The first meeting between comedy record producer and erstwhile pop stars took place at EMI’s legendary Abbey Road Studios in North London on June 6 1962. Martin was at that time an EMI staff producer responsible for the niche-market Parlophone record label which specialised in comedy and novelty material: the Goons, Peter Sellers, Bernard Cribbins and others. His assistant, Ron Richards, took responsibility for the label’s relatively few “pop”acts: Shane Fenton (later Alvin Stardust), Judd Proctor and Paul Raven (later Gary Glitter). During Richards’ first session with the Beatles, engineer Norman Smith persuaded him (Richards) to invite Martin to join the session which he ultimately took over, thereby creating a partnership which lasted until the demise of the Beatles in 1969.

On this day, the Beatles had recently returned from a 7-week residency in Hamburg. They had received moderate acclaim as performers and had recorded before but with little commercial success and had no recording contract per se. Through the agency of the HMV record shop in London and its in-house music publishing company, their manager, Brian Epstein secured a studio audition for his protegés. With one line-up change (the departure of drummer Pete Best and his replacement by Ringo Starr), the Beatles as they assembled on that day would remain a creative unit for the next 7 years.

Abbey Road Studios was converted into a recording studio in 1931 from a large residential property (built in 1830). Its owners and operators were EMI, successors to The Gramophone Company Ltd. It boasted three main studios and a staid, regimented approach to its work. Suited and white-coated engineers presided over recording sessions conducted via the medium of meticulously maintained (and often self-built) equipment the like of which had long been regarded as obsolete by market-leading American studios. Yet it was precisely this structure that, by providing a rock-solid technical foundation, would facilitate the revolutionary work of Martin and the Beatles though, in so doing, they were to revolutionise the way in which studios in particular and the recording industry in general would operate thereafter.

On the face of it, there was little to distinguish the early relationship between the partners from any other pop group/producer/studio of that time. Martin, however brought a unique perspective to the art of popular music production. Trained as a classical musician, he not only had the musical “literacy” that the Beatles lacked but, in his comedy productions, had evolved a way of creating sound worlds entire unto themselves. Even so apparently simple a work as the Goons’ “Ying Tong Song” reveals considerable complexity and meticulous attention to detail in the way that their bizarre environment is created. Careful changes in level, equalisation and reverberation give the production remarkable depth and perspective.

Although initially no more than a well publicised and managed pop group,the influence of Martin’s skills and depth of operation were to enable the Beatles to evolve entirely new approaches to the creation of the popular song. Little by little, new devices and ideas began to invade the Beatles’ work. Guitar pedals, fuzz boxes, feedback and a willingness to embrace instruments not included in or available for their stage lineup offered the opportunity to create new textures and events but the truly revolutionary aspect of their work at this stage was to involve themselves in the entire creative process at a time when simple composition and performance was the norm for the average pop group, many of whom could have a number 1 hit single and subsequent album without ever seeing the inside of the studio control room. In short, at Martin’s invitation, they invaded the sanctum sanctorum - an unprecedented intrusion in the well-regulated and structured environment of Abbey Road. Even more unconventional was their insistence on open-ended recording sessions. It was no longer acceptable to assign a given number of hours of studio time to a project: the only acceptable approach was to go in to the studio and work until consensus dictated a suspension of activity. Nonetheless, these revolutionary activities progressed with the conservatism characteristic of Abbey Road: the first Beatles session to run after midnight did not take place until late 1965 !

Little by little, Martin began to introduce extra instruments, almost always played by uncredited session musicians except for keyboard parts which he usually played himself. By 1965, these additions had become routine although his most radical idea - the use of a string quartet on “Yesterday” - met with stiff initial resistance, Paul McCartney insisting that the players eschew any vibrato. The final recording, however, shows that this objection was quickly overcome and that, for the first time, a fully scored ensemble had provided a major input to a Beatles record. The timescale implied by such work precluded its regular use for as long as the Beatles continued to perform in public since one song would now take days to complete whereas, in the beginning, an entire album had been made in a single protracted one day session. Furthermore, the effects both instrumental and technical that were now employed made live performance increasingly problematic, so much so that, in their last concerts, the band abandoned any attempt to reproduce their recent recordings and relied on older material.

By the time they came to record “Rubber Soul”, experimentation had become the order of the day with songs routinely being varispeeded to transpose key or to provide a desired sonic quality, guitars being fed through Leslie speakers (intended for use with Hammond organs) to create tremulant effects. Very quickly, the Beatles grasped at the possibilities offered even by the somewhat limited technology at their disposal. The idea that a piano or guitar need not necessarily sound like one was, at the time, quite revolutionary and it was the Beatles’ initiation into the privileged world of the control room that gave them, for the first time, the opportunity fully to understand and to experiment in their chosen medium. With his background in “serious” music, Martin was able to introduce the Beatles to at least some of the sound manipulation techniques evolved for the creation of musique concrete by Schaeffer, Stockhausen and others. These included speed change, reversal looping etc and quickly led to the unorthodox productions that would soon amaze the public.

At once sensing the possibilities that now lay before them, the Beatles quickly seized the opportunity to set up home studios, equipped with batteries of Brennell recorders and began all manner of electroacoustic experimentation. The medium of the pop song was not yet ready for the revolution that was to come however, and so these experiments remained private until they burst forth on the 1966 album, “Revolver”. Nonetheless, some results crept out into the public ear, notably Lennon’s pioneering use of guitar feedback at the start of “I feel fine”. It is perhaps hard to appreciate how extraordinary that one note was at the time. Feedback was normally avoided at all costs, even where it offered increased sustain and it took a considerable leap deliberately to induce it. The leap was made and, pointing his instrument towards its amplifiers’ speakers, Lennon duly struck the note with his guitar volume down, quickly increasing it until the system went into runaway oscillation. This one note presaged the extraordinary experimental work that was to come.

The equipment lineup at Abbey Road was, by the standards of the time, adequate if uninspiring. It had, however, the overwhelming virtue of being meticulously maintained by in-house staff who not only kept the machines in superb order but also contributed their own design ideas. For example, a refrigerator-sized”frequency changer” (actually an oscillator feeding large power amplifiers which generated sufficient output to drive the recorder capstan motor) was used to provide tape machines with variable speed and another in-house design, STEED (Send Tape Echo Echo Device), which, when married with the famous Abbey Road acoustic echo chamber, provided a wide range of reverberation and slapback effects. Most notable of all was the purpose-built REDD 37 mixer used throughout the Beatles’ early work. Large for its time, it boasted 10 inputs and 4 outputs and an equalisation control labelled “pop” or “classical”. It normally fed another EMI creation, a 2 track BTR tape machine although, by 1963, a 4 track Studer J37 had taken over as the main multitrack recorder.

With the increasing instrumental and vocal complexity of the Beatles’ work, four tracks soon became insufficient and it became necessary to adopt the practice of recording a basic backing track (usually a live performance) and then mixing this to a spare track. The original tracks would then be erased and replaced with overdubs, this process being repeated as many times as necessary. With each generation of dubbing, audio quality was at risk but the wide tracks of the J37 (which used 1 inch tape) and the high maintenance standards of Abbey Road contributed to keeping the finished sound remarkably clean, bright and noise-free.

With their last concert (Candlestick Park, San Francisco August 29 1965) behind them, the band withdrew from public scrutiny into the protecting world of Abbey Road which, by virtue of their enormous success, had become more or less theirs to command. The initial product of this new approach,which totally ignored “performability” in favour of using the studio as a sound workshop, almost a hyper-instrument in its own right, was “Mark One”, elsewhere referred to as “The Void”, the immediate precursor of “Tomorrow never knows”, the first and most revolutionary recording made for the new album “Revolver”.

Derived largely from tape loops, these pieces represented an entirely new direction, not only for the popular music of the time but also for the way in which composers, producers, engineers and musicians worked in the studio. No longer would songs be composed and rehearsed and then brought to the studio in an advanced state of completeness, needing only polishing and overdubbing. The new approach might start with a scrap of tape, a few chords, a line of lyrics or any other suitably inspiring component. From this (and often other apparently unrelated items), a “song” would be created from scratch, using a range of instrumental and technical resources. The studio no longer existed purely for the purpose of “recording” in the literal sense - meaning the preservation of a performance but became rather an environment and umbrella of resources which contributed to the creation of a product which had no preexistence in its own right. In other words, the act of recording was no longer archival but had become profoundly creative. To a large extent, this approach remains common to the present time.

References to drug usage abound in the works of the Beatles, although to a far lesser degree than popularly supposed. It is nonetheless undeniable that the first words of the lyric of “Tomorrow never knows” were a direct quotation from “The psychedelic experience” by LSD advocates Leary and Alpert. This issue aside, the band went on to create an “audiodelic” recording, its components and their interrelationship mirroring the LSD experience.

The way in which this was created was, at the time, wholly unique. The finished product has evidently been tidied up by the addition of numerous “purposeful” components such as Lennon’s vocal and an inverted guitar solo derived from another song (played by McCartney for “Taxman”, slowed down a tone, dissected and reversed) but the crucial elements of the track had a substantially chance basis. George Martin commandeered as many tape machines as Abbey Road could muster, some of them in separate studios or control rooms. An engineer attended each machine, holding a tape loop in tension with a pencil and their collective outputs were fed by tielines to the Studio 2 control room mixer - the 10 input REDD 37. Opinions differ as to the detailed components but at least 5 machines played back loops consisting of (1) McCartney laughing, (2) an orchestral chord, (3) a mellotron flute, (4) a mellotron string ostinato and (5) a varispeeded sitar. Added to these loops were a John Lennon vocal variously echoed and/or fed through a Leslie speaker, a one note bass guitar part and a viciously limited, violently compressed and heavily reverberated drum part played “live” 1(contrary to popular view which holds it to be yet another loop). Faders on the desk were opened largely upon a chance basis although Geoff Emerick (who engineered the session) describes the process as being more like playing an instrument and, therefore, one assumes, rather more deliberate. Details notwithstanding, this revolutionary “song” was recorded from beginning to end in around nine hours. Despite being the first to be recorded, “Tomorrow never knows” was the last of the tracks of the “Revolver” album to be publicly released. With its appearance, the techniques of electroacoustic music developed in Paris and Cologne entered, albeit briefly, into the mainstream of popular music culture.

Innovations continued throughout the making of “Revolver”. McCartney, for instance, abandoned his famous Hofner Violin bass for a longer scaled Rickenbacker, in itself no great event. What singled the change out as experimental was his use of a loudspeaker as a microphone, which, coupled with subsequent compression provided his bass part with a depth previously unattainable.Such eccentric ideas contravened the staid practices of Abbey Road but it was in no small measure due to their resource base that these and similar experiments were even possible.

Another particular example of technical manipulation was the April 1966 recording “Rain” in which the entire finished track was slowed down to render a denser texture. The basic backing track was deliberately played at an accelerated tempo and subsequent overdubs were similarly treated with the main vocal being recorded yet slower so that it was actually accelerated in the finished product. (So ubiquitous did varispeeding become in the Beatles’ work that a member of the band would take charge of the master pitch control during mixdown sessions). A characteristic flourish was added to garnish the end of “Rain”: the opening lines were repeated backwards. Throughout the “Revolver” sessions, tape manipulation contributed to the instrumental colour although reversed guitar solos proved difficult, having to be carefully notated, then scored in reverse and played against a backing track that was running backwards.

Ideas continued to pour in thick and fast: the strongly rhythmic string track for “Eleanor Rigby” was recorded in unique fashion. The double string quartet was individually miked with each microphone almost in contact with the strings: a complete contradiction of the then conventional wisdom and an approach that horrified the players. (As with the recording of the string part for “Yesterday” an attempt was made to record the part without vibrato but was abandoned as inconclusive.) The technique of close miking of acoustic instruments, followed by heavy limiting to restrict the transients normally obscured by distance was applied again to the brass parts for “Got to get you into my life”. Once more contradicting accepted practice (which would have grouped the five players at least 6 feet from a small number of microphones), Emerick and Martin assigned individual microphones to each instrument, placing them actually inside the bells and then applied the most violent limiting possible. Further innovation occurred when, for several tracks, McCartney abandoned his bass amplifier and connected his instrument directly to the mixing desk: at this time, no-one had attempted to use direct injection before.

These techniques helped the Beatles to create a uniquely dense yet well defined sound. The tight limiting of strings, brass and bass parts allowed an effective contrast with the fluid, chiming guitar sounds (achieved mainly by the use of a 12 string electric guitar fed through a Leslie speaker) and notably crisp percussion (again resulting from unusually close miking and strong limiting). Restricted equalisation facilities led to unconventional measures: on at least one occasion, a track was fed through 2 equalisers connected in series, both set for maximum high frequency boost.

None of these techniques appear at all unconventional in terms of modern studio practice but, at the time, they were regarded as revolutionary. British popular music recording had long sought to emulate the warmth and depth achieved, it seemed, so effortlessly by American studios. For a number of reasons, both technical and instrumental, this had proved an elusive goal - nothing the English could do could generate products like those of Phil Spector or his peers - and English recordings tended to sound thin and weak by comparison. Much of this problem had to do with approaches to microphone technique and it is to the credit of Martin and Emerick that they were not afraid to rewrite the rulebook in their search for greater impact. In so doing, they flew in the face of what was then the conventional wisdom and outraged the Abbey Road establishment but the approaches that they created formed the basis for popular music recording for the next 30 years.

When “Revolver” was released, the response was one of amazement at the sheer impact of its sound and the ingenuity of its approach. This was as nothing compared to the response to the products of later sessions for “Sergeant Peppers’ Lonely Hearts Club Band” which relied heavily on the technical precedents created by “Revolver”.

The “Sgt. Pepper” sessions began in late 1996 with the first attempts to record “Strawberry Fields Forever”, a track legendary for its complexity and the problems encountered in its creation. For the first time, sampling technology was used in a popular song. This took the form of a curious instrument, the Mellotron. Although unable to record, it offered a range of instrumental and effects samples, each contained on a strip of tape which was played back when the appropriate key was depressed. Its main use was to provide flute, brass and string sounds and, despite their poor fidelity, the Musicians Union was sufficiently concerned at the perceived threat to their members’ livelihood that they tried unsuccessfully to stop its manufacture.The first take used the distinctive string sound of the Mellotron but subsequent takes exchanged it for flutes. Thus begun a lengthy process: all in all the song would take a month to finish.

Numerous complex overdubs, speed changes, inversions and so forth followed, culminating in an apparently finished version which was promptly rejected. Recording began again and resulted in a second version. The decision was taken (at Lennon’s instigation) to try to combine the two versions. Unfortunately they were in different keys and tempi but, purely by chance, varispeeding to match the tempi resulted in a degree of pitch change that all but corrected the key difference. The decision was taken to attempt the edit and, by gradually decreasing the speed of the first part from its start up to the edit point, it was possible to create an exact match, so much so that the edit is almost undetectable (it comes at exactly 1 minute from the start).

Although by no means as problematic as “Strawberry Fields”, “Penny Lane” nonetheless employed a range of odd techniques: a “hyper-piano” was created by overdubbing a normal piano part with one played through a guitar amplifier with its reverberation set high and another which was recorded at half normal speed. To this was added the output of a harmonium, also fed via a guitar amplifier. Only when all this was completed did the more conventional recording process commence: vocals, guitar, bass, drums, 4 flutes, 4 trumpets, 2 piccolos, flugel horn, vocal scats and harmonies, hand bell, 2 oboes, 2 cor anglais, double bass, miscellaneous percussion and, finally, the famous B-flat piccolo trumpet solo (actually played at full speed and pitch, contrary to popular belief).

Perhaps the most famous Beatles recording of all, “A Day in the Life”, was equally unconventional and even more technically demanding. Starting out as two completely separate songs, the basic tracks were created conventionally enough (by the Beatles’ unconventional standards), leaving two 24 bar gaps to be filled later. In the basic track laying stage, these were filled by increasingly discordant piano vamping with a verbal bar count and and alarm clock to indicate bar 24. The two songs were fitted together and it was decided to fill the gaps with orchestral buildups with each of 90 instruments randomly playing upwards from its lowest note to its highest. In the event,only 40 musicians were used but Martin conceived the audacious idea of multitracking them 4 times to create a 160 piece ensemble. This in itself was not particularly extraordinary but the method adopted was entirely experimental.

The problem was that, since the 4 track Studers were still the only available multitrack machines, even with intermediate mixdowns, there were simply not enough tape tracks available. The only solution was to attempt to synchronise 2 such machines. In 1967, not only was there no precedent for such an activity, there was no technology available by which it could be done. Synchronisers and timecode lay many years in the future and so Abbey Road Technical Manager, Ken Townsend was given a few hours to create a solution. His ingenious idea derived from the frequency changing technology used to provide variable capstan speeds. Instead of using an oscillator to provide the basic signal and then amplifying that until it was powerful enough to drive a capstan motor, he recorded a 50Hz tone on one track of the “lead” machine. When this was played back, it was duly amplified as before and then used to drive the capstan of the second machine. This guaranteed that the two machines were at least running at exactly the same speed although their relative positions remained indeterminate. With careful operation, the system worked well enough for the session: the Beatles’ original track played on the “lead” machine and the orchestra was recorded four times on the “slave” multitrack. Although it created problems on mixdown, the approach worked well enough and the technique of synchronising multitracks is now yet another item in the armoury of the contemporary studio, albeit controlled by a far more evolved technology than was available in 1967.

Yet another unusual technique was used to record these 24 bar passages: the sound of the orchestra was delayed and fed back to to the studio through no less than 100 speakers to be picked up again by the orchestral microphones.The finishing touch was applied by the creation of a massive chord consisting of 16 overdubbed pianos and 4 harmoniums. By dint of massive compression and careful lifting of faders, the chord was persuaded to last almost a minute.

One final track from “Sgt. Pepper” deserves mention for its studio technique. “Being for the benefit of Mr. Kite” takes its inspiration from a Victorian circus poster and evokes the atmosphere of a traditional circus by collaging together fragments of calliope music. This was achieved in a manner more traditionally associated with contemporary painting and literature than with popular music. Various pieces of music were recorded and then dissected into fragments about 1 second long. These fragments were then randomised (by throwing them up in the air) and then reassembled without regard to direction. (Emerick suggests that the first reassembly came close to putting everything back in its proper order and that a more deliberate “randomisation” had to be undertaken) With the benefit of an additional harmonium overdub, this audacious approach created a sound world that was recognisably that of a circus although no particular tunes were identifiable: another early example of sampling.

“Sgt. Pepper” capitalised upon the private experimentation of the individual Beatles and leaned heavily on the techniques evolved in the making of “Revolver” but, once completed, the experimental approach was largely abandoned in subsequent albums, making only one more significant appearance in the form of “Revolution 9″ on the so-called “White Album” (the first Beatles album to make use of 8 track technology). Using techniques broadly similar to those used in “Tomorrow never knows”, this collage piece exploits numerous tape loops, all played in live from machines throughout the building together with various voice and effects overdubs. As before, the loops were derived from cutups, inversions and pitch changes.

And there it ended. For reasons that have never been adequately explained, the Beatles abandoned experimentation and went back to relatively simple music. Having pushed the envelope of the popular song to an almost unbelievable degree and, on the way, rewritten the rulebook on recording techniques, with their finest work behind them, they ended their technical adventures.