I love recording - as an extension of playing music and writing songs, making records is pretty much my life. I also love the Beatles, and think that they made the coolest and best sounding records just about ever.
So I just got Recording the Beatles, and damn, it’s an amazing book. It’s an exhaustively researched, comically documented, enormous hardcover book about everything that had to do with actually making the Beatles records. There’s a huge color picture, diagram, and multiple pages on every single item they used, from all of the studio equipment at Abbey Road to every microphone, every tape machine, every EQ unit, the instruments, as well as a ton of stuff on the actual techniques and configurations they used. Then the back section of the book goes song by song for their entire career and shows the original studio tracking sheets and diagrams of what was on each track of the tape machine and so on. There’s a ton of stuff with Geoff Emerick and the other engineers about all of the different techniques and tricks and approaches, and about a billion anecdotes from their sessions for the entire career.
Absolutely amazing book that comes in a huge slipcase with recreations of original tracking sheets and lyrics and stuff. Totally over-the-top and amazing.
Yoko’s remarks were especially poignant.