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The Beatles Recording Reference Manual: Vol. 1: My Bonnie Through Beatles for Sale
Nominated for the 2018 Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research.
The first book of the series, "The Beatles Recording Reference Manual: Vol. 1: My Bonnie through Beatles For Sale (1961-1964)" tracks the evolution of the band from their earliest recordings and initial hits, through "Please Please Me," "With The Beatles," "A Hard Day's Night," and "Beatles For Sale." From the first take to the final remix, discover the making of the greatest recordings of all time.
Through extensive, fully-documented research, these books fill an important gap left by all other Beatles books published to date and provide a unique view into the recordings of the world's most successful pop music act.
The collection and analysis of hundreds of recordings (takes, outtakes, remixes and release versions), books, magazine articles, photos, film and video evidence, and interviews with key engineers who worked on the sessions filter out the noise of myth and conflicting fact to arrive at an accurate telling of the creation of The Beatles classic recordings.
The first book of the series, "The Beatles Recording Reference Manual: Vol. 1: My Bonnie through Beatles For Sale (1961-1964)" tracks the evolution of the band from their earliest recordings and initial hits, through "Please Please Me," "With The Beatles," "A Hard Day's Night," and "Beatles For Sale." From the first take to the final remix, discover the making of the greatest recordings of all time.
Through extensive, fully-documented research, these books fill an important gap left by all other Beatles books published to date and provide a unique view into the recordings of the world's most successful pop music act.
The collection and analysis of hundreds of recordings (takes, outtakes, remixes and release versions), books, magazine articles, photos, film and video evidence, and interviews with key engineers who worked on the sessions filter out the noise of myth and conflicting fact to arrive at an accurate telling of the creation of The Beatles classic recordings.
- GenresMusic
432 pages, Paperback
Published July 7, 2017
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About the author
Jerry Hammack
13 books1 followerJerry Hammack is a Canadian-American musician, producer, recording engineer and author living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 16, 2018
Overall I enjoyed this book, am glad to have it as part of my Beatles reference library and look forward to future volumes. My only gripe was a poor editing job. Little words, such as "to" and "of" are missing all over the place. And passages such as this are all too frequent: "Decca thought so little of the Beatles amplifiers that they were not permitted for use any of them in their audition for the label". This isn't even a sentence. Sure, I can grasp the intended meaning, and other readers may think I'm making irrelevant complaints. But I feel shoddy proofreading casts doubt over the entire book: if the punctuation and grammar are this careless then how reliable is the research? I think the author's purpose of a kind of all-in-one encyclopedia that collects together the findings of other experts on the Beatles' studio work, such as Mark Lewisohn and Walter Everett, is worthwhile. I do hope Volume 2 will tighten up on the editing though.
September 17, 2017
Geologic breakdown of the Beatles’ recordings
Jerry Hammack’s ‘Beatles Recording Reference Manual Volume 1’ is a book that digs right to the core of the foundational structure of the Beatles recordings, referencing every take of every recording from the very first Decca Records demo tracks through the first EMI recordings, through the initial flurry of Beatlemania and massive success, sessions caught on the run between world touring, promotional TV and radio appearances and an entire feature film (‘A Hard Day’s Night’), landing us at the end of 1964 with the completion of their fourth studio album, ‘Beatles for Sale’. Just typing all of that is exhausting so I can imagine what living through all of it in the ‘eye of the hurricane’, to use John Lennon’s phrase.
Jerry Hammack is a recording engineer himself and this book is a primer for all contemporary recording engineers on how to record amazing records with limited (from the 21st century perspective) recording equipment. This book reminds me of those plastic geological overlays we used to find in encyclopedias for maps of land masses in which each plastic overlay displays another level of geologic formation, including topographic, near three-dimensional detail. Imagine that as applied to the Beatles’ records and you have a fair idea of the kind of minute detail this man goes into. Hammack took eight years of massive research digging through hours of recordings and interviewing as many of the people involved in the studio recordings as he could find that are still living, doing years of detective work to reveal a plausible narrative of how the recordings evolved in the studio, the equipment used, the decisions made regarding arrangements, musical instruments, types of amps used, tracks used from their original mono form to creation of stereo versions, etc. These diagrams are literal maps of the structure of each recording.
While I’ve read many biographies and recording narratives (most notably the in-depth accounts written by Mark Lewisohn), I’ve never encountered such a thorough breakdown of how the recordings were actually built, I thought I’d already gleaned all the essential details about who played what on which record and what process led to the determination of what constituted the masters. However, there are plenty of nuggets of information I never knew. Here are just a few:
• The first instance of Paul playing piano on a Beatles track is on “Little Child”, from ‘With the Beatles’.
• Engineer Norman Smith overdubbed hi-hat (they were referred to in the studios at the time as “superimposition”) to the stereo version of “Can’t Buy Me Love” as the loss in high frequencies dulled the sound of Ringo’s hi-hat. This happened on March 10. The Beatles were in Middlesex that day filming ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ so it is unlikely that Ringo could have been there to add it himself. First revealed in Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick’s autobiography, it was also Emerick’s first time in the recording booth operating the controls.
• John played the guitar solo for “You Can’t Do That” on February 25, 1964.
• Norman Smith added bongos to Take 9 of “A Hard Day’s Night” (possibly during one of those times when the Beatles were elsewhere making the film).
• The first mention of John playing piano on a Beatles song – “Any Time at All”.
• John also plays piano on “Things We Said Today”.
• Interesting image—John kneeling on the floor adjusting the volume control of George’s guitar as George plays the solo on “Baby’s in Black”.
• John also plays the piano on “What You’re Doing”. I found this surprising as I always thought that in most instances on the Beatles’ recordings when George Martin himself did not play piano (as he did on the majority of the songs that included piano and even on some of the later recordings) that Paul played it. Paul was the most proficient all-around musician of the group and had a knack for picking up instruments and learning to play them fairly easily. Hammack says that the playing on “What You’re Doing” lacked Martin’s virtuoso touches and exhibited John’s simple, staccato attack’ he usually applied to piano.
• I did not know that John, Paul, and George sang the lead vocals into one mike for “Words of Love”. I always thought the song had a John/Paul two-part vocal.
Despite the ‘three-part lead harmony’ vocal on “Words of Love”, there is so much vocal work by just John and Paul that I have now come to regard ‘Beatles for Sale’ as THE Beatles two-part harmony album.
Hammack says that there will be three additional volumes. Vol. 2 will cover 1965-1966 i.e. ‘Help!’ through ‘Revolver’, Vol. 3 will be devoted exclusively to 1967 and comprise the ‘Sgt. Pepper’ and ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ recordings, and Vol. 4 will cover 1968-1970 i.e. the ‘White Album,’ Let it Be’, and ‘Abbey Road’, plus the cleanup sessions of ‘Let it Be’ in early 1970, I presume. I expect that the diagrams will become more convoluted and the narratives more extensive as the songwriting evolved and the recordings became more complex. ‘Sgt. Pepper’ is so layered that it seems to need its own volume. I greatly admire the extensive research and time that Jerry put into these volumes. They definitely fill in some blanks I can’t recall other writers doing previously.
Jerry Hammack’s ‘Beatles Recording Reference Manual Volume 1’ is a book that digs right to the core of the foundational structure of the Beatles recordings, referencing every take of every recording from the very first Decca Records demo tracks through the first EMI recordings, through the initial flurry of Beatlemania and massive success, sessions caught on the run between world touring, promotional TV and radio appearances and an entire feature film (‘A Hard Day’s Night’), landing us at the end of 1964 with the completion of their fourth studio album, ‘Beatles for Sale’. Just typing all of that is exhausting so I can imagine what living through all of it in the ‘eye of the hurricane’, to use John Lennon’s phrase.
Jerry Hammack is a recording engineer himself and this book is a primer for all contemporary recording engineers on how to record amazing records with limited (from the 21st century perspective) recording equipment. This book reminds me of those plastic geological overlays we used to find in encyclopedias for maps of land masses in which each plastic overlay displays another level of geologic formation, including topographic, near three-dimensional detail. Imagine that as applied to the Beatles’ records and you have a fair idea of the kind of minute detail this man goes into. Hammack took eight years of massive research digging through hours of recordings and interviewing as many of the people involved in the studio recordings as he could find that are still living, doing years of detective work to reveal a plausible narrative of how the recordings evolved in the studio, the equipment used, the decisions made regarding arrangements, musical instruments, types of amps used, tracks used from their original mono form to creation of stereo versions, etc. These diagrams are literal maps of the structure of each recording.
While I’ve read many biographies and recording narratives (most notably the in-depth accounts written by Mark Lewisohn), I’ve never encountered such a thorough breakdown of how the recordings were actually built, I thought I’d already gleaned all the essential details about who played what on which record and what process led to the determination of what constituted the masters. However, there are plenty of nuggets of information I never knew. Here are just a few:
• The first instance of Paul playing piano on a Beatles track is on “Little Child”, from ‘With the Beatles’.
• Engineer Norman Smith overdubbed hi-hat (they were referred to in the studios at the time as “superimposition”) to the stereo version of “Can’t Buy Me Love” as the loss in high frequencies dulled the sound of Ringo’s hi-hat. This happened on March 10. The Beatles were in Middlesex that day filming ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ so it is unlikely that Ringo could have been there to add it himself. First revealed in Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick’s autobiography, it was also Emerick’s first time in the recording booth operating the controls.
• John played the guitar solo for “You Can’t Do That” on February 25, 1964.
• Norman Smith added bongos to Take 9 of “A Hard Day’s Night” (possibly during one of those times when the Beatles were elsewhere making the film).
• The first mention of John playing piano on a Beatles song – “Any Time at All”.
• John also plays piano on “Things We Said Today”.
• Interesting image—John kneeling on the floor adjusting the volume control of George’s guitar as George plays the solo on “Baby’s in Black”.
• John also plays the piano on “What You’re Doing”. I found this surprising as I always thought that in most instances on the Beatles’ recordings when George Martin himself did not play piano (as he did on the majority of the songs that included piano and even on some of the later recordings) that Paul played it. Paul was the most proficient all-around musician of the group and had a knack for picking up instruments and learning to play them fairly easily. Hammack says that the playing on “What You’re Doing” lacked Martin’s virtuoso touches and exhibited John’s simple, staccato attack’ he usually applied to piano.
• I did not know that John, Paul, and George sang the lead vocals into one mike for “Words of Love”. I always thought the song had a John/Paul two-part vocal.
Despite the ‘three-part lead harmony’ vocal on “Words of Love”, there is so much vocal work by just John and Paul that I have now come to regard ‘Beatles for Sale’ as THE Beatles two-part harmony album.
Hammack says that there will be three additional volumes. Vol. 2 will cover 1965-1966 i.e. ‘Help!’ through ‘Revolver’, Vol. 3 will be devoted exclusively to 1967 and comprise the ‘Sgt. Pepper’ and ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ recordings, and Vol. 4 will cover 1968-1970 i.e. the ‘White Album,’ Let it Be’, and ‘Abbey Road’, plus the cleanup sessions of ‘Let it Be’ in early 1970, I presume. I expect that the diagrams will become more convoluted and the narratives more extensive as the songwriting evolved and the recordings became more complex. ‘Sgt. Pepper’ is so layered that it seems to need its own volume. I greatly admire the extensive research and time that Jerry put into these volumes. They definitely fill in some blanks I can’t recall other writers doing previously.
October 13, 2017
Very factual, well put together book. Hammack takes the reader through the recording process and details all of The Beatles receordings from the Polydor records to the end of 1964.
Can't wait for volue two
Can't wait for volue two
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews