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George Martin’s relationship with the Beatles made him world renowned as a producer, but his greatness in skill was his own making. Martin had experience playing, arranging, recording, and producing many different kinds of music — from skiffle to jazz to classical — when he started working with the Beatles in 1962, but he wouldn’t have been anyone’s first choice as a pop producer. That ended up serving the Beatles well, as Martin — who died yesterday at the age of 90 — had an ear for experimentation that helped to bring some of John, Paul, George, and Ringo’s more ambitious ideas to life. Along the way, a handful of specific production techniques not only became Martin signatures, but they appeared on record — anyone’s record — among the first times ever. Here are five innovative approaches that "the Fifth Beatle" toyed with, oftentimes with great success.
Read our Afterword feature on Martin.
Playing With Tape Speeds
Though Martin was a behind-the-scenes guy by the nature of his role, he had a few shining moments playing on Beatles songs (see: the honky-tonk piano on “Lovely Rita”). His most notable appearance was the Bach-esque piano bridge on “In My Life.” Originally Lennon was unsure what should go there, but Martin envisioned a piano line that sounded Baroque, delicate even — a little more delicate than he could quickly nail. So he recorded the piano part at half speed, which meant that it sounded twice as fast and an octave higher (and just with a generally shifted tonal quality) on playback. Many people have mistaken it for a harpsichord over the years, the product of Martin’s experimentation with tape speeds.
Another crucial example of Martin playing with tape speeds was 1966’s “Rain,” arguably the Beatles’ greatest B-side. To create a hazy effect, Martin recorded the instrumental track faster than usual, slowing it down upon playback; Lennon’s vocals were also recorded at a slower speed. This being Martin and the Beatles, the warped speed was not even the most interesting production effect on “Rain,” which us brings to…
Reverse Tape Effects
Though Lennon and Martin argued about who stumbled upon the idea of playing vocals backwards during the recording of “Rain,” the song’s final verse marked one of the first recorded examples of such a technique. "From that moment they wanted to do everything backwards," Martin told the BBC. "They wanted guitars backwards and drums backwards, and everything backwards, and it became a bore."
Indeed, the Beatles employed reverse tape effects throughout the rest of their career, oftentimes with vocals at the very end of songs, as they had in “Rain.” Backmasking is what that’s called when it applies to backwards vocals that oftentimes contain hidden messages for listeners to find when they play an LP backwards. On White Album songs like “Revolution 9” and “I’m So Tired,” this technique helped fuel the “Paul Is Dead” controversy, what with their backwards messages about dead men.
In the long-term, reverse tape effects as applied to specific instruments, rather than vocals, proved to be more interesting to the Beatles and Martin. George Harrison recorded an intricate two-part guitar part for Revolver’s “I’m Only Sleeping” that he envisioned taking on a dreamy quality when played backwards (it worked). For “Strawberry Fields Forever,” Ringo’s cymbals were played backwards, adding one of many layers of disorientation to the song’s drug-fueled trip down memory lane. That said, “Strawberry Fields Forever” probably benefited more from Martin’s uncanny ability to manually splice and combine tape, which brings us to...
Tape Splicing
For "Strawberry Fields Forever,” Lennon wanted the producer to combine two different takes, though they weren't in the same tempo or even the same key. Martin and go-to Beatle engineer Geoff Emerick made it happen, blending the two versions and changing their speeds to bring them into a matching tempo. As Ian MacDonald noted in his book Revolution in the Head, only a slight background change around the one-minute mark gives away their editing efforts. "Strawberry Fields" also gained from an unheard-of 55 hours of studio time, which speaks to Martin's forward-thinking approach to the recording studio as a lab for tinkering.
Lennon would frequently come to Martin with big ideas, but more often, big problems to solve. As the story goes, he told Martin he wanted to be able to "smell the sawdust" on carnivalesque "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!," from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The way the producer achieved that effect was ingenious enough: Along with using harmonium, Hammond organ, and harmonicas, he and Emerick physically cut up and reassembled the tape of various recordings of fairground organs. Beyond sawdust, listeners can practically smell the animals, too.
Pop Orchestration
While Martin helped the Beatles bring about advances in recording technology, he also helped them through his deep knowledge of classical music. His baroque string-quartet arrangement for "Yesterday" is justly legendary, but you can get an arguably better appreciation for his unique gifts by listening to Revolver's "Eleanor Rigby," where the stabbing orchestration was inspired by Bernard Herrmann's Psycho film score. But what was also striking is the way the string octet was recorded: on eight different microphones, rather than a single one, each put up close to the instruments. "So close," Emerick later said, "that the musicians hated it, because you could see them sort of keep slipping back on their chairs to get away from the mic in case they made any errors."
Multi-Track Recording
Technology for multi-track recording, which allows multiple sound sources to be recorded separately and at different times, was still in its infancy when Martin started working with the Beatles. The Fab Four's producer was a pioneer in this area, going beyond the limited number of tracks then available by "bouncing down" — combining multiple tracks into one to clear up a previously used track for fresh recording. On 1963's Please Please Me, he was working with two tracks, and even on Sgt. Pepper's, London's famous Abbey Road studio used only four-track technology, instead of the eight-track recorders then available (for comparison, digital recording allows for infinite numbers of tracks). (By 1968's The White Album and "Hey Jude,” plus 1969's Abbey Road, the Beatles were recording on eight-track.)
"Tomorrow Never Knows," the LSD-inspired, drone-utilizing finale from 1966's Revolver, is notable for many production techniques, not least the use of Paul McCartney's tape loops, which brought French musique concrète into pop. It was there, too, that Martin applied a singular mix of effects to Lennon's vocal, including sending it through a Leslie speakers so Lennon would sound, per his instructions, "as though I'm the Dalai Lama singing from the highest mountain top." All together, "Tomorrow Never Knows" is a perfect showcase for the way Martin helped the Beatles weave separate recordings and various experimental techniques into one sonically dazzling whole.