Quick Summary

In a new PureMix series, former Abbey Road engineer Ken Scott returns to Studio Two to recreate some of those historic recordings. Find out more including five recording techniques we love which were pioneered by the Beatles.

Going Deeper

Ken Scott’s first recording session was as a 17 year old second engineer for the Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night album. Being one of the main engineers for the Beatles as well as Elton John, Pink Floyd and David Bowie puts Ken Scott among the engineers who helped shape contemporary music.

However influential the other acts on your credits, the Beatles will always outshine the others, however stellar their achievements. Given access to Ken and Abbey Road Studios there’s going to be only one topic of conversation…

In a new series from PureMix “The History of the Beatles Recording Techniques”, Ken records tribute band ‘The Fab Faux’ to recreate the techniques and sound which made the Beatles so distinctive.

5 Beatles Recording Techniques We Love

From our perspective, 50 years on from the pre-Beatles era, it’s hard to appreciate just how different music was after the Beatles compared to before. There is often an element of simultaneous discovery, as technology becomes available it is interpreted, subverted and misused by creative engineers, often independently and at the same time. But here are some of the techniques we associate with the Beatles and their innovative use of the recording studio through eight years which transformed recorded music. These techniques are attributed to several of the key engineers, not exclusively to Ken Scott.

ADT

One of the best known of the Beatle’s techniques, Automatic Double-Tracking using two tape machines running together playing the same audio, and using variations between the playback speed of the two machines to introduce anything from a thickening effect all the way through to psychedelic tape flanging/phasing effects, is a hallmark of 60s music. Originally conceived as a way to speed up the process of conventional double-tracking, the technique has been recreated in plugin form by many developers, notably by Waves in partnership with Abbey Road Studios themselves.

One of the things this treatment makes possible is ‘through zero’ phasing. When the duplicate track is run out of phase with the original, when the audio matches the original perfectly it will cancel giving a dramatic swoosh which is straightforward to create using standard features of your DAW. Find out how to do it in our tutorial below.

Close Miking

The sound of a drum kit on most records stopped being ‘accurate’ in the sense of capturing what the drum kit sounds like in the room a long time ago and one of the many ways it has diverged from the purely natural is through the use of close miking.

One of the better known stories which illustrates how inventive young engineers were challenging the established ways of doing things in the 1960s, is the story of how Geoff Emerick had to break house rules about placing a mic too close to a kick drum, in this case actually inside it to get the sound. Standard practice today but unheard of at Abbey Road in the the mid Sixties. This close miking approach was incorporated into the recording of acoustic instruments, notably the strings in Eleanor Rigby which were miked close, giving the famous quartet arrangement its characteristic immediacy.

Overdamping Drums

A second, less talked about aspect of the mic inside the kick story is the use of heavy damping on the kick drum, in that case courtesy of a sweater. The emergence of tight, dry sounds is something which has come and gone with changing tastes, the fat, dry snare has been a feature of Motown recordings, reportedly damped with the drummer’s wallet - the drier the snare the fuller the wallet.

However damping of the toms by draping tea towels over them to give Ringo’s characteristic use of the toms even more uniqueness was something new. Drum sounds continued to dry out through the decade but the tea towel tom was something of an outlier at the time.

(Mis)using Leslies

In our recent article 5 Leslie Speaker Sounds On Record we identified some notable examples of the Leslie speaker being used on sources other than a tonewheel organ. One of the most innovative was the use of a Leslie to transform John Lennon’s vocal into an ethereal, disembodied voice on Tomorrow Never Knows, reportedly prompting Lennon to ask whether the same effect could be created by dangling him from a rope and swinging him round the mic!

Aggressive Compression

Over the top compression is something we might associate with music from a later period. The Beatles only briefly overlapped with the 1176, surely the compressor which is responsible for more irresponsible compression than any other. But if you listen to some of the Beatles’ recorded output you find some examples of extreme compression.

The compressors most associated with the Beatles are the famous EMI modified Altec, the RS124 and the Fairchild 660. The choices are many. Almost any bass sound, some pianos, but to hear just how far they went check out the crash cymbals on She Said She Said, which grab so hard after the slow attack catches the cymbal that they disappear, only to swell back in again.

In the series History of the Beatles Recording Techniques Ken recreates the sounds of the Beatles, in the studio where those historic recordings were made. To learn more click the button below.

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