90 Years of Abbey Road

Abbey Road Studios has had a profound impact on the music industry and has left its inimitable imprint on countless iconic recordings. But the legendary London recording complex was also ground zero for the development of many of the multitrack recording techniques and effects that modern musicians take for granted — now available with a few mouse clicks in our DAWs. Join us as we take an affectionate and reverential look at Abbey Road Studios, its fascinating history, and the technological innovation that drives it, even to this day.

The world-class recording facility at 3 Abbey Road was originally a 9-bedroom private home built in 1829 in the St. John’s Wood district of Westminster, North West London. In 1928, the property was purchased by the Gramophone Company, which immediately embarked on the extensive construction project that would transform it into the world’s first purpose-built recording studio that could accommodate a symphony orchestra. Featuring a large garden, the site was perfect: near London’s premier performance venues while being sufficiently distanced from the noise and vibration of automobile and rail traffic. HMV Studio (His Master’s Voice, a Gramophone trademark) opened in 1931, christened by a London Symphony Orchestra performance in Studio One of “Land of Hope and Glory” conducted by its composer, Sir Edward Elgar. That same year, the Gramophone Company merged with the Columbia Graphophone Company, forming Electric and Musical Industries (EMI). HMV Studio became EMI Recording Studios, and it would go on to become a world leader in recording technology.

An Emphasis on Technical Innovation

In the merger, EMI secured the services of a brilliant, young Columbia engineer named Alan Blumlein. For several years, Blumlein had been engaged in groundbreaking research on the science of stereophonic sound, for which he was granted a British patent in 1933. Carrying on with its emphasis on technical innovation, EMI later formed its Record Engineering Development Department (REDD), which, in the coming decades, would be instrumental in the design of cutting-edge custom tape machines, recording consoles, and outboard gear that would advance the state of the art and usher the recording industry into the modern multitrack era and the Golden Age of Analog. But REDD engineers were not working in a vacuum: they were responding in real time to the requirements of artists and producers seeking fresh, new sounds and optimal workflows.

In the early years, classical recordings were EMI Studios’ bread and butter. As the facility’s reputation spread, it attracted the attention of big bands and jazz combos in the ’40s and ’50s. And, as the ’50s drew to a close, the studio played host to the first wave of English rock and rollers. Innovation accelerated in the 1960s as a new generation of artists demanded new technology to fuel their increasing sonic experimentation. Of course, no discussion of EMI Studios would be complete without an examination of the Beatles’ massive influence on this technological upheaval. Intrepid sound chasers, the band was working in a high-end facility with the best and brightest recording and technical engineers, and they had access to the finest, fully optimized gear. Over the decade, they would record 190 of their 210 songs at EMI, and the studio would even subsequently change its name to Abbey Road Studios in honor of the group’s 11th studio album, its cover emblazoned with the iconic photo of John, Ringo, Paul, and George striding across the street’s now-famous zebra crossing near the studio.

In 1970, studio racks housed patchbays and outboard units such as equalizers, limiters, and compressors — and not much else. In the pre-electronic-effects era, studio trickery was accomplished electromechanically. In the 1960s, EMI employed a staff of talented electrical and recording engineers and had the highest-quality equipment available at the time, much of it heavily modified — or designed from scratch — by EMI’s REDD technicians. The Beatles were the most famous beneficiaries of EMI’s technical proficiency. Their early records were recorded on REDD.37 valve consoles built by EMI Central Research Laboratories in the late ’50s, while the updated REDD.51 captured their mid-’60s output. By 1966, when the Fab Four were recording Revolver — the first Beatles sessions in which the group embraced studio technology as an intrinsic component of their music — the studio staff were working overtime to satisfy the group’s seemingly unquenchable thirst for unique sounds.

Recording Revolution

Revolver‘s closing track, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” is a masterpiece of sonic mayhem containing dozens of unprecedented (if not downright bizarre) recording techniques, which include crushing drum compression, sampling, looping, backmasking (guitar parts recorded backward), chopping up tapes and randomly splicing the pieces back together, altering the playback speed of various elements, and more. EMI Studios’ technical manager Ken Townsend even invented automatic double tracking (ADT) as an answer to John Lennon’s distaste for doubling his vocals naturally. After the distorted sitar/backward guitar solo in “Tomorrow Never Knows,” however, Lennon had a different effect in mind and inquired as to whether it could be achieved by hanging him upside down and spinning him around a microphone as he sang into it. Had they learned of the risky proposed maneuver, EMI lawyers surely would have balked over the liability implications, but staff recording engineer Geoff Emerick came up with a safe solution to achieve Lennon’s desired effect by jailbreaking the input circuitry of a Leslie rotating speaker cabinet.

The Genius of Geoff Emerick

Geoff Emerick had assisted engineer Norman Smith on several early Beatles records and, over the next few years, had worked his way up to full recording-engineer status. In 1966, when Smith was promoted to producer, Beatles producer George Martin requested that Emerick take over as engineer. Revolver would be his first album with the supergroup. One could say that Geoff Emerick was in the right place at the right time — with the right skill set and a healthy intellectual curiosity that drove him to tirelessly explore all possibilities in a given recording scenario. Experimenting endlessly with the wealth of premium kit at his disposal, pushing gear to its limits was all in a day’s (and night’s) work for Emerick, and “happy accidents” occurred on a regular basis — as we’ve heard on many Beatles tracks. A decade later, many of these “happy accidents” were business as usual in top studios worldwide. But, in contrast with independent London studios like Trident and Olympic who were doing their own thing, EMI Studios was corporately owned and fostered a comparatively straitlaced, button-down culture where technical engineers still wore white lab coats and ties. Emerick was the maverick for whom “It’s always been done that way” was a challenge to find a better way. Accordingly, he was responsible for quite a few firsts that, by the mid-’70s, were standard operating procedure for professional recording engineers.

Multi-mic Drum Kit Capture

At EMI Studios in the early ’60s, standard practice for miking a drum kit was to use two mics: one for the bass drum plus an overhead mic to capture the snare, toms, and cymbals. That may have been adequate in those mono-only days, but Emerick had started working with the Beatles at a time when stereo was the hot, new thing, and albums were being released in both formats. Clearly, to enable a stereo spread for Ringo’s kit, a multi-mic approach was needed, but mono compatibility was vital in an era in which stereo mixes were still an afterthought, being done after the all-important mono mix sessions. This required careful management of the phase relationships between the microphones — a lot for a recording engineer to juggle, considering he was pioneering an entirely new drum-miking technique.

Drum Damping

A significant component of the Beatles’ later recordings was Ringo’s dampened drum sound — the result of his habit of draping “tea towels” across his snare and toms and tossing a sweater inside his bass drum. While the use of towels never became a popular method of deadening drums, kick drums today are regularly packed with moving blankets, pillows, or other absorptive materials, and the fat snare drums of the ’70s were often the result of a wallet taped to — or simply tossed on — the batter head.

Close-miking

EMI had rules for every aspect of recording, and these included standard distances between sources and microphones. But, by the mid-’60s, the Beatles’ insatiable hunger for new sounds meant that rules were bound to be broken in their sessions. As a result, Geoff Emerick was often in hot water with management for tight miking all sorts of instruments in an effort to capture a different, fuller sound. However, with the biggest musical act in the world vouching for him, Emerick’s position at the studio was secure. Again, fast-forward a few years, and close-miking would be de rigueur in pro studios around the world.

Using a Speaker as a Microphone

In response to Paul McCartney’s constant requests for more bass, Geoff Emerick came up with a possible solution. Why not mic Paul’s bass amp using a speaker instead of a microphone? After all, although they’re designed for different tasks, microphones and speakers are both transducers. The experiment worked famously, and today an NS-10 woofer has become fairly standard for capturing the ultra-low frequencies of a bass drum — but it took around four decades after Emerick’s discovery for the method to become commonplace.

The TG12321 Compander

In 1962, EMI Central Research Laboratories patented a proprietary tape noise-reduction system — the TG12321 — a “compander” (an amalgamation of the words compressor and expander) encode/decode unit that compressed a signal on input and expanded it on output. The first generation of Abbey Road “pop” engineers soon discovered that treating a signal to only the encode part of the process imparted a sparkling high-frequency emphasis that added air and excitement and helped instruments cut through the mix. In the capable hands of Geoff Emerick, (ab)using the TG12321 in this way was a secret weapon that found its way onto countless records.

Ken’s Flanger

The first hardware “flanger” units hit studio racks in the 1970s, but the technique emerged in the previous decade, commonly attributed to EMI engineers’ efforts to satisfy John Lennon’s request for a unique vocal effect. American guitarist/inventor Les Paul had experimented with flanging and phasing (a similar time-based effect) in the 1950s, so it is perhaps more accurate to say that the techniques were “perfected” at EMI Studios during the Revolver sessions. Closely related to Ken Townsend’s ADT, the technique was expanded upon to create the classic “jet plane” flanging sound.

Basically, flanging entails superimposing a slightly delayed copy of a signal on its undelayed original, creating a swept comb filter. In practice, you would have the same signal on a pair of tape machines running in sync. For modulation, a tape op (or someone else) would apply manual pressure (typically a finger pressing on the reel) to the supply reel flange of the “delay” machine while the “reference” machine ran at speed. Momentary pressure would result in a slight, fixed delay of, say, 10ms between the two machines after pressure was promptly removed, while more prolonged pressure created irregular drag that variably altered the speed, causing the signal to “rub” against the unaffected signal on the reference machine. Alternately (or additionally), a VSO (variable-speed oscillator) could be used to control the capstan speed of the delay machine. Further, VSO settings might be shifted in real time, or manual pressure (and/or VSO) might also be applied to the reference machine. Mixing and matching these techniques could produce wildly unpredictable modulations, and a John Lennon call for “Ken’s flanger” often ended up resulting in an all-hands-on-deck operation involving everyone in the control room.

No Ordinary Tape Recorder: EMI’s J37s

Although EMI benefitted from its own in-house R&D department, it’s instructive to note that British studios in the 1960s were generally several years behind their counterparts across the pond in terms of access to the latest technology. By December 1966, when the Beatles began recording Sgt. Pepper with producer George Martin at the helm and Geoff Emerick behind the board, 1-inch 8-track had already been in use for some time in the US. But what has been hailed as the most technically proficient rock album of all time was committed to tape on a pair of 4-track recorders by bouncing mono reduction mixes between the two to clear up open tracks as the group meticulously layered their magnum opus. However, what they gave up in convenience, they gained back in audio quality — as these were no ordinary tape machines.

The EMI-modified Studer J37 4-track machines were far superior to other recorders then available. In fact, with four tracks over 1-inch tape, the J37 represented the ultimate in audio fidelity for analog tape-recorder technology with EMI’s electronic and mechanical modifications further boosting performance. Each outfitted with 52 tubes and weighing a whopping 300 pounds, EMI Studios’ custom J37 tape machines were witness to the pinnacle of late-’60s studio creativity. In February of 1967, with Sgt. Pepper sessions ongoing in Studio Two, Pink Floyd began tracking their debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, in Studio Three using the same technology with Norman Smith producing. These two psychedelic masterpieces, and other projects, stretched the capabilities of EMI’s venerable REDD consoles to the limit.

The Iconic TG Consoles

EMI’s introduction of 8-track recording and the extreme levels of sonic experimentation that were becoming commonplace called for new technology; and, thus, a new in-house designed and built EMI desk made its debut in 1968. With 24 mic inputs, eight buses, four echo sends, two cue sends, and — for the first time ever — a compressor/limiter (in addition to EQ) on every channel, the TG12345 console was substantially larger and more capable than its REDD.51 predecessor. And, driven by transistors rather than tubes, its sound was strikingly richer and more highly detailed. The TG12345 was put to the test in Studio Two the following year on the Beatles’ Abbey Road album. The groundbreaking sound quality of the solid-state EMI TG12345 recording console would go on to leave its mark on classic albums by the leading artists of the era.

The TG boards came along at a time when technology was rapidly advancing and music was exploding with creative energy, and the “Abbey Road sound” of the ’70s was largely the sound of the studios’ in-house-built consoles. Four generations of TG desks served Abbey Road clients through the ’70s and into the ’80s, recording countless hit records and film scores before being retired from service in 1983. Worth noting is that no EMI-designed/modified gear was ever made commercially available; it was for the exclusive use of studio clientele. This was not at all unusual in the early ’60s, when most of the equipment in a given studio was designed and built in-house. But, by the end of the decade, that would no longer be the case.

The artists whose music was shaped by Abbey Road’s TG consoles constitute a who’s who of rock royalty: Sir Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Wings, Pink Floyd, the Hollies, Al Stewart, the Shadows, the Alan Parsons Project, Cliff Richard, Raspberries, Buzzcocks, XTC, and many, many more.

Birth of a Film-scoring Powerhouse

Here’s to a Century

Throughout the ups and downs of the economy and the technological sea change brought about by the Internet, streaming, and software-based production methods, Abbey Road Studios has persisted and today remains as relevant as ever, offering a suite of online services that includes mixing, mastering, its own film music library label (Abbey Road Masters), an educational Production Hub, an incubator for nascent music technology companies, and more.

The studio’s very existence was challenged in 2009 when it came under threat of sale to real estate developers, but the British government stepped in the following year to preserve the site by granting it English Heritage Grade II status. Boasting a 90-year history rich with iconic music and technical innovation, it is indisputably the most famous recording facility on the planet; and, a decade from now (2031), the legendary studio will celebrate its centennial along with musicians and music lovers the world over. From there, Abbey Road Studios will set its sights on its next chapter. What will the music-recording world look like in 2131? If the human race is still here, then one thing’s for sure: there will be music.

Photo courtesy of Nick D’Virgilio while he was recording his album, “Invisible”.