because it was
• 1:10:45
  very much it was very much a studio construct. How finished that song was
• 1:10:49
  and they and it was kind of hit hit and miss as a lot as
• 1:10:53
  a live performance. Well, I didn't have to worry about that anymore.
• 1:10:57
  They can make these songs as complicated, as dense, as as odd and
• 1:11:03
  wonderful as they wanted to because they didn't weren't even thinking about ever performing them.
• 1:11:11
  The the recording was the performance. Yeah, and there's some equipment you
• 1:11:16
  talk about that they start using that's not available to the general public, like
• 1:11:19
  the E M I R S fifty six curve bendor EQ. Yeah, so
• 1:11:27
  what's that. Well, the first thing to understand is, and I'll jump
• 1:11:30
  back here to my my buddy back here on the mixing concert is doesn't want
• 1:11:35
  to turn around and say hello, he's shy. Yeah, he's well,
• 1:11:38
  he's hard, he's at work, and he knows he won't get paid if
• 1:11:42
  it doesn't keep at it. Those early consoles, and this is a very
• 1:11:45
  early one. The Beatles were a little more advanced than this, but the
• 1:11:48
  early consoles had very limited uh tone controls on them. Almost you could really
• 1:11:57
  think of them as as if you have a stereo receiver, You've got a
• 1:12:00
  treble and a base knob on a stereo receiver. That's pretty much what they
• 1:12:06
  had to sculpt sound on the on their recording consoles of that era. When
• 1:12:15
  it came to doing the cutting of a tape to disc though, they needed
• 1:12:20
  more fine control, and this equalization unit, called an RS fifty six or
• 1:12:27
  curve bender, was designed for mastering engineers to be able to be able to
• 1:12:33
  equalize a finished recording so it sounded as good as it could when it got
• 1:12:39
  cut to disc. Well. The Beatles were able to use it as they
• 1:12:43
  were recording on the front end of the recording, and that gave them a
• 1:12:47
  much broader spectrum than of sounds that they could use. So one of the
• 1:12:51
  problems that you get with sound is is you get a you get crowding and
• 1:12:57
  overlapping because many struments, especially pop instruments, they share a similar frequency range
• 1:13:04
  and and so if you've got a bunch of guitars going and their share and
• 1:13:10
  the Beatles recording for the same amps, right, you've got all this total
• 1:13:16
  similar similarity there and you lose the distinction of the parts. Well what a
• 1:13:23
  What an an equalizer like that curve bender allowed them to do was to be
• 1:13:27
  able to pull apart and make gaps for this guitar to fit in where that
• 1:13:31
  guitar wasn't And now I can really hear both guitars, even in mono.
• 1:13:39
  I can hear everything they're doing because that that piece of equipment allowed me to
• 1:13:44
  carve out spaces and make make room for things and highlight other things. Interesting.
• 1:13:49
  It's like a new toy man. They must have loved stuff like that.
• 1:13:53
  Oh yeah, well yeah, and and you know, and the spirit
• 1:13:58
  was simply to make to make great recordings. And that was the next step
• 1:14:01
  in making great recordings. Is that is that is that we can hear everything
• 1:14:08
  we intend to hear. How About on the day in the life you write
• 1:14:14
  about they make a sound that is bigger than it naturally was an example being
• 1:14:17
  the orchestral crescendos. Talk about that. Yeah, so they had a forty
• 1:14:21
  one piece orchestra that they hired to come in and do those crescendos and do
• 1:14:27
  the string string parts on it. On a day in life. There's a
• 1:14:29
  couple of different string sections in there, including the whirlwind wind up. So
• 1:14:35
  you know, that's a forty one piece orchestra. That's a that's a pretty
• 1:14:39
  good sized studio orchestra. But for the Beatles, that wasn't big enough for
• 1:14:44
  that moment, and so they recorded it. They recorded that orchestra doing that
• 1:14:48
  wind up there both it before the woke up got out of bed part and
• 1:14:56
  at the end of the at the end of the track, they they had
• 1:15:00
  the orchestra performed that and they recorded it four times, four different performances of
• 1:15:05
  it. And of course you're never doing it quite the same way each time
• 1:15:10
  that you do it. So what you've got the equivalent there is is of
• 1:15:14
  a one hundred and sixty four piece orchestra. That's so awesome it is making
• 1:15:19
  that sound. It's awesome. Yeah man, yeah, Well from sixty seven
• 1:15:26
  we also get an album called Magical Mystery Tour. Yeah, and I Am
• 1:15:30
  the Walrus. You write quote, this song demonstrates how a couple choices and
• 1:15:33
  some luck can change the direction of a song dramatically. What are those changes
• 1:15:40
  I Am the Walrus. Well, the big choices in that, to my
• 1:15:45
  ears, are that they really leaned into the electric piano. They leaned into
• 1:15:55
  the distortion of Lenin's vocal. Lennon's vocal is not pretty at all on Eye
• 1:16:00
  on the Walrus. It is, it's dirty, it's distorted, it's narrow,
• 1:16:06
  it's it's an ugly tone, and they absolutely lean into that. And
• 1:16:13
  then the orchestral arrangement that is thrown into it is also this sort of angsty
• 1:16:23
  toned, angsty voiced sort of orchestral orchestral piece that is that's arranged to it.
• 1:16:31
  All of those things give you that disturbing psychedelia. The luck comes when
• 1:16:40
  they tag on at the very end of the process. They tag on the
• 1:16:45
  radio broadcast and they're just were And when they were doing this, they were
• 1:16:48
  just scanning the radio bands to try to find something interesting as they were running
• 1:16:54
  a mix. Each time they were running the mix, they were scanning radio
• 1:16:58
  bands to try to find something that they that they thought was cool. They
• 1:17:02
  just happened to catch the Shakespeare performance. They just happened to catch that little
• 1:17:09
  bit of king Lear. It wasn't. It wasn't. Okay, let's reel
• 1:17:13
  it up to hear We've got that recording a king Lear and now I want
• 1:17:15
  to hear you know bury my body. You know, No, that just
• 1:17:23
  happened, a happy another happy accident that they caught and that was that was
• 1:17:28
  a little bit of look that got you know, that got them that.
• 1:17:30
  But but there were very purposeful choices in in how ugly that song sounds,
• 1:17:42
  in the harshness of the of that that really reflects, you know, some
• 1:17:46
  very dark lyrics, you know, yellow maunt of custard dripping from a dead
• 1:17:49
  dog's eye. You know that's as far from you know, please please me
• 1:17:57
  like I please you as as you get. And and again they're using they're
• 1:18:03
  using their their arrangements, they're using the choices to reinforce those moments. The
• 1:18:12
  book down Rock Podcasts will be back after this. The White Album from sixty
• 1:18:17
  a's where you say new Solutions weren't pushing the Beatles sounds in this era as
• 1:18:21
  much as how they adapted the ones already at their disposal. So I asked
• 1:18:27
  you how to can you expand on that and how they apply that to the
• 1:18:29
  White Album? Yeah, the so the White Album, there was no like
• 1:18:34
  great introduction of technology, you know, they did, they did get an
• 1:18:39
  eight track recorder about midway through the session, but a lot of the session
• 1:18:44
  was done, it's still done on four track. So there's a bit of
• 1:18:46
  a of a a misperception that the White Album is is a an eight track
• 1:18:54
  album. I think a little under half of it ended up being eight track
• 1:19:00
  recorded recorded to eight track. So they were using the same tool sets that
• 1:19:04
  they had been using, you know since uh since Revolver. They were using
• 1:19:10
  the same the same tool sets to make the White Album as they were as
• 1:19:15
  they were using you know, back in sixty six. Here's you know,
• 1:19:19
  and remember we're really talking two years later. Yeah, so you know,
• 1:19:24
  so uh, not a great advancement in technology. It is how that it's
• 1:19:30
  how they recombined and used it. It's how they how they used the tools
• 1:19:33
  to do the job that they wanted to do. So now they were using
• 1:19:38
  what was called very speed, which is where you slow or speed up the
• 1:19:43
  tape deck as you're recording or you're playing back in order to change the pitch
• 1:19:46
  of an instrument, which changes the tone of an instrument or a vocal.
• 1:19:51
  They're using they're using that in a very sophisticated way. They're using artificial double
• 1:19:57
  tracking across multiple instrument They're embracing distortion, they're uh uh uh, they're again,
• 1:20:06
  they're they're pushing their gear in a way that they hadn't before. Nothing's
• 1:20:11
  new, but the way they're using it is new. Let's give an example
• 1:20:15
  of the of the single Revolution from the from this era. I was gonna
• 1:20:20
  ask you about that. Yeah, yeah, so you know that is as
• 1:20:26
  hard a rocking song as you're ever gonna hear, and there isn't a single
• 1:20:30
  amplifier used on it. Yeah, tell me how they get that of that
• 1:20:34
  fuzzy sound. This is the the R E D D console. Yeah,
• 1:20:39
  it's used. Yeah, it's it's a red fifty one console was used on
• 1:20:44
  it. And this console a lot like the one my friends got back here
• 1:20:49
  is it's a it's tube based, like a tube band, so it's got
• 1:20:57
  it had like uh, I want to say that twenty two amplifiers in it.
• 1:21:04
  They had a lot of two bamplifiers in it, like enough that you
• 1:21:08
  could keep a meal warm on it. But the the inputs where you put
• 1:21:15
  microphone, you know, run microphones into it, they were essentially two amplifiers
• 1:21:19
  like a guitar two amplifier. So they just plugged their guitars directly into the
• 1:21:25
  board and then they overloaded it. They overloaded their inputs, and they got
• 1:21:30
  this and then they got this really unique kind of distortion, like almost like
• 1:21:35
  an olver modulation type of thing. When you when the MIC's run hot,
• 1:21:40
  you get a little distortion. Well you well, you get you get distortion
• 1:21:45
  if you push too much signal across you know, you're pushing too much input
• 1:21:50
  signal, right, you'll get you'll get distortion. It's the basis of it's
• 1:21:54
  the basis of distortion and amplifiers or pedals or things like that. You're just
• 1:21:59
  you're cranking you you're cranking and input and you're over overloading the circuit. In
• 1:22:04
  this case, it's a it's a tube circuit, tube based circuit valve valves
• 1:22:10
  they call them. They call them over across the way. And you know,
• 1:22:15
  but if you think of in that light, it's essentially a tube amplifier.
• 1:22:19
  And they are they're cranking the input into the tube amplifier and so they're
• 1:22:25
  distorting it. And now you've got what sounds like a great distorted amplifier,
• 1:22:30
  but there's no amplifier involved at all. And they did it on everything.
• 1:22:35
  They did it on the they did it for the guitars, they did it
• 1:22:40
  for the vocal, they did it for the bass, and when it came
• 1:22:45
  time to, you know, to release the song, em I was like,
• 1:22:50
  we can't release this song. It's all distorted. Yeah, I can
• 1:22:55
  imagine. Is this a mistake? Yeah? And the Beatles reaction was,
• 1:23:00
  yeah, well yeah, that's what we wanted. Pushing to the extreme.
• 1:23:08
  But again the song it's but again, there's no new there's no new magic
• 1:23:13
  piece of gear going on here. This is what they've been using. You
• 1:23:16
  know, they use the Red consoles from the very start of their career to
• 1:23:20
  the end of their career, and they're just using it in a unique way.
• 1:23:25
  And I think that's a great lesson again for for engineers and producers that
• 1:23:30
  are trying to embrace this uh embrace the The way the Beatles made music was
• 1:23:36
  was you take what you've got and you figure out how you can use it
• 1:23:42
  in a new way or combine it in a new way with something else that
• 1:23:45
  you've already got. You know, there's there isn't a new There isn't some
• 1:23:50
  new toy that you're always looking for to get the sound that you want.
• 1:23:54
  It's it's just use the things at hand and try to think of ways that
• 1:23:59
  you can get something different out of them, and the Beatles were just masterful
• 1:24:02
  of that. Yeah. R. E. D D. I would saying
• 1:24:05
  you say, RED, it's all caps. Does it stand for something?
• 1:24:10
  Oh? Here, it is a recording Engineer Development Department. Yeah, that's
• 1:24:13
  what it stands for. Yeah. So for those that don't know, there
• 1:24:17
  was a division of EMI called Hayes and they manufactured a lot of the gear
• 1:24:23
  that the Beatles worked on that they recorded through, and that included the consoles,
• 1:24:29
  the tape recorders that you see back here. These were all in house
• 1:24:32
  designs, and the mixing console back there. These were all things that were
• 1:24:39
  designed by EMI, manufactured by EMI, and used by EMI to make hit
• 1:24:44
  records. Yeah. The RED I'm looking at a picture on Wikipedia and it's
• 1:24:47
  like it's like something you'd see in Lost in Space or Star Star Trek.
• 1:24:51
  It's so it's so cool, man, so cool. Let it be as
• 1:24:57
  next record of January of sixty nine at least may have seventy For the title
• 1:25:00
  track, Phil Spector keeps you talk about. He keeps the stereo field of
• 1:25:04
  the song narrow and centered into the chorus where it breaks out wide. You
• 1:25:10
  also note how dominant the guitar solo is in relation to the backing track,
• 1:25:14
  completely altering the tracks dynamics. Now I'm interested in interested in what you think
• 1:25:18
  of the naked version of that song and the album that Paul released in two
• 1:25:23
  thousand and three, because that version removes Specter's embellishments. What do you think
• 1:25:27
  of the O three version? Do you like it? Do you prefer more?
• 1:25:30
  Or did you like the Phil Spector version? Well, you know,
• 1:25:33
  I grew up with the Spector version, you know, I grew up with
• 1:25:39
  it. I you know, only learned later, like a lot of us,
• 1:25:43
  diad of you know, Paul's strenuous objections to you know, although he
• 1:25:47
  let it be released right, they'd say it was too late? But was
• 1:25:53
  it too late? I don't know, I don't I don't mind. I
• 1:25:59
  don't mind, you know, the specterizing of let it be as much as
• 1:26:01
  I think most people do. I find the the naked tracks to be.
• 1:26:14
  They're an interesting artifact to me. They're they're they're not superior in any way
• 1:26:21
  to my you know, to my ears, they're you know, they're you
• 1:26:25
  can look at them as is that's the pure beetles and look at them through
• 1:26:29
  that intellectual light, but you know, performance wise, you know, feel
• 1:26:34
  yeah, what they evoke in you, I don't. It's not any stronger
• 1:26:40
  than anything I ever got out of the out of the Let It Be album
• 1:26:43
  that you know, that that specter got, you know, his hands on,
• 1:26:45
  and that's what fans made an emotional attachment to. So that's the one
• 1:26:49
  they're going to prefer. I think, you know, even even if you
• 1:26:53
  say, oh, this naked version sounds better, you still have that attachment
• 1:26:57
  to the original version. Yeah, And and the naked you know, people
• 1:27:02
  need to remember that when Naked came out, this it was it was also
• 1:27:06
  of a fashion. This was it came out in the unplugged era, right,
• 1:27:14
  so you know, lest we forget the unplugged era, when you know,
• 1:27:17
  it was all the rage to sit around with acoustic guitars and play acoustic
• 1:27:21
  versions of electric songs. Captains Lela Man, Yeahirvana, Yes, yeah,
• 1:27:30
  you know, I mean yeah, And you know, there's certainly a fondness
• 1:27:32
  for those things. There's there's a an idea that that makes them purer,
• 1:27:36
  that makes them more real. But it's just another version of the track.
• 1:27:43
  I think, if you really want to understand what was going on with the
• 1:27:46
  Beatles. Prior to Specter, you need to listen to the Glenn John's mixes
• 1:27:53
  of the of the Let It Be work. They were never accepted by the
• 1:27:57
  Beatles, but it gives you, I think, of much close their idea
• 1:28:00
  of what's what's there on the on the original eight track reels for the Let
• 1:28:08
  It Be album. Did you get to read Glenn John's book, I have
• 1:28:11
  that, Yeah, yeah, sad Man, Yeah, yeah, great book.
• 1:28:15
  Yeah. It doesn't talk a lot about the Beatles, but yeah,
• 1:28:20
  yeah, he could have certainly written much more. Yeah, I mean he
• 1:28:25
  had and he had a job because Apple Studios was not ready to record them,
• 1:28:30
  and they had a haul in all of this, you know, gear
• 1:28:33
  from E M I two of these red consoles in order to facilitate the eight
• 1:28:40
  track, which is George's eight track, George Harrison's personal eight track. They
• 1:28:46
  had wires going through the doorways to get out to the studio because they didn't
• 1:28:51
  have a proper patch bay. Glenn John's had a lot to overcome to make
• 1:28:59
  that album. And and they also, you know, they went into that.
• 1:29:04
  Something I talk about in the book is they went into that with like
• 1:29:09
  a mission statement. You know that mission statement being we're only going to record
• 1:29:14
  what the four of us turned out to be. Five of us can play,
• 1:29:18
  can play live, and you know that was their intent going in.
• 1:29:24
  But that's not the album that came out of it. The album that came
• 1:29:28
  out of it was was still comprised of a lot of edits. In fact,
• 1:29:34
  the get Back song is not the rooftop performance that we'd all like to
• 1:29:42
  believe we're hearing that ends with I'd like to say thank you on behalf of
• 1:29:46
  the group. It's a studio performance. Yeah, the whole thing. It's
• 1:29:53
  a studio performance. And Specter pasted Lenin's uh dialogue from the film to the
• 1:30:02
  end of it to make it feel like it was live. Mm hmm.
• 1:30:08
  It's an illusion, like all recordings. Well, yeah, I just just
• 1:30:14
  talking to an author of a book on Prince's Purple Rain and we're all those
• 1:30:19
  Minnesota Vikings football game. The cheering is at the end of the song Purple
• 1:30:25
  Rain because they want to enhance the the sound of the applause at the end.
• 1:30:30
  Yeah, it's all it's all an illusion, which that was a big
• 1:30:34
  thing. You know, live album is how live were they? You know?
• 1:30:36
  And they kiss kiss alive turns out wasn't all that? I think only
• 1:30:41
  the drums from the show. Yeah, you know, it's it's the rare
• 1:30:48
  artist that doesn't want to be seen in their best light. They just want
• 1:30:53
  to be seeing their best light. Yeah, just winding down a few more
• 1:30:57
  here. I want to ask about It's All Too Much, which is one
• 1:31:00
  of my favorite Beatles songs. That's from the Yellow Submarine soundtrack also released in
• 1:31:03
  sixty nine. Beautiful mix with a guitar in Churchike Gorgan. But what is
• 1:31:09
  it that that pulsating percussion sound that comes in and out of that track?
• 1:31:13
  It sounds like it sounds like an army marching? What is that? All
• 1:31:16
  too much? It's all too much? It's it's there. There's some backward
• 1:31:25
  percussion that's going on in that. So it's it's and it fades in and
• 1:31:28
  out too, it's not it's yeah, so it's a it's the percussion track
• 1:31:31
  that's been that's been flipped and and so you know the transients are flipped.
• 1:31:36
  Of course, then too decay and attack relationships are changed. You get decay
• 1:31:42
  before attack and uh, and that's that's the way that they did that trick.
• 1:31:46
  Is it's a reverse again, nothing new in the Beatles world. They've
• 1:31:50
  been reversing audio since Rain and here we are on you know, I think
• 1:31:56
  sixty eight they recorded It's All too Much, even though it came out later
• 1:31:59
  on the on Yellow Submarine soundtrack. But yeah, it's it's it's a it's
• 1:32:04
  reversed percussion track recorded backwards and then as you noted, then brought in and
• 1:32:13
  out of the mix. Yeah, just fades in phadse out. Yeah.
• 1:32:15
  Yeah. Abbey Road released in sixty nine. A great observation on the song
• 1:32:19
  something that I'm hoping you can share, you know, the placement of certain
• 1:32:23
  parts and tones that a lot of modern pop songs have. How did the
• 1:32:27
  Beatles demonstrate here that you can place those elements wherever you want? Something you
• 1:32:30
  talk about in the book. Yeah. Now, Abbey Roads are thoroughly modern
• 1:32:39
  recording and it stands up to you to any modern recording. It was done
• 1:32:44
  on a on a what anyone would feel would be a contemporary mixing console,
• 1:32:47
  the TG one two, three four five console, a solid It was a
• 1:32:53
  solid state board. They had discrete control over over all of the puts on
• 1:33:00
  it, meaning they had tonal control for EQ, they had dynamic control for
• 1:33:04
  like compression or limiting, if they chose to use it, that gives you
• 1:33:09
  a fineness of sound that that they didn't have previously. And additionally, they
• 1:33:16
  were able to use the full on every channel. They could use the full
• 1:33:21
  one and eighty degrees of the stereo sound field, and any element then could
• 1:33:26
  be assigned to any portion of that or any point within that sound field.
• 1:33:30
  And they and they use that in bringing the songs to life again in very
• 1:33:36
  a very modern modern way of of Hey, look over here at two o'clock
• 1:33:42
  is that string section? And now over here at you know, at nine
• 1:33:47
  o'clock, I've got that guitar solo comes in. They could do all of
• 1:33:51
  those things that that we don't even think about nowadays, the Beatles recording techniques.
• 1:33:58
  It's out now, right, But it came out yep. I think
• 1:34:01
  it came out. Was it in April that it was released? April twenty
• 1:34:04
  third? Yeah, late April, So it's out now. You can find
• 1:34:06
  out wherever books are sold? And Jerry, where can people find you online?
• 1:34:11
  You have a website, don't you. I've got a few of them,
• 1:34:13
  okay, Jerryhammock dot com. If you want to learn about the work
• 1:34:16
  that I do in music. There's the Beatles Recording Techniques dot Com for the
• 1:34:20
  new book if you want to get an overview, and it'll give you a
• 1:34:25
  great kind of premer of what's in the book. And then if you're interested
• 1:34:29
  in the previous books, Beatles Recording Reference Manuals with ans dot Com will point
• 1:34:35
  you to those five volumes of walking through their entire catalog. Thanks so much
• 1:34:40
  here. This was fascinating and I grilled you on some Beatles questions and you
• 1:34:45
  you answered them all. Thank you, Eric. I really appreciate your time
• 1:34:48
  and being able to speak to you today. I love talking Beetles. That's
• 1:34:59
  it. It's in the books.