The Beatles recordings

When the Beatles first encountered George Martin, at the EMI Abbey Road studios, they were young boys, fresh from playing the bars of Hamburg. There, they played the bars 2-3 times a night for the sailors. They’re equipment was terrible unpainted wooden amplifiers which made so much buzzing, that it was equally loud to the music. During their first sessions, they did little other then record the songs exactly as they were played live. You can hear this in the arrangement of “Love me do”, where Paul sings solo during the break. This was done in order for John to be able to switch to harmonica. The recordings were made on 2-track British Tape Recorders, which was the medium available at the time, with the engineers walking around in white coats, as if in a laboratory. This was in fact their dress code at the Abbey Road studios until the 70’s. What I find most astonishing when listening to these recordings, is the joyful way in which the songs are performed. Love Me Do is one of their first recordings, and in that recording the Beatles were trying to capture a bluesy sound. George Martin thought that Ringo was not precise a drummer enough, so he hired a session drummer, and Ringo was put on tambourine.
The first two Beatles albums were recorded on 2-track recorders. After that 4-track recorders became available, and finally in 1968, the 8-track. Because of the success of the Beatles, they were allowed unlimited time in the Abbey Road studio. After around 1965 with the Rubber Soul sessions, they started to spend more and more time in the studio, using it as an instrument in itself.
The experimental nature of the Beatles recordings continued outside of the studio, as they all had Brennell tape recorders at home, and some of the experiments ended up on record, for example in Tomorrow Never Knows.
The Beatles can be credited for being one of the first to record guitar feedback on record, as is heard in the intro of “I feel fine”.
During the recording of Revolver, many new techniques were created. One of them was Artificial Double Tracking, which was invented by Ken Townsend in 1966. This technique mimicks the sound of double tracked vocals, by recording the vocals into two different tape machines, one which has a slightly variating pitch.
During the recording of Eleanor Rigby, McCartney asked the strings to be closely miked, to avoid a “Mancini” string sound. The engineer, Ken Townsend, responded by close miking the strings right up to the bodies of the instruments. In 1966 this was considered a radically new way of recording strings, but nowadays its common practice.
On top of this, by the time of Revolver, Abbey Road had gotten its compressors. The Beatles were geniuses of using tape machines to get all sorts of cool effects. For example, Paul talks about the acoustic guitar in yellow submarine, were they would drive the guitar into red on the tape, to much horror of the engineers.

perfect

do you know someonw who can change my past?
i want to have a perfect life, so when people ask me how was your life?
i can say, it was perfect.
I don't see any way i could've done better.
I don't see anything I could've done differently.
I don't see how I could be more perfect then this.
How could I want to change my perfect life?
and I've achieved everything.
I don't have anything more to achieve.
everything is too perfect around here.

everything