Beatles Recording

Brian Kehew and Kevin Ryan have long been on the Tape Op radar — Kevin conducted the fantastic Emitt Rhodes interview in issue 33, and Brian recently set up and helped with the Ken Scott interview in issue 52. They both work in the recording realm extensively, but many people will soon know them as the obsessive authors and publishers of their upcoming book, Recording The Beatles. Subtitled The Studio Equipment and Techniques Used to Create Their Classic Albums, it's a big exhaustingly researched book, and is sure to turn a few conceptions of gear and technique on end when it comes out.

How did the decision to do the book start with you guys?

KR: We started it individually. Brian started working on a version of the book in the '90s. I started my preliminary work in '98. It's really because growing up recording and trying to recreate some of the sounds, you start to wonder how it was done and you want to know. Waiting and waiting for a book and realizing one wasn't coming, I guess I was naive enough to say, "Hey, I'll try writing it!" I had no idea at the time what I was in for or how long it would take. I just started trying to track down the people that were there. Brian was doing the same thing at the same time and we eventually crossed paths.

BK: I think it's interesting — I was researching just for personal reasons why these records were done they way they were and how they did it, yet there was almost no information written down. I wanted to find out about the ADT [automatic double-tracking] process that people talk about. Mark Lewisohn's recording book [The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions] mentioned it. I wondered how people did this. It's discussed as if it's common, yet no one I knew could tell me how it was done. And that was one of the interesting bits that I wanted to know that actually took us a long time to figure out. Even the people from Abbey Road, their descriptions of how it worked were not immediately clear and not immediately obvious. We were talking to many people over many years to figure out how it worked properly.

So did you have a little section that explains the theory behind it and how it was built?

BK: Not a little section. A big section! [laughs] KR: Yeah. There was an evolution of the effect for sure. We had to track down chronology of certain events here and there. The recollections of the people that were there became so important. That's part of why it's taken so long to write the book — because you have to track down these people. That "trust building" aspect is a long process.

BK: People wouldn't imagine this, but it is true for the few people that worked there with The Beatles directly — it's not their favorite subject all the time. If you call them out of the blue and ask to talk about The Beatles, you might get shut down. It's like asking someone about high school over and over again. They find it a little bit tiresome. But usually, we approached them with very unusual questions or at least a different approach than most people. We didn't want to know about John Lennon as much as we wanted to know about these people and how they did their jobs. We had one or two people that literally had said, "No." It's not that we wore them down, but we were gently persistent until they realized we needed their input...

KR: And their colleagues were starting to vouch for us and say, "Hey, these guys do know what they're talking about." And once they saw that we came back with information that wasn't normally available — they were more open. The technical engineers we found were the most informative.

BK: Absolutely.

KR: Partially because opposed to the balance engineers, like the Geoff Emericks and the Ken Scotts, the technical engineers haven't been asked about The Beatles every day of their lives — so, a lot of these things they are being asked about for the first time. You get really fresh answers. It's the first time they've had to answer some of these questions, so they haven't had time to retell the story so many times that it changes or gets watered down.

BK: To clarify too, the term "balance engineer" is what we normally call a recording engineer. It's an Abbey Road term for someone who balances sounds and tones. And then the technical engineer was a guy who handled all the technical requirements on the session. There was one assigned to each session. He knew about the equipment, hooking up microphones, compressors and outboard gear, fixing things as well if they needed it. The Beatles' balance engineers, who are the names you might know, were not necessarily technical people at all. The person who did the recording may not even understand how a microphone works specifically, but they were people who were creative.

KR: And the technical engineers were involved as well. There was a bit of overlap. It was sometimes up to the technical people to create or figure out how to accomplish the effects that The Beatles or the balance engineers requested. The balance engineers didn't necessarily have the technical know-how to do it. The technical engineers played more of a role than people really ever knew.

BK: That being said, it's an interesting process, one where everyone was freer to concentrate on their job. Now, you and I and everyone know about patchbays and how to fix a bad microphone or something that might go wrong. But the balance engineers didn't have to worry about or deal with that. They had a team assigned to each job.

Maybe they can be better at their respective jobs in some cases.

BK: I think so.

So far you guys have mentioned Abbey Road a lot, but do you get into sessions at Trident or Twickenham, or even the Tony Sheridan stuff in Germany?

BK: We do spend the time on other studios proportionately...

To how much they used it?

BK: Yes.

KR: There's actually an entire chapter called "Other Studios" that outlines what was done there and the available gear at those studios — and we found some really cool pictures that show those other studios at the time. It's an interesting chapter.

Do you talk to Malcolm Toft a bit?

BK: Yes, he's one of them. In fact, in all these cases we find that as many people from those studios that we can talk to — it gives a larger picture of what when on there. In fact, I wish there could be a book on each place. Every studio in the world has its own history. Maybe in the future there will be books from us and other people about other studios and other types of recording.

One thing that came up with our interview with Ken Scott is the different recollections of events from the people involved. How do you reconcile something like that when you're putting a book together?

BK: We have a system that we developed over time. Kevin and I learned a lot about researching while doing the book. We've never done something like this before — most people haven't. But we learned as we went on. With limited photographic evidence, the next best thing to do was to interview someone who was there. But that can be very deceptive, because those memories are shifting and changing at best, and they are often inaccurate somehow. So we found that only over time, through multiple, multiple contacts with these people, were we able to assess who are the most reliable — and also what topics people are likely to be accurate on. Some are better than others.

KR: What often appear to be conflicting memories at first are just peoples' memories of things at different times. Each had valid memories for their time there. Someone could be talking about '66 and someone could be talking about '68. They seem to be conflicting, but they are true for that person's time. And we just have to sort out the chronology and figure out why there is the apparent conflict.

So with the book, it's obviously easy to just talk about recording equipment. But I also gather that the book talks quite a bit about the people responsible for running the equipment and their techniques as well.

KR: True.

BK: I think it's one of the more fascinating parts besides the artist and making a record. As you know, in the studio you realize how much your creative contribution matters to each record, and how the personal taste of each person can affect it. We discuss the various methods that people work with and how it changes from year to year. There's a section in the book that discusses each year and who worked on the record. Certainly it's more about procedure and why things were done differently each year. Maybe the gear got better, or the people changed.

KR: The book overall is really three larger sections. One section is an introduction to the studio and the people that worked there. Then there's a middle section, the bulk of the book probably, which is about all the pieces of gear and the effects and the things that were available. And then the last section is the chronology that Brian is talking about, which we are calling "Production", which is a year-by-year look at how things were done, what techniques were coming in, how the engineers chose to use certain gear during different times. Between those three sections, which are comprised of smaller sections, the overall picture emerges of what was being done, when and how. A lot of the songs are examined in detail — a closer look at what was done. Some interesting things are revealed there.

BK: It takes up a lot of space to do this. It's over five hundred pages — like a phone book! And there are still things that we could have covered or would have liked to have covered. But at some point it has to be broken down into the components that are necessary to know. As Kevin mentioned, the first chapters teach you about things that most people have never run into. No one on the planet except for people at Abbey Road know about this stuff. We've got an entire chapter on certain pieces of equipment — like the speakers at Abbey Road. Almost no one knows the detail in there. It took us years to find out what was there accurately, because everyone just used "that brown speaker" — they didn't know what it was. EMI, because they are such an old studio from the 1930s era, actually built a lot of their own equipment. During the period we discuss, they did start going outside to get certain things. Yet there was a time when EMI made their own microphones and things — items made specifically for EMI/Abbey Road studios, but nowhere else.

KR: Yeah. That's one of the things people are going to be surprised about. People are aware of things like the Fairchild limiter and Neumann microphones. But nobody knows about all this other EMI-designed gear that doesn't really have a name, except for a number. These are things that nobody has ever known about. So, I think that will be a real eye-opener, how much in-house gear was used.

If you publicize this too much, then Wade at Chandler Limited is gonna have to start making them too. [laughs]

BK: There are some pieces of gear discussed in the book that no longer exist as far as we know. It would be fantastic to be able to hear them. EMI didn't always keep records and documents around. They have a wonderful archive that we visited that has millions and millions of documents. But they don't have all the stuff you wish they had from Abbey Road. They don't have all the details of equipment that we hoped was there. But with the help of different people and the various pieces of gear that turned up, we found the equipment details and learned about its use. In some cases, we actually got to use the equipment and see how it operated, to see how different it was from modern stuff.

Once this book does get published, do you foresee equipment hounds searching for things more frantically that they never thought they'd be looking for?

BK: Certainly eBay searches will change. You know, there are things people know right now. For example, the [AKG] D19C is a very common Beatles microphone, used a lot on the drums in certain periods — and they've gotten very expensive for a little dynamic microphone. It doesn't mean that they're not good — they are really good for certain things, but that specific mic is very valuable. There are other microphones and maybe certain pieces of outboard equipment in the book that, once people know about them, the actual scarcity of them will make them more valuable.

KR: And there are a lot of things that people currently accept as confirmed and common knowledge that are just wrong. There are things that people have accepted as properly classified over the years which have turned out not to be the case.

BK: It is interesting that we have so many years of research into this, and have bided our time to try to get it to come out in one place at one time. But we see so many people talking about things on the Internet and having opinions about, "This is the way it was done." It's quite often very funny to us what they say. The minute the book comes out, everyone will come to understand it a little better. It will suddenly become common knowledge.

But then someone's going to write another book to disprove everything that you proved. [all laugh]

BK: At this point, we're really, really aware of that. But our book has been run by the Abbey Road people that helped us, the guys that were there. And we haven't just worked with them once — we've spent years and years working on it. Just in the past two days, I've had probably ten emails from former Abbey Road people — this is a daily occurrence. We've worked with them so much. They are the ones that approved it. They are saying, "Yes, this is the way it was. This is accurate." And maybe there is a detail here or there, and we would like to make it more correct as time goes on, but it's going to be very, very close to accurate.

KR: One thing I'd like to clarify: Some people are going to approach the book as a guide to sounding like The Beatles. That's inevitable. But the book is not an attempt to distill the magic of those recordings down to a formula. It's not a recipe book for sounding like The Beatles. It's also important to differentiate between "the sound of The Beatles" and "the sound of The Beatles' recordings". If you could have picked The Beatles out of London and dropped them at Capitol, Stax or any American studio, the results would still have sounded like The Beatles, but the recording itself would have had different characteristics — different engineers using different equipment in different ways in different rooms would have captured that sound differently. You can't really quantify in concrete terms the sound of The Beatles. But you can talk about how that sound was captured and what equipment contributed to that sound.

BK: I think one of the concepts that's most interesting with The Beatles was how they constantly pushed everyone all the time to be different. And that's how they stayed ahead of the pack. Each album was considered, "We've already done that drum sound last year. Let's do a new drum sound this year." Even if it's just strange and odd. And they would just push. Different amount of effects. Different amounts of EQ. Different kinds of recording going on to make each record different. The Beatles weren't last year's sound. They didn't do anything very long. Had they kept making the records, they wouldn't have made records that sounded like the other Beatles records.