How in the hell did they do that? I am just blown away.
I mean, you sit there and you listen to it, and…
Unbelievable.
What blows me away is that it was all recorded using only four tape tracks.
Is this the first time you’ve sat down and listened intently or are you making a statement about the quality of the 9/9/09 release?
Hadn’t they expanded to 16 track by that time (I know the Beatles had access to the first 16 track machines but can’t recall which album they first used them on).
No, according to Wiki (!) it was recorded on four track. I seem to recall that The Beatles (aka The White Album) was the first time they used 16 track, but I’m still seeking confirmation of that memory…
I can’t stand to listen to it on CD, having grown up with the LP. Each song is supposed to segue into the other, not have those jarring walls of silence between them. Or have they fixed this since I last listened to it on disc?
8 track machines had been invented and used in the US, but they were not available in the UK until after Sgt. Peppers was released.
My copy of Abbey Road segues just fine.
Maybe it’s your player.
This.
Cheesy CD players that use PC CD drives treat each song as a “file,” and put a gap between them. I mostly see this on cheap DVD/CD players.
George Martin has opined that the paucity of tracks was a major contribution to the inventiveness of the Beatles. The technology wasn’t there to do it for them, so they had to find another way - and they did!
Incidentally, if you’re interested in how it was done, Geoff Emerick’s book, Here There and Everywhere is very interesting.
Sgt. Pepper has been growing on me for 42 years now. I used to think it wasn’t all that great; now I love it (except for “She’s Leaving Home”).
“She’s Leaving Home” is actually my favorite Beatles song, heh. Though that’s like choosing your favorite child … so much to love, in different ways.
I’ve become embarrassingly trite by falling in love with the Beatles again thanks to the releases, even though I haven’t bought 'em yet. Just spent a lot of time listening to interviews w/George Martin and the lads, and especially listening to all the old albums.
There’s a reason Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is considered by many to be the best album. It’s fucking brilliant. Favorite tracks, aside from SLH, are “Within You Without You” and “Day in the Life.” Unfortunately my CD is cheap too and I’m not a fan of the way DitL sounds on it, but hopefully that’ll be rectified when I have the new version. I do miss my records, though.
Abbey Road remains my favorite album, though. I have a new appreciation for Revolver since finally listening to it after all these years – holy crap that’s an amazing set of songs, from “Taxman” to “Here There and Everywhere” and especially “Eleanor Rigby” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.” And the pure delight of Hard Day’s Night can’t be dismissed either.
Sigh. I really really want those mono disks, darnit.
It’s a bit more complicated than that. They only had four track machines but they were able to synch two together (IIRC) by running one machine off a 50Hz tone recorded on another.
I listenened to Rubber Soul/Revolver/Sgt. Pepper/MMT back-to-back this weekend. Quite the musical journey in just two years!
One of the things that really struck me was the transition from the last track of each album to the first track of the next. Another thing was how jarring is was to hear John declaring “I’d rather see you dead…” at the end of Rubber Soul. I never thought about it before, but now it seems like a major turning point in their lyrical sensibility/world view.
Not doubting you, but do you have a cite for that? I didn’t think that they had the technique of slaving one machine to another then. Bouncing tracks and mixing one 4-track to another sure, but slaving machines?
If you’re willing to trust it here’s a wiki article. Which isn’t where I learned about it, I think I saw George Martin explaining it on a TV program. Seems like they only used it for A Day in the Life, not surprised, it must have been a right palavar.
The relevant bit from wiki:
As Giles Martin points out, they were heavily influenced by The Goon Show, and good portions of Sgt. Pepper (And their movies, as well.) were efforts… not to copy the sound, but to try to play with noise in similar ways. So there’s some heavy Foley influence as much as anything else there.
What I find so amazing about the use of only 4 tracks is the way that they had to plan the bounces and submixes as they went along. When they Beatles recorded on four tracks, it’s not like the final recording only used four tracks - they’d fill up all four and then bounce (mix them all down together) to only one track of the four track and repeat until they had everything they wanted. On stuff like Sgt. Pepper’s, you’re talking many generations of mixing everything down to a mono track and then repeating until it was done and everything sat right. They had to always consider which elements would get progressively lost in the mix through multiple generations of bouncing in order to figure out which order to put new tracks down to tape.
By SP they’d got the hang of the technology available to them and they began to push George Martin - that’s when it got really interesting, all five (I include Mr Starkey) pushing each other.
The four still didn’t know too much about classical instrumentation but, jesus, what a creative distance to come in 5-6 years, especially when you think of their output in that period.