For a while, you were monitoring in mono, even for stereo releases.

Stereo was late being introduced in England; we were quite behind the times. Up until Abbey Road, everything was monitored in mono through one loudspeaker. Which was hard, but it also helped. Because it’s easy to get distinctive sounds between guitars if you’ve got them left and right. But if they’re coming from one sound speaker, they merge together, and it’s a fight to find a place and a tone and an echo for each guitar. And then, of course, when you got it and you switched to stereo, it was wonderful. It’s still a good way of putting sounds together.

You have to work harder on it.

Yes, it would take, on the average, two and a half to three hours to work on each sound. We had the luxury; we weren’t holding up the session. Most of the tracks were started in the studio, and they would go on for many hours working on the basic rhythm track, which gave us time to work on the sounds.

Of course, we were recording and mixing at the same time because we were still 4-track. So we were putting the real sounds on the instruments. They weren’t going on separate tracks; they were all mixed on to one. That was the finished sound. It wasn’t a question of doing it in the mix. That was it, and the rest of the track was built around that sound.

Well, that’s pretty much a lost art. It’s certainly apt that your job description was “balance engineer.”

Actually, originally in EMI terminology it was called “balance and control” engineer; you balanced the sections of the orchestra. And our overdubs used to be called “superimpositions.” In my second week at EMI, as a second engineer, I had to do a superimposition with a classical orchestra: Elizabeth Schwartzkopf doing “Cosi Fan Tutte,” singing over a recorded orchestra. On classical sessions, you had to record in quadruple stereo—four machines running, and of course, sending the music tape for her to hear—on the speakers, not headphones, we didn’t have headphones for foldback. So you had to play back, while recording on all four machines! [Laughs] And you never recorded over a take, you had to keep track of numbers with a mechanical clock on the tape machine, and you had to write out all the boxes . . . . [Laughs] It was horrendous. I’ll never forget it. I actually had nightmares.

Is it true that the kind of slap you used on John Lennon’s voice couldn’t be duplicated anywhere else because the EMI tape machines had a different kind of head gap?

You could work it out now, I’m sure. But the head gap between play and record isn’t the same on EMI’s machines, that’s all.

I’m confused about how you were doing ADT—Automatic Double Tracking—back then.

It’s funny you should say that, because not long ago, when I saw Jack Douglas who had worked with John, he said to me, in a humorous kind of way, “How did you do that ADT? I could never get the copy tape to go fast enough to actually lie on top of the original voice like it was double tracked.”

From his question, I got the feeling the tape was going so fast it was about to go up in smoke. John must have told him you could do it while you were recording, but actually, you could only do it when you were remixing. You have to take the signal of the vocal from the sync head. So you’re mixing off the replay head. The sync is in advance, and you put it into another quarter-inch tape machine, then you put that on frequency control, and you slow it down. You’re not trying to advance it . It’s already advanced. You’re just slowing it down. The trick is taking it off the sync head.

You were having to devise all this crazy stuff on the spot: backwards bits, phasing with tape machines, loops—were you having fun?

Looking back, it was great fun, for the most part. There were some moments that weren’t, of course — there was a sort of bad period during the White Album. I actually walked out halfway through. It was something like the eighth attempt at “Oh Bla Di, Oh Bla Dah”...they were arguing, and I could see the whole thing disintegrating. I just couldn’t handle it anymore. I said to George Martin, “Can I have a word?” and told him I wanted to leave the sessions. We went to the manager of the studio; it was a Tuesday, and he said, “Well, can you stay ‘til Friday?” And I said “No.” We went back to the studio and had a discussion with the band, who tried to make me stay. But I said, “No, I’ve had enough.”

Your mind was made up.

Yes. Because if someone had twisted my arm, to stay ‘till Friday, when Friday came I wouldn’t have gone. I would have been there the next week and the next week, and felt worse and worse. I had to leave there and then.

You stayed on at EMI for a while after that, then what happened? How was it that you came back to make Abbey Road?

Being so young, I felt I couldn’t further myself at EMI. I’d gone as far as I could, and was desperate, really, to leave. Apple [Records] had formed, and Paul asked, “Will you join Apple and do the studio?” I did, and built the studio, and during that time Paul phoned up and said, “We’re going to go in and do a new album, would you like to do it?” So I said, “Of course.” And that’s how it all worked out. I just went back.

If you were teaching someone how to record vocals, what would you tell them?

You normally know which microphone will suit the artist’s voice; talking to them and listening to them sing in the room gives you insight into their tonal quality. Limiting and compressing depends on what kind of track it is. On “Because,” for instance, I didn’t use any compressors or limiters on anything. I just rode the faders. It’s not about grabbing the nearest bit of outboard gear when there seems to be a problem; you don’t want to over-react.

If there’s a problem, you want to rectify it with the person and work from there. If you’re working with a true artist, it’s not really a lot of what you do, it’s what the vocalist does. Of course, you can now, with Pro Tools, do a lot of pitch shifting and fixing, which seems to be the norm, no matter whether or not someone has done a great performance. But a great performance can get lost that way. When everything is made perfect, it can become insignificant.

I like to hear [drummer Steve] Gadd make a personal statement [with timing]. One of the magic things with Ringo, he’d be hesitant, sometimes, on his drum fills, and then you’d hear them really pick up, and you’d realize it’s a human being, playing. When something is so rigidly in time, it’s like listening to a clock ticking in the bedroom. After a few minutes, your ear just doesn’t hear it ticking anymore. It’s unnoticeable.

Many drummers have said they were inspired by the way the drums you recorded sounded on Beatles records.

It was the presence, I think. No one had heard a bass drum up in your face, sounding as solid as it did. Maybe my approach to recording was magnifying them. I don’t know. Getting back to this visual aspect, it was a question of putting into focus various instruments. Whereas before, everything had been sort of a blur. We just pulled everything back into focus.

There’d been very little close miking done before.

I used to put my ears near to things to hear what the makeup of the particular tone was. I would go out and have a good listen, and see if there were any places where things sounded slightly different. It’s like miking a cymbal on the edge. Have you done that? I put a little condenser on the very edge, and it vibrates and you get this enormous big bottom end—things like that.

Were you puzzled the first time you had to record a sitar?

[Laughs] No, because I’d worked with other instruments on sessions, and had been listening to the tones and where the sounds came from. The sound of the sitar was so quiet and complex. I think I used Neumann 54s or 56s, which are really nice condenser mics—little tubes you could get right close onto the strings or the soundboard, then probably through a Fairchild, to get this amazing big wall of huge sound.

After that, Ravi Shankar came in and was doing a classical recording in Number 3. And George Harrison, who was friends with him, said to me, “Do you want to come in and see Ravi? Because something’s not quite right.” Well, they had him wired up on a wooden rostrum, and they had a ribbon mic, a 4038, about twenty feet up in the air. And of course, you couldn’t hear anything; he was getting more room than sitar, which was just kind of mush in the background. I was just the young kid and the engineer had been there years and years, so I had to be a bit diplomatic.

Considering that you were using loops as far back as 1966 [on Revolver], it must amuse you that they are now so prevalent.

A lot of it was that Paul had a couple of Brenell tape recorders at home. You could disconnect the erase head on them, and he used them to make tape loops, putting new recordings over the first. He’d come in with a bag full of them—some long, some very small—all labeled with a grease pencil. We’d lace them up on our tape machine, and people would have to hold them out with pencils. I recall that on “Tomorrow Never Knows,” there weren’t enough people in the control room to handle holding them, so we got some of the maintenance department down to help. I think we put five loops up on faders, and then just played it as an instrument.

Of course, now, it’s endless, you can do anything. But often, all that doesn’t mean anything. If you just press a button and it’s there, you haven’t really created anything, have you? Going back to the artistic side of it, it’s the difference between painting by numbers or being a Rembrandt and painting a picture. Anyone can apply this technology to recorded music. But there’s that certain something that you can’t put your finger on, something that you can actually give to that piece of recording that the equipment can’t. It’s something that’s in your heart, that’s in you, that doesn’t come from any equipment whatever. It comes from what you hear.

Being pushed to come up with all sorts of new sounds, to try all sorts of things, did you ever think, “Oh, this will never work.”

Oh no. Never. Everything was always possible. Nothing is impossible. That was always my theory.

Selected Credits

America - Nine albums, including: Holidays, Hearts, Hideaway, Highway, 30 Years of America
Badfinger - No Dice
The Beatles - Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour, Abbey Road, Anthology 1, 2, 3, “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Penny Lane”
Jeff Beck - Wired
Elvis Costello - Imperial Bedroom, All This Useless Beauty
Art Garfunkel - Lefty, The Animals’ Christmas (with Amy Grant)
Paul McCartney - Tug of War, Flaming Pie, Run Devil Run
Paul McCartney (& Wings) - Band on the Run
Carl Perkins - Go Cat Go
Split Enz - Dizrhythmia, Spellbound
Supertramp - Even in the Quietest Moments
The Zombies - Odessey & Oracle 6.Droney