Beatles Recording Techniques

Video Transcript

"Hey, here we are back at the recording studio, we're going to have a little fun today, we're going to talk about some Beatles recording techniques. This goes back a ways but the Beatles along with George Martin and Jeff Emerick and some of their other engineers actually pioneered some techniques that we still use today. Back in the early days, a lot of their recording was done you know mono, in their early mono records and stereo was done, they were all out in the studio recording and playing at the same time, you know, open miking technique. Then they steadily moved into more segmented, isolation recording, you know, miking every drum, miking all of the instruments and maybe going to the over dub stage. Now a lot of talk is, there's been a lot of talk about Sgt. Pepper's recording being recorded on a fore-track and that is true, to my knowledge that is true, but what we don't know, what they didn't say is how many fore-tracks they used, because on fore-tracks they would record basic backing tracks and then maybe from those they would be mixing, say those down to one or two tracks over here. Then adding maybe some percussion, adding some vocals and then taking those and mixing them down to two other tracks of another machine, then adding some more vocals, maybe adding, and I hear stories that Paul McCartney would spend hours upon hours working on his bass tracks, on the album to make them, to make them just right. Another technique that they used was a vocal doubling, or double tracking, automatic double tracking, of course it wasn't automatic back in those days and John Lennon used this in some of the earlier recordings, where he would record a vocal and then he would sing another vocal over dubbing that, to give an effect of two people singing in unison. And, another way that I believe they pioneered in doing that, is they would actually take his, one of his tracks and actually slightly vary the track that he was singing to, to give a sense of the pitch and the time varying as he was singing to give you that kind of doubling effect. So these are some kind of, kind of fun things that they did, and if you'll also notice on some of the records, the drums, Ringo's drums, they used compression pretty heavily on some of those records and you could tell when he's splashing those overheads, they're just pumping like crazy, you know, then he comes back to his Toms and those Cymbals are still ringing and they just go on forever sometimes it seems like. But, just kind of some fun techniques that we still use today, I still use a lot of that heavy compressions on some rock stuff, you know that those guys started back in those days and some fun techniques from the Beatles."