Recording "Revolution 9"

About

On this day, Paul McCartney flew to the USA for a five-day trip just one hour before the session began. Only John Lennon and George Harrison were in the studio on this day, to work on “Revolution 9” and assemble the master tape. A rough mix was made at the end of the session. The track would be properly mixed the day after.

The work [on “Revolution 9“] culminated on 20 June, with Lennon performing a live mix from tape loops running on machines in all three studios at EMI Studios, but during the live mix, the STEED system ran out and the sound of the tape machine rewinding can be heard at the 5:11 mark and additional prose was overdubbed by Lennon and Harrison.

From Wikipedia

George Martin had booked all three Abbey Road studios for the complicated mix of the sound pastiche known as ‘Revolution 9.’…It was just John and a rather unenthusiastic George Harrison working on the track. The two of them, accompanied by Yoko, would occasionally venture out into the studio to whisper a few random words into a microphone. Just as we had done when we mixed ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ two years previously, every tape machine in the facility was required for the playback of tape loops, with every available maintenance engineer once again standing around in his white coat holding pencils in place. The big difference was that on this night there was a good deal of resentment among the staff because the session was running quite late – well past midnight – and they wanted to go home. I didn’t blame them; many of them had been there since nine in the morning – they didn’t turn up in mid afternoon like we did. Plus the session had to be dead boring for them because they couldn’t even hear any sound; they were just standing in the various control rooms, holding pencils while the tape went round and round. Occasionally one of the loops would break and they’d have to get on the phone and let us know, which, of course, annoyed John no end.

Geoff Emerick – From “Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of The Beatles“, 2006 – Quoted in beatlesebooks.com

There were about ten machines with people holding pencils on the loops – some only inches long and some a yard long. I fed them all in and mixed them live. I did a few mixes until I got one I liked… I spent more time on ‘Revolution 9’ than I did on half the other songs I ever wrote. […] It was like a big organ or something, where I knew vaguely which track would come up if I did that and I’d try to pull out the ones I didn’t like. I just tried to get the bits of conversation in that I liked.

John Lennon, 1980

By the time of the ‘White Album,’ it was not uncommon for various Beatles to sit behind the mixing board alongside me; they were no longer afraid to touch the equipment. On this night John sat with me behind the console like a kid with a new toy. He was the composer and he knew what he wanted, so he manned the faders instead of me, although I served as an extra pair of hands, doing bits of panning and looking after the overall level so things didn’t get out of hand and distort.

The whole thing was extremely haphazard. If he’d raise a fader and there was no sound, he’d say, ‘Where’s it gone?’ A curse word might escape his lips from time to time, but that was about it. He never really lost his temper that night, though you could tell from his tone of voice that he was getting irritated. Yoko, as always, was by his side, whispering in John’s ear and lifting the odd fader on occasion. Every once in a while, Lennon would shoot a glance at George Martin and me to see if we approved of what he was doing. Personally, I thought the track was interesting, but it seemed as though it was as much Yoko’s as it was John’s. Certainly, it wasn’t Beatles music.

Geoff Emerick – From “Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of The Beatles“, 2006 – Quoted in beatlesebooks.com

Last updated on September 11, 2021

Songs recorded

Staff

Production staff