Meeting Topic: Recording the Beatles
Moderator Name: Malcolm Addey
Speaker Name: Brian Kehew, Kevin Ryan authors of "Recording the Beatles."
Meeting Location: The Ed Sullivan Theatre, NYC.
Over 300 people, including many who are not yet AES members, filled CBS's Ed Sullivan Theater on December 3rd to hear Brian Kehew, Kevin Ryan and Malcolm Addey discuss "Recording the Beatles." Kevin, Ryan and Malcolm sat slightly downstage of where the Beatles stood on February 9, 1964, when they made their first live television appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show.
This theater, which was known as CBS Studio 50 when it was home to the Ed Sullivan Show, has now been transformed into a modern television studio for the David Letterman show. We got a glimpse of its original appearance when Brian and Kevin showed us some unpublished backstage photos of the Beatles' 1964 show.
We also saw many photos of EMI Abbey Road Studios, and heard how Brian and Kevin acquired the photos, documents and stories for their book. When they began their ten year quest for information on how the Beatles' recordings were made, neither of them knew of the other's existence. Their paths soon crossed, and they decided to become collaborators rather than competitors. They traveled the world searching for former Abbey Road employees and equipment. They learned that human memory of long-ago events often changes over time, and in any case each person's memories are only one view of what happened. Recall of things someone hasn't thought about for years is not always instantaneous. They stayed in contact with the people they found, and fostered discussions between people who had lost touch with one another. They compared the stories which emerged to documents and photographs, seeking a more accurate picture of events, and digging for more technical details.
Malcolm provided "color commentary", drawing on his own experience as a top pop music engineer at Abbey Road from 1958 to 1968, and helped to debunk a few Abbey Road legends. For example, legend has it that the engineers at Abbey Road always wore white lab coats. Not true! The "Balance Engineer" who sat behind the console (or "mixing desk", to use the English term), and decided how to record the music, was typically dressed in a suit and tie. There was a separate technical staff who installed and maintained the equipment, and they often did wear white lab coats.
Kevin played sections of Beatles recordings which demonstrated some of the recording techniques. One was half-speed recording. Tricky parts could be played slowly, then sped up. This also radically changed the sound of the instrument. They also used smaller speed changes to make subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) changes in the sound of vocal tracks.
Reverb at Abbey Road was, of course, provided by real echo chambers. We heard about some of the techniques used to create the desired reverb sound, including tape delay, a high pass filter and HF rolloff on the signal fed to the chamber. Considerable time was spent listening to the chamber, and experimenting with speaker and mic locations, and the interior treatment of the chamber. One legend is that EMI engineers visited the US, and brought back secret information about how CBS constructed their chambers. Malcolm gave us the true story: EMI engineers never visited CBS, and "they wouldn't have let us in the door if we had arrived". The Abbey Road engineers admired CBS recordings, and spent a lot of time listening to them and refining their own techniques so they could achieve similar results. They had no secret inside information on American techniques.
The equipment used for the Beatles' recordings was taken out of service long ago. Brian and Kevin tracked down some surviving equipment in other locations around the world, so they could inspect it and listen to it. And, as they discovered one night, some of it even survived for decades in the back of closets at Abbey Road. They described finding some of the famous EMI-modified Altec compressors, covered with dust and with the power cords cut off. Some of them were subsequently restored and put back into service at Abbey Road.
Ten years of research can't be condensed into one evening, but Brian and Kevin did a great job in selecting interesting highlights, including much new or unpublished material. Malcom provided first-hand information about the evolution of Abbey Road studios and the techniques and equipment used during the decade he spent there.
The evening concluded with a lively Q&A session.
