A Magical Mystery Solved

Paul McCartney’s special on PBS was a little slow if you’re not a Beatles fan, but riveting and emotional if you are. I thought it was sad and powerful seeing the actual physical space at Abbey Road studios where it all happened; sad because Paul clearly misses John and George, and though Ringo is still alive, he was not present.
One highlight was the Mellotron demonstration with Paul playing the opening riff to Strawberry Fields.
There was also a good look at the old 4-track machines the Beatles recorded on with their primitive levers and knobs. Somewhere I have the book that details the actual recording sessions and the output was staggering. They sometimes turned out 2 or 3 classic in a day. Of course, the “Meet the Beatles” album was done in one day so the lads were at an awesome level of proficiency. Their version of “Twist and Shout”, for example, was banged out at the end of the session with John letting it all go in one take. Remarkable.
As a Beatles nut who has sat and listened to bootleg outtakes, there really wasn’t much I didn’t know here, with one big exception. I always wondered how the Beatles got their guitar sounds. I’ve played through VOX amps on similar guitars as I see in the pictures, but they just had a sound in the later years that I couldn’t figure out. Paul explained it last night.
All their recordings were done on 4-track machines so they had to bounce the three tracks down to one and then record over on the first three. That’s difficult because once you make that bounce, there is no going back to remix those three; they are permanently locked together. And remember, you are mixing the three before you hear the next tracks, so when I did it anyway, there was always some adjustment you wanted to do later but couldn’t.
The thing I didn’t know was that bouncing the guitars on these big, old 4-tracks actually changed the sound. And the Beatles loved it. So those guitars that I thought were the result of some expensive amp or brilliant board adjustment by George Martin, actually came into being because of the degradation of the tracks as they were bounced. That was a real shock to me, and a great example of making a good thing out of a negative – much in keeping with the positive message that Beatle fans loved so much.