On the original backing track Paul played grand piano, with John playing acoustic guitar and George with maracas and Ringo on congas. Everything was recorded on to one track...
More »On the original backing track Paul played grand piano, with John playing acoustic guitar and George with maracas and Ringo on congas. Everything was recorded on to one track. So let’s have a listen to that. The slight bleed you can hear is from John’s live vocal. Than a few extra vocals were added and an extra piano track. This was then all mixed down to a new tape onto 2 tracks. The vocal being camped of all the best bits from the 3 tracks including some double track bits leaving 2 tracks free. Next on the song the drums and bass were over dubbed onto a single track leaving one final track free. To my ears it sounds like the bass is just...straight to the mixing consol. And that classic drum sound of this record would have had to be created as the recorded it. And this is another example of how the engineers of Abby Road studios can now separate these two instruments. So using the same process we heard earlier on tax man, here’s just the built section with drums and bass…now just the high hat…and here’s just the bass. Now comes the brilliant bit, for years I wanted to know exactly how the orchestra parts were achieved on this track. Since my visit to Abby road I now know. So the orchestra was recorded on the last remaining track of the original four tracks, one single pass but then a second four track machine was used and this had four empty tracks on it. Initially q track was put on track 1 leaving 3 tracks. 3 passes of the orchestra were recorded and then that final track was wiped. So now they have a total of 5 orchestra parts. Syncing machines together was impossible back then so these extra orchestra tracks were literally manually synced back into the mix on the fly. The orchestra musicians listen to the back track through speakers. So what you’re hearing now is the musicians spill form the second 4 track machine. You can really get a sense of the room sound of the space Abby Road studio went through this sound. Now here’s a bit of the orchestra playing. This is just one of track of the 5 muti track passes. And as a cross fade to the stereo master you can hear…and there’s even a difference in the stereo and mono version of this song because while they were mixing they had to add in the additional string tracks from the second 4-track machine. They couldn’t press play at exactly the same point every time. So the strings enter at a slightly different place in each version. For the final huge not they needed yet another machine with four empty tracks, 3 tracks of piano and one track of harmony. As always with multi tracks it’s the bits in-between that I find so fascinating and here’s a couple of these. The first is the band’s rowdy counting the bars of the middle section so they know when to come back in. And now finally here’s Paul counting himself in. So there we have it one of the most intricate productions of all time especially given the technology George and the band had at their disposal. The Beatles are very interested in the recording process and the mixing process but at the time of Sergeant Pepper mono records still prevailed. Very few people bought a stereo record; very few people had stereo machines. And so when Sergeant Pepper came along the Beatles worked very hard on getting the sound right in mono and it took 3 weeks for us to mix the album. It went on a long time because they all had their acts to grind and they wanted a little bit of tweaking there and it worked out very well. And then they said okay fells that are great wrap it up. I said hang on a moment you guys we still got to mix the stereo record. And they said you can do it. And they left us, Jeff and I, to do the stereo version which of course came he version and did that in just a few days because we’ve been through all the mono work, we knew what the boys wanted in mono so it was just a question of doing the same thing in a stereo field and I thought it was great and the Beatles were quite pleased with it then too but they weren’t then.
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