What were the limitations at EMI (today known as Abbey Road Studios)?
Our limitations were a mixing console with basically eight microphone inputs and a tape machine and microphones and few small echo devices, and that’s basically what we used and had to start with. When I started to do Revolver,’ they wanted to go into different directions and advance. The early Beatles records were only two-track recordings? Let’s go back to the earliest stuff when (engineer) Norman Smith and I was maybe assisting on the sessions, of course, they were just two-track recordings. And basically, they would actually do it live. The main vocal would have been live. Most of those earlier ones were. All the rhythm track would be on one track and if there were any overdubs to be done, we’d do it tape to tape, a twin-track to twin-track copy overdub little bits on the copy and edit (literally cut and tape) the bits on the copy back into the original two-track master. And then when you went to the mono reduction it was just a question that you could at least balance the vocal ag
