Let’s step back a minute. How would management know if you put too much bass on something?

Well, the mastering engineers would complain to the manager of the mastering department, “Geoff’s put too much bass on his tape, and we can’t transfer it.” And I used to get reprimanded.

At that time, the producer and engineer weren’t allowed in the mastering room.

No. In fact, when I did Sgt. Pepper, I put on the box “Please transfer flat,” and it just caused chaos. Now, I knew, having gone through the mastering stage, what could be done and what couldn’t. There was no need to touch the tape, and I wanted just to transfer flat. And also, I wanted to go in there while it was being done. Eventually, I did get special permission to sit in on the mastering. Over time, of course, things gradually changed, and it became the norm to go in with the mastering engineer.

But you really did have to do battle over certain things.

Yes. For example, on Ringo’s drum sound, I wanted to move the mic closer to the bass drum. Well, we weren’t allowed. I was caught putting the mic about three inches from the bass drum, and I was reprimanded. I said “Look, this is the bass drum sound we’ve got, and we don’t want to touch it.” And so, I was sent a letter, from one of the guys in the office down the corridor, giving permission—only on Beatles sessions—to put the microphone three inches from the drum. They were worried, you see, about the air pressure—that it would damage the mic. There were a lot of things like that.

But what made you think to break the rules?

It was the fact that I was looking for something new and different all the time. The only way that I could do that was to change the way things were done. In fact, one of the first sessions I ever did, with Force West, we did in Number 2 studio, where the strings always went on the hardwood end and the rhythm and brass up on the carpeted end. But I was after a more live rhythm sound, and a different string sound, so I put the strings up on the carpeted end and the rhythm and brass on the hardwood. And it caused all manner of problems. When the next day, some of the older engineers found out what I’d done, they said, “You can’t do that; we’ve been doing it this way for all these years.” Other people would set the session up, you see, and they used to just walk in and know where to put everything. Then the engineer would just sit down, and away they went. So it was, “If someone else wants to do this, we’ll have to do such and such . . . and we can’t have that.” Because, really, they’d had it easy for ten or fifteen years, and if things were changed, people might expect more from them.

I’ve heard that there was, at that time, a sort of adversarial relationship between engineers and artists.

Well, there were certain rules and regulations. It was very regimented. You weren’t allowed to get too close to the artist; you were only supposed to speak to them if they spoke to you. That was very hard. We had to wear collars and ties and make sure our shoes were polished, and we had to get permission to take our jackets off on a session. And to be seen without a tie—forget it. Of course, you were working with classical people, remember, who expected a certain amount of respect.

Then it’s back to my question of, “Why you?” I mean, the Beatles could have been stuck with someone who said, “It can’t be done” when they asked for something new.

That’s right.

So, what was different about you?

It’s just something that I hear, I guess. I’ve always leaned more toward the artistic side. I didn’t get into the recording business for the technical side.

You have said that you hear in “colors.”

Oh, I do, definitely. The way I approach it is I use what I’m given by the studio like a palette of paints. It’s very hard to explain, but I hear visually. I hear certain sounds in different colors. It’s really an art form to me. If you start asking me technical stuff, I’m not really that interested.

Yet you’re quite a technical engineer, especially in the techniques that you developed—close miking, preamp distortion, backwards sounds, automatic double tracking, tape loops. . . .

It was only out of frustration. Because the Beatles were quite demanding on the sessions. That’s what gave me the fuel to do what I was doing. I couldn’t just sit there and leave it; you had to do something different every track—like “Geoff, we’re going to use the piano, but we don’t want it to sound like a piano; we’re blending the guitar, but we don’t want it to sound like a guitar.” So, what do you do?

Did you usually have a sound in your head that you were going for?

No, I just built the picture from the textures and colors of what the other instruments were doing: what Ringo was playing on the drums, or the way the other guitar or keyboard sounded, trying to get something from that. Obviously, it was still going to sound like a guitar. But I knew what they were saying. They just wanted that extra little bit of magic to make it sound like a different guitar. So I was just applying what we could apply.

I was given the equipment and have used it. Basically, that’s what happened. Like triple compressing a bass, or going from one compressor into another compressor and out of that compressor into a limiter and out of that limiter into another limiter and seeing what happens.

Speaking of compressors, in other interviews you’ve mentioned Fairchilds quite a bit. What is it about them you like so much?

The Fairchild 660s; it’s just a sound they’ve got that I loved. It’s good for specific drum sounds. It’s great on electric guitars, and it’s great on vocals. That’s about it, really.

Do you think there’s something to the notion that bigger is better in terms of recording equipment?

[Laughs] Well, that’s because it was all tube equipment. All the albums up until Abbey Road were recorded through a tube desk. Abbey Road was the first album that was recorded through an EMI transistorized desk, and I couldn’t get the same sounds at all . . . . There was presence and depth that the transistors just wouldn’t give me that the tubes did.

That must have been frustrating.

Oh, it was. But, of course, it gave a texture to the Abbey Road album, after all, which is quite pleasant. But at first, being used to the tube desk and being confronted with the transistorized desk, it was like chalk and cheese. It was hard. And there was nothing I could do about it except craft the music around it. It was a much softer sort of texture.

When Studer came out with their transistorized multitrack tape machines, we were A/B-ing with an MCI 8-track, and the same thing happened. The tape machine just wouldn’t produce the same snare or bass drum sound. And, of course, they could never give you an answer. You could only hear it and say to the people from Studer, “Why does it sound this way?”

And they’d run test tones through it and say it was all to spec.

Exactly.

I was experimenting with 4038s—which were originally BBC design, and are now made by Coles—on overheads. They’re big ribbons; you have to boost the high end. But there was a certain relationship, for some reason, on the 4038s, between mixing them in with the close mics, that really worked. Something to do with the phasing, I suppose. When you reversed the phase on the snare mic, it always came as a much bigger, fatter snare sound when you used the 4038s. It had to do with the bottom end on them. And they were also figure of eight, of course, so it was kicking back.

You say you’re not technical, but you did have a lot of technical training at EMI.

Yes, and it was superb technical training; it really was. Referring to what I said earlier, to be able to record in straight stereo, with no multitrack backup. . . .

And the quality of EMI’s equipment, even to the tape, was excellent.

Oh yes, it was extremely high. When I went to do the Beatles’ Anthology, I took some of the tapes out of boxes that hadn’t been out for thirty years, and they didn’t shed or show much sign of wear at all. Even the tones went straight to zero. It was quite unbelievable. But then, we never had a problem with the tape. Of course, we were never allowed to go back over it.

You used fresh tape for every take?

Oh yes. That was another one of the rules: we always had to record on virgin tape. Because the technical people at the research department said—due to the flux or something—we shouldn’t record over.

“Paperback Writer,” which you recorded, had a rather unprecedented amount of bass on it.

Yes, and the bass drum also. It was one of the younger mastering guys—Tony Clark, who was a pal of mine—so there was some rapport between us. Whereas before, it would have been “No.” I also remember the buzz that quickly went around Abbey Road when it became apparent what we had achieved with the sound of a record. People were standing outside the door and listening. . . . It was so different; really, it was like seeing the first screening of 2001.

Do you recall the setup for those sessions?

We did it [ed: “Paperback Writer” and also “Tomorrow Never Knows”] in Number 3 at Abbey Road—although most of the Beatles songs were done in Number 2. I think I was miking the toms from underneath as well as on top. And I think

What mic would have been on the bass drum?

I think D20s. But whatever can take the impact of the bass drum. We always used to keep the front skin off of the bass drum and put in cushions and a big weight. That sounds better to me than with the head on and a hole cut in it.

What other mics do you recall using on drums?

There were D19s, which were AKGs, I think—just a cheap talkback mic. AKG always said they were the “throwout” capsules for D20s. Then they came out with the D19C, which had a little vent in the back to help the bass end, or something, which never sounded the same, of course. Like Neumanns—the way they progressed up the chain from the 47s and 48s to the 67, which never sounded as good as the 47, and the 87, which didn’t sound as good as the 67. They were always trying to prove to you that it did, but it didn’t.

Overall, your favorite microphone for vocals was a 47.

Yes, and also for guitars.

And you liked using a microphone in figure-8 pattern on bass.

I used to try to pull the bass out of the track to get its own space, and hear it more defined. And one way I tried to do it was to put a tiny bit of chamber echo—well, actually, I should say “reverberation”— on it. I started to do that on Revolver, but Paul could always detect even the slightest amount, and he wouldn’t accept it. So I had to be careful.

But when we were doing Pepper, Paul would often overdub his bass after everyone had gone home. It would be just Paul and I and Richard Lush, the second engineer. We’d spend a couple or three hours doing bass parts, and I started using a C12 on figure of 8 about 8 or 10 feet away from his cabinet, which I would bring into the middle of Number 2 studio. I’d bring it out into the open from the corner area, where it was baffled off because I wanted a bit of the room sound.

Did you ever take the bass direct?

Maybe once. I didn’t like the texture; especially, not on Paul. I guess I never have liked anything that went straight from electrics to electrics. There’s something missing for me if it hasn’t any natural acoustic sound.