Inside The Great British Recording Studios
Meet the Beatles—And Their Studio And then there’s the role of the studios themselves. Massey’s 357-page lavishly-illustrated book progresses in more or less order of their historical importance, beginning with, not surprisingly, the British studio, EMI’s Abbey Road, the home of the Beatles throughout their run, to the point where they named their last album as a group after its address. (As Geoff Emerick, their engineer at EMI once noted regarding the iconic photo of the Beatles atop their last album, “For people who don't know the geography, they're actually walking away from the EMI Studios -- or Abbey Road [studios], as everybody knows it now…When I saw that photo, I did think to myself, ‘They're sending a message.’”)
During the many hours they inhabited the studio during the 1960s though, the Beatles found a facility with beautiful acoustics, and well-stocked with those aforementioned expensive high-quality tube-based German condenser microphones, but with some limitations: Because EMI management dictated that the eight track recorder they had purchased in 1968 be thoroughly vetted by their maintenance department before its use, Abbey Road was slow to update from four track to eight track recorders, despite their growing popularity in America, and the recording process’s insatiable need for more and more tracks. Because of the demand for additional tracks during complex productions such as the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album in 1967, resourceful Abbey Road engineers such as Emerick and Ken Townsend were forced to innovate; ganging two and occasionally three four track machines together to produce the intricate sound paintings on genre-redefining songs such as “A Day in the Life.”
By: Ed Driscoll
Source: PJ Media
