In addition to their catchy, chart-topping songs, the Beatles also attained tremendous musical and cultural influence through their experimental recording techniques, ushering in a new, more psychedelic era of the 1960s. Yet, despite how impressive this achievement might sound on paper, the Fab Four didn’t come up with these studio tricks by being technical geniuses at their craft.
As Paul McCartney explained in a 1990 interview, their studio prowess was less a testament to their know-how and more an example of how “f***-upable” their audio equipment was back then.
Paul McCartney Describes Divisive Recording Techniques
All the managers, engineers, and producers who worked with the Beatles during their short tenure as a band all had to quickly learn that the Fab Four was loyal to their vision and no one else’s. Whether they were pushing to record their original music or cut a nonsensical song like “I Am the Walrus,” the Beatles were going to do exactly what they wanted, and very little, if anything, they didn’t. The same was true about their recording techniques, which often ruffled the feathers of their studio engineers.
In a 1990 interview with Guitar Player, McCartney explained how one of the ways the band achieved their distinct acoustic guitar tones was to overload their equipment. Speaking of the recording process of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” at EMI Recording Studios (now Abbey Road Studios), McCartney said, “We got them to record the acoustic guitars in the red. The recording engineers said, ‘Oh, my God! This is going to be terrible!’ We said, ‘Well, just try it.’ We had heard mistakes that happened before that and said, ‘We love that sound. What’s happening?’ And they said, ‘That’s because it’s in the red.’”
“So, we recorded slammin’ it in the red,” McCartney continued. “And these old boards would distort just enough and compress and suck. So, instead of going, dink, dink, dink, dink, it just flowed. I’m a big fan of blues records and stuff, where there’s never a clean moment. Nothing was ever clean. It was always one old, ropey mike stuck somewhere near the guitar player, and you could hear his foot more than some things.”
The Beatles Founder Said Older Equipment Was Better At Messing Up (In a Good Way)
The “red” Paul McCartney referenced in his 1990 Guitar Player interview was the meter displaying volume levels. Green and yellow are typically safe volume levels, while red is typically indicative that the levels are surpassing the board’s processing capabilities. Distortion is likely at this level. According to McCartney, the fact that older equipment had lower audio processing capabilities was a blessing in disguise for the Beatles’ records.
“One of my theories about sound nowadays is that the machines back then were more f***-upable. They were more destructible,” he said. “You could actually make a desk [recording console] overload, whereas now, they’re all made so that no matter what idiot gets on them, they won’t overload. Most of the old equipment we used, you could get to really surprise you. Now, a brand-new desk is built for idiots like us to trample on.”
Some say idiot. Others say genius. Ob-la-di, ob-la-da.