index by Barry Miles

Author:Barry Miles
Language: eng
Format: epub

This did actually get a little organised by George Martin. I didn't want that amount of restriction on them and in my instructions to them I didn't give it, but George, knowing a symphony orchestra and their logic, decided to give them little signposts along the way.

The guests moved to the sides of the studio. The two conductors raised their batons George Martin in evening dress and Paul McCartney in a red butcher's apron and a purple and black psychedelic paisley shirt and recording began.

The orchestra played the chord through five times in all, and each take was very different. Then George Martin and his team had to synchronise it with their original four-track master since they did not have an eight-track machine. The engineer Ken Townshend lashed up a method of starting all the tape machines simultaneously using a 50-hertz signal, but even then the synchronisation wasn't quite perfect and on the final mix the orchestra can just be heard going in and out of time.

PAUL: And it became what's been referred to as a "musical icon". It's a very famous sound bite and of course John loved it. It was great to bring those ideas to it but this is the difference between me and Cage: mine would just be in the middle of a song as a little solo; his would be the whole thing. So we did this, and it was a great session.

If there was ever an example where up-to-date equipment would have improved a recording, it is "A Day in the Life". Because EMI was still using antiquated four-track equipment, nine years after American record companies such as Atlantic had switched to eight-track, George Martin was constantly forced to transfer one track to another in order to record the next layer of sound.

As well as taking up a tremendous amount of studio time, each transfer multiplies the signal-to-noise ratio, introducing tape hiss: two copies creates four times the amount of hiss but a third copy increases it by nine times, so George Martin was constantly juggling tracks and worrying about keeping a track free. There is a lot of hiss and noise on "A Day in the Life", as a pair of decent headphones will show.

George Martin and his engineers did a brilliant job considering that they were working in a museum, but the sound quality would have been better had it been recorded on modern equipment. It was typical of EMI that when they did finally decide to upgrade, they opted for an eight-track instead of buying one of the sixteen-track machines that had already become standard throughout the industry. By then, however, rock groups had become accustomed to using the top-of-the-line equipment in the

independent studios, and EMI had to replace the eight-track with a sixteen within a year.

"Experimental" or "avant-garde" are often derogatory terms in popular journalism, as if the experiment was going to be performed upon the public rather than on the art form. John Lennon was deeply suspicious of any conscious

intellectual attempt to bend or break the rules.

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