The Beatles pioneered several recording techniques, such as double tracking, isolated miking, and the use of fore-tracks. Find out how the Beatles recorded t…
The Beatles pioneered several recording techniques, such as double tracking, isolated miking, and the use of fore-tracks. Find out how the Beatles recorded t…
Your mislead. The industry was regulated in 1965. They were not allowed to do certain types of micing.Jeff, their new enginer developed close drum micing.Yes some of the technques were introduced prior to their recordings. However, they developed many variations never used before. Read The Beatles Anthology and you will be enlightend to some of the other ideas they developed. Watch Paul’s 6 part video where he goe back to Abby Road Studios and shares stories.
A New York DJ, Murray the K, helped market them in the USA in the early days. That was the reason they called him the 5th Beatle. I do agree with you, G Martin played a huge part in thier music.
Yeh I know who Murray the K is ;)
– I think he means pioneered in the sense of how they use these technique. Yes they existed before The Beatles but they were used in very minimal ways. The Beatles took those very well known techniques and brought them to the forefront of modern music.
master !!!
the sound of his shirt is just annoying…!
Say what? They never miked every drum. Most they ever did was stereo drums on The End.
Lennon was a very bright guy. Smarter than Martin by far.
dude thats a nice 8108 56 channel you have there!!!! we have a 32, the first one built that was commissioned for Capitol Records Mix Suite C
Billy Preston
This guy doesn’t seem to know much about the Beatles’ recordings or how extremely important those recording techniques were. But…..oh well.
Where does this guy come off giving information about the Beatles recording techniques? He can’t even explain ADT correctly or how they bounced tracks. Sounds like he just picked up a short article and said whatever he was able to remember. All the stuff he you tubes is pretty lame. This stuff is for the people that have no real desire to know what goes on in a recording environment, therefore quite worthless information.
I was just going to type the same comment. I use ADT all the time (I actually have a plugin that does it very nicely these days). But he has no idea what it actually IS. For those that don’t know you take the single vocal track, duplicate it and then delay that second track a few milliseconds. Then hard pan those 2 tracks left and right and you have the doubling effect.
does he use clasp
Does anyone know anywhere on the net that gives more detail about Beatles recording techniques? Particularly the drums…Our band has some very basic equipment (people say Martin would’ve envied todays equipment, but in many ways, we envy what he had!) and its hard getting a decent sound (possible, just difficult). Much of the recording info on the web are about advanced kit, with 70 mics for the snare and 311 for the rest of the kit, along with a 6 million band EQ and a mixer with 900 channels
Great info. thanx. Going to try that double modulating vocals now.
This is not the exact way they did it, but if you want a similar effect on the cheap, try a single sm57 mic about 6 feet in front of the bass drum at about head height pointed at the snare. use a vst vintage style compressor, and make sure you really let the drums pump. that should get you close.
Did they do that on songs like And Your Bird Can Sing and I’ve Got A Feeling? The later ones? Or just early on?
They did that for %99 of the songs, the compressor was used probably starting on Rubber Soul or Help. The only song i can think of not done this way was In the end, because in the end had stereo drums.
Ok, cheers – will try that out next chance I get 🙂
ADT is automatic you don’t sing twice
you need a pop shield on your mic………ha ha , nice post, thanks
yea, all those mixdowns to the tracks have resulted in the sound being muddy and dead sounding, your losing a generation in every mixdown to a track, that’s why the early records sound so clean, and the later records sound so dead and flat
ADT never sounded like two vocal passes and I don’t think it was ever supposed to be a substitute despite what Lewisohn says. It just gave a certain effect like the vocal on “Good Morning” or “Walrus” or guitar solo on “Tomorrow Never Knows” (mono mix). ADT (as used by Martin) was also not some complicated variable oscillation thing. ADT is nothing more than a 33 millisecond tape delay, no variance (at least early on) in the delay. When you vary the delay it’s called flanging/phasing.
Fun remixing project: Take the regular stereo mixes of “And You Bird Can Sing” and “Doctor Robert” and separate the stereo mixes into a left channel only WAV and a right channel only WAV. Then shift the right channel 33 milliseconds (about 1,477-1,479 samples) behind the left channel. This will bring the ADT’d vocals in sync and they will collapse to the center of the stereo into a single vocal track mix. Of course the instrumentation will now be ADT’d but it’s still cool.
thank you speaking about the Beatles … we’d love to hear more info on them on recording techniques …
Get a copy of Geoff Emerick’s book called ‘Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles’. George Martin was important, but Geoff Emerick was equally so in crafting the sounds of Revolver and Sgt Pepper, Rain, Paperback Writer, etc. George Martin is often afforded credit for Geoff Emerick’s pioneering studio techniques. Read the book.