The Black Adder
15-05-2014, 15:05
Great little article here. A must read for any Beatles/Tannoy fan... Like me ... lol
Quick quote:
"On the end of ‘Hey Jude’ you can quite clearly hear someone swearing. Why did you decide not to remove that?
Paul McCartney: I don’t think we noticed until later. We recorded it in Trident Studios, which is in Soho, which is a studio that we used if we couldn’t get in Abbey Road.
So, we were all there and we did ‘Hey Jude’, and we were listening back on these six-foot tall tannoy speakers, and there were four of them in the room so it was like living in the song, which is how you can impair your hearing! So we just whacked it up real loud and listened to it. It was more of an experience than anything.
Then we took it back to Abbey Road, and we were more preoccupied with the thing that we’d fooled ourselves with the sound - it sounded great on these great big speakers, but when we put it on the naff speakers that we always tested everything on, which was just a couple of very ordinary JBLs, it sounded crap.
We had to put in like full bass and full treble; the engineers really had to load it back up, cos we’d fooled ourselves on the sound. I think we were so preoccupied with that, that we didn’t really listen to it until it was too late, and then we listened to it very carefully on headphones and sort of thought, ‘Oh, shit!’ Because there were a lot of vocal part harmonies, you know: [sings] “And any time you feel the... Aaaahhhhhh...” A lot of long notes, and I think probably someone made a mistake and went, ‘Aw, fuck it!’ or whatever, and that just found itself in the mix. It wasn’t intentional. "
More here: http://www.clashmusic.com/feature/paul-mccartney-interview
Quick quote:
"On the end of ‘Hey Jude’ you can quite clearly hear someone swearing. Why did you decide not to remove that?
Paul McCartney: I don’t think we noticed until later. We recorded it in Trident Studios, which is in Soho, which is a studio that we used if we couldn’t get in Abbey Road.
So, we were all there and we did ‘Hey Jude’, and we were listening back on these six-foot tall tannoy speakers, and there were four of them in the room so it was like living in the song, which is how you can impair your hearing! So we just whacked it up real loud and listened to it. It was more of an experience than anything.
Then we took it back to Abbey Road, and we were more preoccupied with the thing that we’d fooled ourselves with the sound - it sounded great on these great big speakers, but when we put it on the naff speakers that we always tested everything on, which was just a couple of very ordinary JBLs, it sounded crap.
We had to put in like full bass and full treble; the engineers really had to load it back up, cos we’d fooled ourselves on the sound. I think we were so preoccupied with that, that we didn’t really listen to it until it was too late, and then we listened to it very carefully on headphones and sort of thought, ‘Oh, shit!’ Because there were a lot of vocal part harmonies, you know: [sings] “And any time you feel the... Aaaahhhhhh...” A lot of long notes, and I think probably someone made a mistake and went, ‘Aw, fuck it!’ or whatever, and that just found itself in the mix. It wasn’t intentional. "
More here: http://www.clashmusic.com/feature/paul-mccartney-interview