George Martin: 50 Years In Recording

bw: Is there stereo radio transmission in England?

gm: Yes, there is, but it's very limited. It's third programme stuff; that is, you get classical concerts occasionally broadcast in stereo and occasionally you get stereo record broadcasts. I should think the number of people in England who listen to it is about .001 per cent. And also, people don't listen to radio much anyway. The average man in this country is glued to the television set.

bw: Would you describe what you feel the responsibilities of the producer are on a "rock" date?

gm: Yes. I'm glad you defined that because a producer's responsibilities do vary an awful lot. For a rock date I think he's got to get to know the group musically and obviously psychologically he's got to know the people. He's got to get into their minds and he's got to try to find out what they're trying to express and if he can find out, it's then his job to realize it in terms of sound. So, his function is not to impose his will upon the group and produce his sound using the group as his puppet, but more to draw out from the group the best sound he can possibly get, and get them to play the best possible music.

bw: Then you feel that sound, as well as music, is a major responsibility of the producer?

gm: Yes. That's the way I see it. It's also psychological. I think you've got to learn how to get the best out of people – find out when they're going past it and so on.

bw: How would these responsibilities vary for a CLASSICAL MUSIC session?

gm: Well yes, they vary enormously. To begin with in the classical session, unless it's chamber music, you've only really got one person's ideas to deal with, and that's the conductor; and then, from the amount of classical recordings that seem to take place today, it's more a question of the diplomatic handling of that conductor and trying to get the best out of him rather than the technical details of a good sound. The classical producers of today, and I'm not calling myself a classical producer, seem to leave everything to the engineer and just act like a kind of ... what shall I say ... host to the conductor. I don't think they interfere too much musically, which I think is a pity. I think that classical music could be in fact improved by adapting certain pop techniques to it. I wouldn't mind having a go at recording something classical in a different way.

bw: Would you, for example, use close miking?

gm: Yes. Most classical records are made like photographs of concerts, if you know what I mean – aurally speaking. The ultimate aim is to reproduce as naturally as possible the sounds of the orchestra as created in the concert hall. Now I think this is terribly limiting. I mean it's been done, and it continues to be done better and better because engineers and acoustics and recording techniques have advanced enormously. But I think we're missing out on something. I think that if Beethoven or Bach were alive today, they would call that a very timid approach, and I think they would go back to first base and say, "You've got tremendous tools here; let's use them." And I think if you go back to the actual music and adopt, really, very modern recording techniques and produce a work of art which is different from what you hear in the concert hall, and not necessarily inferior which most people might think.

bw: Then the rock producer presently has more room for creativity?

gm: Unquestionably. That's what appeals to me.

bw: (Before AIR Studios were built) Your responsibilities also include selection of the studio and engineer?

gm: Yes.

bw: In recording a rock group, will you attempt to capture a "live" studio performance, or will you construct a recording using, for example, overdubbing.

gm: I'm afraid the latter is true. One doesn't go for a performance as such in the studio because you know darn well that if you do that there are going to be shortcomings in various other departments. You might get a great vocal performance, and the bass line may not be so great. So, there are various things that you can do – you can go and overdub the bass line if you've got good enough separation. You've seen us working recently ... what I was trying to do yesterday, in fact, with Peter, with the whole group, was to try to concentrate on Peter's performance trying to get something out of him, and then worrying about the rest of it. But in fact we've reversed the process today because we've decided that Peter will probably do as good a performance by overdubbing anyway. So we're going back to first base and concentrating on the actual sound. It doesn't seem to impair the total result. Most rock recording is done that way today. You obviously get a much better sound on everything; you are able to pay much more attention to detail.

bw: You mentioned before the importance of psychologically understanding the group. Could you be more specific?

gm: It's just instinct really – a kind of sixth sense you build up. You've got to get to know people and sense what's happening.

bw: Would you say that a sense of humor is important?

gm: Oh yes, a sense of humor is terribly important. Absolutely. If you didn't have a sense of humor on rock dates, then everybody would go sour. I can't bear people who take themselves too seriously, including rock musicians.

bw: Do you find that you do a lot of producing during the mixdown stage as well as during the recording stage?

gm: It depends on the artist and the record you're making, and what techniques you're using. If you're making a record like Sgt. Pepper, for example, the mixdown is just as complicated, in fact more so, than the original recording because you're painting a picture in sound and you're using extra things: you're bringing in sound effects, you're distorting sounds, you're playing with them, you're sort of shaping them – sculpting them, if you like – and mixing them down at the same time. So that kind of production is probably more complicated and more important in the mixing stage than at any other time. But if you did that all your life, you'd be spending all your time mixing and none of it recording.

bw: Then it varies greatly from group to group?

gm: Very greatly, yes.

bw: When mixing down, do you physically operate the console, or do you direct an engineer?

gm: Like most producers I like to get my hands on the controls, and it's wrong. Sometimes I do sometimes you have to – because sometimes the mixes are so complicated that one pair of hands won't work. In fact, on many Beatles mixes, we would have the engineer sitting in the middle, me sitting on the right, and one of the guys on the left. It depends whose song it was – it might be Paul or John or George. And we would all be playing with the faders, the three of us; we would actually be playing a sort of triple concerto. But the snag with that is that you still need someone else to listen because when I'm controlling the controls on a mix, I'm listening for certain things that I'm controlling and I don't have that essential requirement of being able to listen to the whole thing with absolute impartiality. So nowadays I tend to get out of that scene and say, "This is wrong. You shouldn't be handling the controls. You should be standing back and telling people what to do, and listening to the whole thing." It's only by being free that you can really see the whole picture.

bw: What qualities do you look for when selecting an engineer?

gm: Oh, that's a big question. First of all, he's got to be an enthusiastic engineer. I'm very fortunate with Bill (Price); he really is a dedicated engineer. He must be keen on his job, keen on sound, and preferably – and there will be many people who will quarrel with this – preferably without the ambition to be a record producer, because I think that gets in the way of good engineering.

bw: Why is that?

gm: Well, there are an awful lot of engineers who become record producers, which is fine; I've got no gripes against that. But I don't think you can do two jobs at the same time. And there's always the transition period when the engineer tries to do a bit of production, or goes back to doing a bit of engineering after he's been a producer. And I think that they lose out because of that. They are two separate jobs and they need detatched minds.

bw: Anything else?

gm: He's got to be good at his job; he's got to know a lot about recording – that goes without saying. He's got to know the board, and he's got to have a good ear. He's got to have a personality where, without being servile, he makes it plain that he is there, in fact, to serve the group. He doesn't have to be a humble person. On the contrary, he must be a person of some authority and some spirit; but he must always give that impression, that he is there to get the best sounds out of people, just as the producer should give that effect.

bw: So you don't care if the engineer has a musical background?

gm: No, not really; not personally because that should be the job of the producer.

bw: What kind of language do you use to communicate with your engineer? You mentioned to me before that you were non-technical, therefore I assume that you do not communicate in technical terms.

gm: Well, in fact, I do. I'm non-technical, but I still say to him, "I think we need a bit of top at 4,000 (Hz) on that, or try it a little lower down." When I say I'm not technical, I mean I haven't any technical training. But you can't grow up in the recording industry, and go from mono recording through stereo and multi-track, working all the time on boards, without picking up a little knowledge.

bw: Then you feel that the producer should be able to operate the console himself – at least in his head?

gm: I think it helps – anything that gives a greater understanding between people. I think that if my engineer knows that I know what's going on, then he will respect me more and he'll work more closely with me. If I don't know what I'm talking about and I ask him for something that is patently impossible, I'll lose his respect, and he won't work so well with me.

bw: Do you prefer to work straight through with one engineer?

gm: I prefer to work with one engineer for a particular job, but I don't want to work with that engineer all my life.

bw: Many Beatles recordings employ techniques or tricks such as phasing very tastefully. Did the ideas for these techniques come from engineers? Or, to put it another way, do you encourage your engineers to make suggestions?

gm: I certainly would encourage engineers to make suggestions. But in fact, all the techniques we used that you've described have come about not because the engineers made suggestions, but because we actually asked for particular sounds. Phasing came about as a result of experimenting with the automatic double tracking, ADT, which was, in fact, suggested by an engineer, who strangely enough wasn't a balancing engineer. He was a backroom boy who came forward with this idea. He was an EMI bloke; he's now in fact running EMI studios, which is nice. And so phasing came about as a result of that – playing with ADT. In most other cases they've been a result of personal experimentation in the studio. My experience with spoken word recordings – building up sound pictures without music – was invaluable in that respect.

bw: Are there any special considerations that you keep in mind when producing a 45 rpm single release?

gm: Obviously it's got to be a little more concise than an album track. There are a lot of things which you put on an album, which stand up on an album because they are part of a long scene, which obviously wouldn't mean anything on a single. In any case, you are making records to a certain extent for a particular market. One is well aware of the nature of the music that is played on the top 100 in the "states ", so you're obviously thinking of that when you select your single.

bw: Is there any instrument, or instruments, that you consider particularly important, especially with regard to singles?

gm: No, I don't honestly consider any one thing to be particularly important – I think they're all important. When I'm doing a recording of a rock group, I do actually, mentally, go through every sound that I'm hearing, saying, "Is that the right sound?" I apply the same devotion to each one. If you miss out on one, you're not doing your job.

bw: Is it true that the early Beatles records were remixed by Capitol for release in the states?

gm: They weren't remixed by Capitol; they might have been re-equalized by Capitol. Yes, in fact, I'm sure they were. The story was in those days that American record players were different from English record players, and therefore they had to cut their own masters to suit their own tastes. And they did that; and I didn't like the results, but I couldn't do anything about it.

bw: Could you describe the differences in sound between the American and British releases?

gm: I didn't think they (U.S. releases) were as good. It's difficult to get a good answer to that one because I was hearing their records on my machine and I don't know what they would have sounded like if I had heard them on their machines. They may have been alright, but they generally sounded much thinner and harsher than our sound, and less bass certainly.

bw: Early Beatles records were characterized by a particular vocal sound which has been very influential on pop music in general. How did this come about?

gm: Because we had particular kinds of vocalists, really.

bw: You mentioned ADT.

gm: That was a particular sound we put on. You know, once we got over the first hurdle of being a success, they were always looking for something new. They were continually coming to me and saying, "Do something different." They were always prodding and trying to push some things out a bit further. John hated the sound of his own voice, which I personally thought was a great voice, and quite often he would come to me and say, "Can't you do something with my voice; it sounds terrible." He'd say "I know it is terrible, but let's do something about it. Don't make it sound like me," which was worrying in a way because he expected magic. I don't know quite what he was expecting to hear, but it wasn't what he was producing and consequently we did play about with the voices quite a bit. Sometimes, I think the results weren't very good, but in a lot of cases they were.

bw: Is it true that Sgt. Pepper was recorded on four-track machines?

gm: Yes, absolutely true. It was done four to four.

bw: Who did the engineering on Sgt. Pepper?

gm: Geoff Emerick, I think he did all of it.

bw: What other Beatles records has he worked on?

gm: I couldn't give you a catalog – there are quite a few. When we started out, the engineer we had was a guy by the name of Norman Smith. I can't give you which record he stopped on, but we could find that out easily – the facts are there. But he came to me one day and said he wanted to be a producer ... he was an EMI engineer ... and did I mind. And I said, "No, fine. Off you go." He said, "The only thing is, I want to go on engineering the Beatles." And I said, "Well, now, I don't think you can do that." I was very firm, but quite polite, and I said, "If you want to be a producer, that's one thing and that's fine. Go and make some good records. I'm sure you can, but don't think you can go on engineering at the same time," which comes back to your previous question. So he made the plunge and he left and became a producer, and he's done some extremely good stuff. He made all of the Pink Floyd's early records. He's now a staff producer for EMI. But then I had to find another engineer. Now there were lots of engineers senior to him at EMI, but I decided at that time that wanted someone very new and young. I'd been looking around – looking for talent, so to speak, and decided to give the chance to Geoff Emerick, who in fact had done very little recording before. He'd been balancing for six or nine months before I gave him the job with the Beatles. He jumped at that and it was really tossing him over the deep end; but he was marvelous – he came out with colors flying. And after Geoff we used other people as well, but in fact, we brought Geoff back for Abbey Road.

bw: He didn't, then, work on the Beatles white album?

gm: No, he didn't.

bw: Would you describe some of the techniques used on Sgt. Pepper, for example on "For The Benefit of Mister Kite"?

gm: That's really quite simple when you know about it. John wanted a calliope kind of sound. He wanted to get the impression of a fair ground and he played me this song that he'd written, and asked what I could think up to give it that kind of fair ground atmosphere. And I thought a lot about it, and decided the best way to do it was to use some of the techniques I'd done with spoken word records. I decided that to get the kind of swooping, steam organ noise he wanted, I got him on one Hammond organ and me on another; actually I think he was on a Lowry and I was on a Hammond. And we recorded some half speed organ, and I did some chromatic runs with the tremelo on fairly fast over two octaves and then sped them up to double speed. That was one of the things – the swooping noises. But for the background mush, I got lots of steam organ tapes, genuine fair ground organ recordings of all sorts of pieces of music – "Stars and Stripes Forever" and those kinds of things – and cut them into short lengths (of tape) and threw them up in the air, literally, and just told the engineer to pick them up again and join them all together. He thought I was mad. We played it and of course the result was very cacaphonic. We used that as just a general background, mingling mush, which gave the required effect ... all kinds of funny jumping – some of it was backwards – but it worked.

bw: Beatles records are also characterized by constructive use of echo effects. Do you pay particular attention to echo on your recordings?

gm: The right kind of echo, yes. There's a tendency these days to use plates an awful lot, in fact exclusively. We have plates here but we also have an echo chamber, which I must confess I haven't used a great deal yet. But I believe that a good chamber can beat a plate any day. I used chamber mainly on Beatles records. Actually, we used a combination of chamber and tape, which we called "steed " – I don't know why we called it "steed" – but it was basically sending the delayed signal by means of tape into the chamber.

bw: Why weren't any of the engineering teams credited until Abbey Road?

gm: EMI policy, and they didn't like it even then. (Abbey Road)

bw: Beatles records, especially since Sgt. Pepper, have caused a rekindling of interest in the electric bass. Was bass a particular problem in recording the Beatles?

gm: Paul was always worrying me to get more bass on the records, certainly, and it was my job to try and get that bass on, true. Probably it was the single most worrying factor, of any sound that we produced, because Paul is a perfectionist and even when we got a great bass sound he didn't think it was very good. Now, you say that we got some great bass sounds, which is nice to know. I'd like you to relay that information to Paul.

bw: I'd be glad to.

bw: Could you describe a technique you used on the bass on Abbey Road, say, for example, "Come Together"?

gm: I think on that particular one we used a combination of direct injection and live sound.

bw: And limiting/compression?

gm: Yes, of course, and also a little bit of echo too. But each sound is treated on its own merits. That's why we, in fact, got lots of varied sounds, some of which were not so good as others.

bw: The instruments and voices on Abbey Road have a particular clarity and presence that seem to be derived from close-miking or similar techniques. Was this your aim?

gm: I was aiming for clarity, but oddly enough, it isn't very necessarily close-mike techniques that provide this. The essence of that clarity that you talk about is the ability to differentiate one sound from another; so that if you get a bass drum sound that is interfering with your bass, for example, then you do something about it. You change it. And I think the clarity comes from having distinguishable sounds anyway.

bw: Then from a production standpoint, if you're going to have two sounds in the same frequency range, they should be playing approximately the same part, or else they will muddle each other?

gm: That's right.

bw: Did you do all the horn and string arrangements for the Beatles?

gm: Yes, with one exception. Oh, I certainly didn't do the Let It Be one, which Phil Specter did. I was quick to disown that. There was one exception; it was one of the string ones, which an English arranger did. He gave us the score because I wasn't around at the time and Paul wanted it done very quickly. Mike Leander it was on one title. He gave us the score and I directed it in the studio. Everything else was mine.

bw: Do you think that you'll work with the Beatles again, or any of the Beatles?

gm: In answer to the first question, I think it's possible if the Beatles ever work together again. As to the individual Beatles, I don't know. Each one of them is very talented, two of them in particular, in fact George, John, and Paul are obviously more talented than Ringo. All four of them are very talented anyway, but none of them is as strong as the four of them together. The four individual parts were not as great as the entire whole. The Beatles, four people together, did something that nobody else had ever done before, and the fact that they're not together I think is a terribly sad thing.

END

R-e/p, February 1979

GEORGE MARTIN Revisited by Tom Lubin
Photos by Henry Diltz

Tom Lubin: What do you think the role of a producer is?

George Martin: Big question isn't it. It's changed. It changes with the time. I guess the role of a producer is to produce a record as well as he possibly can, using the best of the talent available to him, which means that he has to get more out of the artist than the artist is capable of getting by himself. There's been a tendency in recent years for the artists to want to produce his own record because the role of the producer has become too important, it's been kind of self-defeating. The 'cachet,' "produced by" has become such a coveted title that the artist themselves have become jealous of it. So they say, well, I'd much rather not have you around, I think I can produce it by myself. I'd like to have "produced by" not just "sung by."
In the main I think it's to their disadvantage, because the problem with a certain produced piece of work is that the artist can't be completely objective and a prime role of a producer is to be objective. He needs to step back and look at the whole of the painting instead of just concentrating on the brush work in the corner. It's one of the most important parts of making a record. He must also contribute, and be creative. He must see within the raw material, both the song and the voice, something which can be brought out that other people may not see. He has various ways of doing that. Some people do it by taking their ideas and giving them to the artist to carry them out. Then the better ones do it in such a way that the artist feels he could have easily done it himself.

Tom Lubin: How do you get an artist to think he had a particular idea?

George Martin: It's not very difficult since most of them think they did anyway. I'll give you an example. If I want a particular ending to a piece of music and the guy, the composer, goes to the piano and I say, "That's fine, but I don't like the ending very much. I think you might do something about that." And he'll say, "What kind of thing do you mean?" And I'll say, "Well, I think you ought to go to a kind of unrelated mood, finish up some pattern you're doing." He'll say, "Like this?" "No." He'll try something else and I'll say, "No." Well, pretty soon he'll get it.
I knew all along what it was I wanted, but instead of taking his hands off the piano and doing it myself I had him try it, and about the third time around he had it. Because later he'll say, "You know George said something about the ending so I made this change at the end and it really works great." That's really how it works. It's a very subtle thing.

Tom Lubin: What we're talking about is diplomacy.

George Martin: Absolutely, it's essential. Though it can rebound on you. If you take it to its logical conclusion sometimes the artist will say, "So what the hell do I need him for, I did it all myself anyway." That is the danger. On the other hand most people do have pretty big egos, and it is necessary to pander to it in order to get the best out of them.

Tom: Diplomacy is as much a part of producing as making musical decisions.

GM: There's an awful temptation if you're good at something to show off because everyone wants to have people say how clever you are. Everyone wants to be able to do something that people say is great. That's a thing that a producer must always resist. He really is subservient to the artist. He is not the talent that is being promoted, he really isn't. If that were the case he could then make his own records and be done with it. He is there to serve, to guide, and encourage the artists. And at all times he's got to be careful to not push too hard. He's got to lead rather than drive.

Tom: At what point do you think a producer should become involved with a project.

GM: From the very beginning when the material is first played. Before the Beatles, the role of the producer, who wasn't called a producer in those days, was very much a role of song picker. The day of the singer/songwriter hadn't really arrived. The tendency in those days, pre-1960, was to find really good professional singers who didn't necessarily write their own songs, though sometimes they tried. But generally there were songwriters who wrote really good material. But they couldn't perform. It was the wedding of those two.
The producer's main role in those days was to pick really great songs for really great artists and put them together; choose an arranger or whatever, and produce the record in that fashion. That's what we all did. And then came along the Beatles. And things started changing because the Beatles started writing their own material. Other people wanted to do the same thing. A lot of singer/songwriters came along. And the producer's role changed. Since the songs were already there, it became more a question of shaping the songs; of helping the songs along. Saying, "Right, I think you ought to go into the middle eight a bit earlier," or whatever.
That role lasted for quite a while. Now, I think we're coming back into the other phase, because there is no doubt that albums are selling because of singles. You've got to have a hit single if you're going to be a success, and the selection of the raw material is absolutely crucial. And so we have the situation where the producer has a very, very important role of picking songs.

Tom: His role seems to have been broadened as well by the extensive use of orchestration.

GM: Yes, but there's a lot of records without heavy orchestration; the group does the sweetening themselves. Use of synthesizers have made it that much easier.

Tom: What do you think the role of the engineer is?

GM: To make a good technical record is the simple answer. Again, over the past fifteen years there have been changing elements within the roles of these two people.

Many times they've become immersed in each other's way. In fact, the role of the engineer/producer has become very important. I should think of all the records produced in this country, half of them are produced by engineer/producers; a great many are. Obviously, I'm an old-fashioned type of producer, and obviously I think it's better to have two heads rather than one, if they work in good harmony. The complementary roles of a top engineer working with a top producer produces a better result.
When I'm working with someone – like Geoff Emerick, who I've worked with for years since I tossed him in the deep end and now one of the great producers of all time – we know each other so well we don't have to talk. He knows what I'm thinking; I know what he's thinking. I know the kind of sounds he can get. He knows the kind of sounds I want. Consequently, we don't get in each other's way; we don't waste time. He concentrates like mad to get a really great technical sound. If I say, "Geoff that bass drum sounds a bit flabby," he'll say, "Okay, I've got it." He goes off. I literally forget that problem, because I know that he'll give me a great bass drum sound. In the meantime, I'm working on the music. He might say to me equally, "Do you think that chord works there, George?" And I might say, "Yes, Geoff, I think it does," and I fume a bit. Or, I might say, "You know, maybe Geoff is right about that; I hadn't thought about that."
And that's as far as our roles overlap. We stick to each others' work. And the result is we come up with something that an engineer/producer would take longer to do, if he does it as well, because he's having to think of all things at once. He has to think of keeping the band happy, of looking after the technical side of it, running around to all the instruments, and so on. And at the same time thinking of the music. And I frankly think it's too much for one person to do.

Tom: Do you think your production style has changed with the advancement of the recording technology?

GM: Its bound to have changed because of the years I've been in the business and the way it started. In the beginning it came out of a tiny little hole, and that was all the sound you got. That was a mono sound. It was really restricted. The equipment you had to play with was extremely limited. If you wanted to be avant-garde in any way you had to make your own tools. It was literally like living in the Stone Age.
If I wanted an electronic sound there was just no such thing as a synthesizer. I'd have to make it myself, bang on the piano wires, and speed the tape down or double it up, or whatever. The most elementary way of doing concrete music. As the techniques changed, the development of records made that little hole in the middle a big, panoramic wall of sound. I see that wall not as a line, but if I can be a bit pretentious, I see it as a painting; if I could think in terms of sight in relation to sound. I'm thinking of putting bits here and there, and hearing things coming out, and going back so that there is depth as well as breadth. I think three dimensionally, where something is way back behind. A hundred yards back. And I can hear things right in front. As I started developing that process, that was when mixing became fun. "Pepper" became an ego trip, and a hobby as well. I used movement. I found when panning it not only went left-to-right, but it seemed to go above me.
Later on, when we had quad, we had the facility to bring the sound out in front of the speakers. Ah, well! But that died a death.

Tom: Do you think quad will ever make a comeback?

GM: It may do it, but the improvement of stereo over mono was enormous; let us say it was 100 per cent better. The improvement of quad over stereo wasn't as much, maybe 20 per cent better. And the encumbrance of it all didn't make it worthwhile for the average listener in the home. Mrs. Jones will put up with two speakers, but when it comes to four she's going to put her foot down.

Tom: The texture of the echo on the original Sgt. Pepper is quite different than the film.

GM: I think the answer is that plate echoes have become better. In the old days at Abbey Road we used to have a great chamber, and we would use a combination of chamber and tape. We called it Steed. We would vary the amount of tape going into the chamber, and so on; sometimes using it straight. In the end we'd get a combination of all things.
Nowadays the EMT plates have become so good that they almost sound like a live room. Today we use EMT and tape together. In fact, we don't have live chambers at Air. We built one but it didn't sound as good as the one at Abbey Road and it took up too much space. EMT's work better anyway.

Tom: I'd like to go back before the Beatles.

GM: I was running a label. I was running Parlophone Records. It was a pretty small label, but I was responsible for all the music on it and, as I was responsible for the success of that label, I had to decide what records to sell. During the time that I was doing that, the British market was dominated by the American charts. The best sellers were all American. A label that didn't have any American product was bound to be unsuccessful, and my big brothers at EMI – which were Columbia and HMV – had people like Elvis Presley, Guy Mitchell, Doris Day, Frankie Laine and Frank Sinatra. Coming in on that Parlophone was never a very successful label. We had no American artists at all; we had to make our own.
The British rock and roll industry didn't exist, then. Rock was just beginning in the late fifties in England. What we did have was skiffle. Have you heard of Lonnie Donegan?

Tom: No.

GM: No! He had quite a bit of success. Ha! I guess it's too far back. Lonnie Donegan was about 1958.
We had a pseudo rock and roll star, who didn't really become a rock and roll star at all, but became a general entertainer named Tommy Steele. That was after the start of Presley. Lonnie Donegan started skiffle, which was kind of a mixture of bluegrass music, but an English version. And I had a skiffle group called the Viper Skittle Group that did very well, and a rock and roll star named Jim Dale that was not as successful as Tommy Steele. He eventually gave it up because he wanted to be a comedian. He now appears in Walt Disney movies and such. We had a bit of success with him.
And then along came Columbia with a new guy that was different than anybody else but fairly anonymous in his sound, and, of course, he's still there after twenty-one years – that's Cliff Richard.

During this time I got into comedy records. I did an awful lot of it and became sort of the comedy king in England. I recorded people like Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan; shows like "A Drop of the Hat" and "Beyond the Fringe." There was a whole string of comedy records. It was a breakthrough in England because nobody else was doing it at that time.
During the same time that Stan Freeberg was a big success over here, Parlophone became sort of an oddball success for a small label, and I got the reputation for doing weird things, but which happened to come off. I was producing every record on the label; kind of one man band. I was handling the business as well, you had to in those days.
I was very envious of the ease with which Columbia had hit records with Cliff Richards because this guy was a kind of sex symbol. All he had to do was find a fairly reasonable song and it became number one. Whereas, there I was sweating my guts out trying to find a really clever funny song for Bernard Cribbins to follow up "Hole in the Ground," as each one was a one-off job.
I was looking and looking for something like that. And it was at that stage in my life when I heard a tape that Brian Epstein brought in.
I met them [The Beatles] in April of 1962 and signed them in June or July to Parlophone. We issued our first record in November, 1962, which wasn't enormously successful. The first record that became number one was really the second release, which was "Please, Please Me," which was issued in February of 1963.
So began the whole she-bang that became just one golden treadmill. It never stopped. I nearly had a nervous breakdown in the balance. I was producing an awful lot at that time. Too much.

Tom: In 1965 there was a definite American sound and a British one. It's become very much one in the same. You've seen quite a change in studios.

GM: We always throught we were way behind and, of course, we were.
Around 1955 when British recording was fairly primitive, I paid a visit to America. Capitol by this time had been bought by EMI. I visited the Capitol tower where Frank Sinatra reigned supreme. I went to one of his sessions and was enormously impressed with the studios. They had things like limiters, which we didn't have. They did things to sound which we couldn't get. And they had three-track recording on half-inch. We were still in stereo. We had twin-track. That's all we had. It wasn't just the facility or tape; the whole approach was much more as it is today. It was the beginning of the electronic revolution. Their monitoring was better. The handling of the whole thing was very impressive, very modern.
So I went back to England saying, "For Christ's sake, we've got to pull our socks on!" I started beating around the EMI people telling them they had to have better machinery and better studios otherwise we couldn't compete.
It so happened that during that same time a new generation of recording engineers were developing at EMI. I will say this much for EMI: It was a breeding ground for talent and, though they didn't provide us with very many good tools, they didn't stop us from experimenting. It was almost like a laboratory. It was generally done on a shoestring. We'd listen to other people's records and try to figure out how they were done and try to do them ourselves, though not very successfully.
We had very limited technology, but eventually we got it – the beginnings of multi-track. EMI made their own tape machines, and then we started getting machines from Germany and limiters from America, and new kinds of microphones from the Continent. And the whole thing started moving along.
By the time The Beatles had made their success we were getting pretty good sounds. The studios had a tradition of good acoustics and once they were coupled with the modern technology they were as good as any studios in the world.
When I went back to America in the heart of The Beatles thing, I went back to the same studios that I had seen years before at Capitol and I found that they hadn't changed and were now very old-fashioned. I was shaken. We had reversed places.

Tom: That was about 1965. At that time the acoustics of English studios seemed to be quite different in design than their American counterpart.

GM: Well, it's very difficult to generalize because studios vary like hell wherever you go. It's still true to say that most American studios are deader than most English studios or Continental studios. Here they seem to like wrapping the drums up in a soundproof box so the sound doesn't go out too much. The Ridley designs always provided a drum box in the corner with a bass trap overhead to soak up sound. The obvious thing of having that kind of treatment is you get very good separation which we tended not to get in our English studios because of the very nature of our livier rooms. But we used to get a better string sound and generally more "air" around our recordings. I think that's still true, but as you say ... like the rest of the world we've tended to become less different. I mean it's in everything; in our way of dress, our lifestyles. The world is shrinking.
There are one or two studios in Los Angeles that are like British studios. There is still a difference between a British and an American studio, and it's obvious I prefer the British ones.

Tom: Do you think there's a difference in engineering attitude between the British studios and the American ones?

GM: I think the engineers in England are trained more to pay attention to detail. I don't mean to sound like carping, after all American studios are very good; but we tend to line up things with a greater degree of accuracy and consciousness.
For example: Dolbys. We tended to use Dolbys before America. In the early days Dolby got a bad reputation in the States because people said they colored the sound. I think they do, actually, but that's neither here nor there. There was a very strong feeling against them but we preferred the coloration of the Dolbys to the hiss. Now, granted, we spent a long time before each recording making sure that every one of those Dolby units were really right, really tuned properly. I found that when I came over here I was getting bad results from them so I started using 30 ips without Dolbys.
In England where I could control them and I knew what I had, I used them. Now, curiously enough, Americans are tending to use Dolbys more whereas we are thinking of dropping it all together. I have Dolbys in Montserrat only because I have to. When I'm working there I won't use them.

Tom: Why do you think there is such a difference between English and American engineers?

GM: I think there are different pressures on English engineers. I think they're not as well paid, which is cutting across my own argument while on the other hand I don't think they have the internal pressure that American engineers face. Here in the States we seem to grind the engineers into the dust and expect them to be there the following morning at 8:00 a.m. when they've just finished a session at 4:00 a.m. They're expected to work around the clock, and weekends are an automatic rule.
You question one of them here, "What do you mean you didn't have a holiday this year?" and he'll answer, "I haven't had a whole day for the past five years." I think we treat engineers a bit more humanly in the U.K. even if we do pay them worse.

Tom: Who are you influenced by? So many people listen to George Martin records.

GM: I don't listen to much more. Obviously, I listen to the records that are high in the hit parade or anything that's been brought my way as being interesting, but I don't really listen to a great many records. I don't really get all that much time to just listen. I do most of my listening in the car.

Tom: I'd like to talk about the Jeff Beck "Blow by Blow" album. That album stands alone as being quite different from all the other records that you've produced.

GM: A lot of people told me I shouldn't do it before I did it. The combination of Jeff Beck and myself was an unlikely one; for that reason I wanted to do it. I've always admired his guitar playing which is fantastic. We got on fine; we were both prepared to do something different.

Tom: The guitar sound on "Blow by Blow" has a great deal of space around it.

GM: We used a big room to record. With Jeff I set out to get what he wanted to do and what his sound was. Jeff is not a very technical person. He's the kind of guitar player that plays by the seat of his pants. When we were doing "Blow by Blow" he had pretty rotten equipment. I think he had two guitars and, at any given time, only one of them would be working. He'd be cursing the thing and flinging it across the room saying it was no good and he wanted another one.
When he played he would generally bring a small amp and we'd use number one at Air as a kind of ambient chamber. The guy who engineered "Blow by Blow" was Denny Bridges. He doesn't do too much engineering these days but is helping John Burgess with Air Studios. Dave Harries, the manager at Air, is out at Montserrat developing that. Denny did get a good guitar sound because it was a fairly natural one. We didn't use very much direct insertion, we did it mostly through an amp, using the studio.

Tom: Did you have Jeff working in the studio or was he working in the control room with lines run out to his amp?

GM: When we were working with the group we had him in the studio. When he was overdubbing we had a line running to the studio and he was playing in the control room.

Tom: Do you like working that way – with the player in the control room?

GM: Sometimes, but sometimes it doesn't work. I've seen an artist get awfully inhibited with everyone sitting around waiting for him to produce a work of genius. Jeff found that very inhibiting. Jeff is essentially a guy who does his best work when he's blowing to a crowd. Within the confines of the studio he found it very difficult to play anything inspired. The only difficulty I had with Jeff was that he would play something I would try to encourage him by saying, "Yes, that's great ... now try it again." And he'd turn around and say, "You know damn well that's not great, it's absolute crap." That was the kind of problem one would get.

Tom: Were Jeff's guitar parts pretty much complete takes or was there a lot of punching-in or multiple takes?

GM: Generally we had a number of takes.

Tom: On one of the America records – particularly "Hideaway" – the brass sound is excellent. Do you happen to recall how you recorded them? Do you use a small brass section and then double- and triple-track them or use a large one, much like an orchestra?

GM: I'm smiling because I get this quite often, and I'm always somewhat embarrassed about it because the truthful answer is that to most of these specific questions I have to think very hard because I can't remember. When I've done records in the past I just do what I think is right for the time. I certainly don't make notes about it. I think we did the brass on "Hideaway" back in Los Angeles, at Western. I like Western. We did some in that big room in Burbank. I think that was the orchestral things. I don't think the brass were done there. To my memory we didn't use anything special on the horns. It was Geoff again, and he was just using the microphones he aways uses. I use a large section, or at least on those recordings I did. I wrote it like it would be a performance.

2tupzem:

Большое спасибо! Очень интересно.

Tom: Do you approach it like it was a classical recording using, say, a stereo pair of microphones.

GM: Yes, we do use that on strings quite a bit. It's a combination of that and direct miking as well. I mean if you can get away with just a stereo pair on an orchestra and your using a good room, it's a lovely sound. But it's very difficult to do that when you need things brought out; they need a certain amount of help. I try to write most of my score so they sound naturally right without having to artificially raise the volume of any particular one section.

Tom: Do you write your score before the basics are cut?

GM: No, generally the score is the last thing to be done.


The SGT. PEPPER MOVIE

Tom: For the Pepper movie was it completely scored before being recorded?

GM: It really depends on what part of it we're talking about. There was an enormous amount of work involved. There's about 200 minutes of music. I was scoring right up to the film dubbing. Little background bits here and there. Sweetening, for example, on the Alice Cooper tune, "Because," was basically very similar to the original except for his spitting out the words. But, in fact, it wasn't because there was a lot of sweetening on it that was not on the original; strings and such. They were rather weird strings that were done to fit the picture.
Have you seen the picture?

Tom: I tried seeing it, but it wasn't playing in San Francisco.

GM: I don't suppose you've missed very much. It wasn't the best picture in the world, but neither was "Grease." So on one hand you have an enormous success and on the other a bomb. I can only presume that people weren't prepared to accept a third Stigwood film. I think the public had a reaction to it. The fact that The Beatles were being played by the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton must have incurred some sales resistance before the word go.

Tom: I would assume that you were given which song would be done and who would sing them.

GM: Yes.

Tom: Were you able to pick your players?

GM: Yes.

Tom: You must have put quite a lot of thought into who would re-play those basic tracks.

GM: Well, I was in an impossible situation anyway having to make a soundtrack of that. So I decided that what I would do would be to make the music sound fairly authentic where in the picture the group is supposed to be an up-and-coming group. Then make the music a little more sophisticated as they became more successful. We started off with the original sound and then brought it up to date.
You might say what The Beatles would have tended to do if they were still working today. I wanted something where the basic rhythm tracks could be a little bit more hip than the basic rhythm tracks of 1964 ... which weren't very clever, you know; just sort of a bashing noise, really. They were good records, but there was nothing particularly hip about them. So I wanted something a little jazz oriented. It was slightly watered down because of the songs themselves. There's only so much you can do without destroying a song.

Tom: I wondered if you used any processing on the Alice Cooper vocal.

GM: That was just him. I got him to speak it or hiss it more-or-less. You see, it was a nasty bit of work in the film. The sort of cloying vocal effect on the original was duplicated by the Bee Gees, which was countered by the nastyness of Alice Cooper.

Tom: On "A Day in the Life" – the last piano chord. I was wondering if you had gone back to EMI to get the same piano.

GM: No. To begin with, on the original we used three pianos: two grands and an upright played three times. In other words, I played one and John and Paul played the others. We all played the chords. As a matter of fact we had several people on a piano. We'd count and hit the chord together, and then overdub a couple of times with lots and lots of percussion.
This time we were working in Cherokee Studios and I just used one piano. What I did there was to do it about nine or ten times on 24-track; each time I did it in a different key to give me different overtones. So if the basic chord was in F, I put one chord down in F. And then I would speed up or slow down the tape and play the chord in a different key to change the timbre. I used ten completely different keys at different speeds. When it was put back to normal speed it was monstrous. I did something similar with the strings.
In fact, I had to explain what I wanted done. I divided the cellos and gave half of them just the root note. They were to play very softly to give me a sense of tonality to the whole chord. To the violin, viola and the rest of the cellos I told, "These are the notes you play. Let's say it's an E minor seventh chord, so you play E, G, E and D, and you can also play – if you want – an A. What I want you to do is play any of those notes ultra-pianissimo at any time in the sequence you feel like; but they must be in this tempo." The tempo was a very quick rhythm pattern. Every person was to do something different than the player who was next door to him. They all looked at me as though I was crazy and deaf. So! ... what we got was this kind of shimmer of any minor seventh chord. And it sounded good. It was just an effect. I did that seven times over with seven different chords and kept it going for about twenty seconds.
Then we made loops of each one, put them on machines and played them through faders and dubbed them over to seven tracks of one 24-track. I had a continual sound of whatever the chord was, and then I just mixed in where I wanted it. As the song went through I would play the fader like an organ, fading up the strings as a background for the song. It doesn't sound like strings, but it doesn't sound like a synthesizer either.

Tom: Do you use a conductor so that you can be in the control room and hear the results, or do you stay in the studio and listen to just playbacks?

GM: Sometimes I just get the first violin to take it.

Tom: On the new version of "Good Morning," the phasing effect on the drums . .

GM: Yes, we phased just the overheads, not the whole set, though undoubtedly some leakage of the rest of the kit got phased as well.

Tom: There was quite a lot of phasing on "Lucy in the Sky."

GM: Yes, that was a weird one, too. A lot of synthesizer stuff on that. Michael Schultz wanted a very psychodelic effect. He wanted it to be a dream-like sequence, so we did rather over-do it.

Tom: You worked off the script?

GM: Yes. I worked very closely with the director.

Tom: Is that why you did it here in Hollywood?

GM: They insisted that I do it here because they were so late with their cutting. Ordinarily when you do a film you get measurements from the director. You get a rough cutting and then when the picture is finished, or almost finished, you'll get a fine cutting or editing. You can't really start scoring while the director is still chopping the film around and altering the length of things so you don't really know what you've got to write to until you have the fine cut.
Well, I was promised the fine cut on April the twelfth and was geared up to leisurely do the scoring after that. As it turned out, we didn't get the fine cut until two weeks into dubbing. He'd actually finished some of the reels and started dubbing while others were still being cut.

Tom: How much was recorded before the film was shot?

GM: I did the basics first and all the sweetening was left until afterwards.

Tom: The vocals were also later?

GM: No, the vocals were done before shooting. They had to sing without any of the strings and such. But it wasn't quite as simple as that because quite often he would cut a song. For instance, George Burns' vocal on "Fixing A Hole." Although I had done all the vocal that song was cut in half and whole phrases were taken out. Michael would come back and say, "Look I want to get rid of this sequence, would you mind him not singing this line." And I'd say, "Sorry, you can't alter the song that much." In the case of "A Day in the Life" he wanted to cut out the complete middle of it. I put my foot down and said, "No, you just can't do that."

Tom: While doing this project you must have had a number of moments that took you back ten years. Deja vous ... there must have been a measure of sentimental feelings.

GM: I got over my hangups when I decided to do it because I thought that if I had hangups about it, I'd never be able to do it. For a start I didn't look at is as though I was making a record. I had made the record in 1965; this was making a film, and that was how I got past it. I really didn't relate to what had happened before except as a basis from which to start. It was like being involved with Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess" on the New York stage and then having to do a film some fifteen years later.
That was my justification for sticking fairly close to the originals. I really didn't view it as a duplicate of the record.

Tom: On the live America album Elmer Bernstein conducted. How did you like his conducting of your score?

GM: Real nice. Very good musician. I couldn't do the conducting myself, so they got Elmer to do it. Well, some of the scores that I had originally done had got lost, and I didn't have a copy myself. So Elmer, though I don't think he did it himself, got someone to listen to the record and take down the scores so they could be reproduced with the live orchestra.
When I heard the scores they sounded different. They were written in a way I never could possibly have written them. The notes and chords and lines were right, but the way they were disposed over the orchestra was different than my style of scoring. The guy had listened to the records and had figured out that I'd done things that I really hadn't done, which was interesting. Elmer hadn't seen the difference either. There was a lot of dividing of the string lines which I rarely do. I guess they thought it made things sound fuller.

Tom: That album was cut live at Greek Theater, in Los Angeles. Did you have any particular problems working there?

GM: No, it's a good place, one of the best around. It's a damn sight better than Hollywood Bowl.

Tom: America's "Harbor" record was cut in Hawaii. You cut all the basic and vocals there and sweetened it back at Air?

хороший материал

GM: That's right. We did absolutely everything that could be done without an orchestra because it was a pretty expensive process just recording out there. You know we had built our own studio in a house. I had done that before a number of years ago while I was recording Sea Train in Massachusetts. But in Hawaii it was the only thing to do because there wasn't a studio there. The only studio in Hawaii was on the island of Oahu, which was a 16-track. The boys wanted to go to Hawaii, so we found an old, large house on the seashore that had a good room in it and we made that our recording studio.
I did a kind of reconnaissance with Geoff. We gave the realtor the specifications as to what we were looking for, and then had carpenters build what we needed, batten screens and things. We hired a Yamaha piano from Japan, and brought in Record Plant's mobile truck. Geoff used the same desk later on the boat with Paul McCartney. We had our own little studio right there ... very cozy.


The AIR MONTSERRAT STUDIO

Tom: Tell me about the new studios.

GM: The new studios are on Montserrat, which is a small island 27 miles from Antigua. Antigua is in the middle of the chain of Caribbean Islands. Antigua is kind of a focal point because it's an international airport. You can get to New York, Toronto and London on direct flights. So it's quite convenient. We've got a thirty-acre site there. It's a lovely island, very green.
We chose the island because I wanted to build a total environment studio. I'd been looking for a long time. In fact, Hawaii was very appealing. When I did that album with America on the island of Kawaii, I was sorely tempted to try to do a studio there, but decided against it when I found out how expensive property was on that island. Also, the cost of living is very expensive, and it's one HELL of a way from London. Lastly, it's American soil, which didn't make very much sense for a British citizen. So I was looking to building a studio which would be within easy reach of London and most of the places in America. Antigua certainly fits in with the East Coast. But admittedly it's more difficult to get to from Los Angeles than it is to get to Hawaii, but it suits my bill very well.

We were able to build a studio from the ground up, which we hadn't done before. As you know, Air studios was built in a department store banqueting room 65 to 75 feet long and 45 feet wide. We had a lot of problems inherent in the site due to the fact that it was on the fourth floor of a department store, in a steel frame structure, over three underground railways, and a lot of traffic noise outside. We had to be very careful in our design of Air. We used Ken Shearer for that one. We designed the studios ourselves but the acoustics were worked out by him. Once we got in there we did some changes to tighten it up a bit.

Tom: It has a control room window that overlooks the street?

GM: That's right.

Tom: I love a studio that has a window that opens to something besides another room.

GM: So do I. Funny thing when we first built it we had a certain amount of comment from the rock groups who on seeing the outside didn't like the daylight. They found the outside distracting. But they're coming around to it. At the new studio there's windows. I have this picture window giving me a view of the bay and the mountains going down to the sea. I shall sit in a complete daze and not make records at all!

Tom: Who designed the new studio in Montserrat?

GM: Well, we've done it literally ourselves. We used an architect, of course. But Dave Harries, who's the studio manager at the London Studio, is a great technical influence. He's very good on sound. He designed our own speaker. I got him very heavily involved in the design of the new studios. He knew what I wanted so he worked out the acoustics for me.

Tom: Describe it.

GM: It's pretty typical. It's rectangular and looks pretty normal. There's no point in having butterfly winged studios, or conical shapes or tetrahedron for the sake of it. It's better with it rectangular with a corner out of it for a piano trap. The piano disappears into its own trap. There's a bass trap and a guitar trap for the heavy instrument. There's also a live area for the others, but it's basically a fairly large studio. I like having a bit of air around the drums and not locked away in some box. There's also an overdub room next to the control room.

Tom: Is the control room window in front of the console or to one side, as typical in many English studios?

GM: It's in front. And you have one into the vocal booth. I guess the control room's emphasis is on size. I like plenty of space in my control room as well as the studio. My main criticism of most of the studios I've been in is that their control rooms are much too small. When you have a group coming to listen to their record, and there is only three feet of space where it's good to listen to, then everyone has to huddle around on each others' shoulders. The control room we have in Montserrat is 24 by 20 feet. It's almost the size of the studio.

Tom: How high is the ceiling?

GM: Not too high. It's about ten to twelve feet high.

Tom: What are the speakers like? You mentioned that they were custom made.

GM: They're basically Tannoy Gold units which have their own tweeters built in them. The enclosure is Dave's design, rather like the Lockwood cabinets, but a bit better than that. They're very flat. So we have two kinds of speakers, our own and the JBL 4311, which I find to be a very good speaker.

Tom: What equipment have you chosen for Montserrat? Are you going to have digital recording?

GM: Well, all my life I think I've been in the forefront of studios while trying to make Air the best, always trying to be better than anybody else. I looked at digital very closely; I'm very aware of it all. And I've been aware of the growing complication of analogue recording, and the growing expense of it. A point is going to be reached where someone is going to say, "Halt! This is enough!" I think I've gotten to that point now. But in making the studio in Montserrat I wanted to have the very best facility not just in the Caribbean, but in the world. That didn't mean that I had to go into digital, because if I went into digital I wouldn't have the best recordings in the world, I might have the most avant-garde ones, but it certainly wouldn't cope with the majority of recordings being done today.

Tom: What board do you have there?

GM: A Neve, 52-input, 32-output with separate monitoring systems. Not an in-line desk. I like to have my own monitoring section.

Tom: Automated?

GM: No. We have automation at Air. The new board could be automated if I ever need it, but since automation is only really used for mixing, and since I don't anticipate at this time that we will do too much mixing. At Montserrat I didn't get it.
It's much more likely that people working there will concentrate on basic tracks for three or four weeks, and then go back to Los Angeles or New York, or wherever, and do the rest of it – sweetening and mixing.
It's a new transformerless system of Rupert Neve's design and will be the only one of its kind. It's got completely new EQ facilities. It's very expensive and very good. In fact, the figures on the tests are just incredible.

Tom: What sort of tape machines are you going to use?

GM: We use Studer in England and I was sorely tempted to get the new Studer 32-track, 3-inch machine. But, frankly, I don't like 32-track or 3-inch tape; but it's got to be provided at the facility. Because we're so near Florida and they're very good machines, we've ordered the new MCI 32-track machines. We haven't gotten delivery on them yet, but we'll be the first to get them. The new ones will be optional 24/32 with interchangable head blocks.
I personally will never use 32-track. I think 46-track using two 24-track machines in sync makes much more sense. However, if you're a tidy producer you shouldn't really need more than 24. If you do need more than 24, which I did on the Pepper film, there is no sense going to 3-inch tape. It's different technology; more flapping problems; more storage problems, and so on. What you should do is whatever you've got on the first 24 mixed it down to a rough stereo and put it on a second 24. To do overdubbing, let's say you'll work five weeks on one particular tape. The amount of spooling back-and-forth, to-and-fro is enormous. The tape wear is fantastic. Why should you keep wearing down the original tracks that whole time?
You're not wearing them out at all if you're working on a second reel. When it comes to mixing, what you've got to do is sync the two together and away you go. That seems to me to be a lot more logical than running a 32-track thing back-and-forth a few thousand times just to get one vocal or some other equally time-consuming overdub.

Tom Lubin: In 1971 you were interviewed by R-e/p. Many things which you felt would be a part of the future of recording have come to pass. One of them was the emergence of video as an integral part of a musical presentation.

George Martin: Sure, it was bound to happen. I must confess that if I said that seven years ago I was being a bit premature. It hasn't been all that fast. It's a question of economics rather than the arts. And what people are prepared to pay for it.

Tom Lubin: Air was the first studio in London to have the capabilities to do both recording for records and for video.

George Martin: That's true.

Tom: Where do you see the direction of technology?

GM: Well, digital is going to be here. When we were talking about Montserrat, the reason I said I didn't want to go digital ... I think the degree of sophistication on our new Neve is about as complicated as I want to go on a desk and about as big as I want to go before I go to digital.
Digital is now in its infancy and we've been guinea pigs for an awful lot of years. We're letting other people be the guinea pigs this time. In three or four years we'll take all the hard lessons learned by other people and use it where it's properly used. In any case I think digital recording will only come into its own when it becomes completely integrated with the desk. I think just having a digital machine connected up to an analog desk doesn't make too much sense to me. That's just cutting down on your noise a little bit; but that isn't a major problem. I think when the tape machine is an integral part of the console, and it's a completely computerized unit which can do things that you can't do now, like synthetically process an echo sound that imitates "Heartbreak Hotel" without an echo unit ... that kind of thing. Then it will make sense. But that's aways off.
I heard the Soundstream stuff about two years ago, but I'm afraid I haven't kept up with the latest developments in digital technology. I've obviously read about them, but there isn't all that much development. I'm a bit surprised that the development hasn't been quicker.


The Record Pressing Problem

Tom: Would you care to comment on the quality of pressings?

GM: It's a hell of a problem 'cause you never know about it. We spend hours in the studio getting a great sound. We take a lot of trouble, and because we don't want it to go into the hands of an idiot, we go along and we have it cut by someone we like and know well. We know what he does, so we spend more hours with him in the cutting room to get the lacquer right and then we approve them.
Then we hear a test pressing and it sounds good ... fine. But what we don't hear is what happens to the thirty-second run at the Scranton plant, or what happens in Turkey. Or what happens when the tapes are shipped to Japan. We do hear eventually. I've heard some ghastly reproductions of something I've done. Christ! How'd that ever get out!
And I know for a fact that an awful lot of records that get out in this country bear no resemblance to the record we've made. They're issued that way and people buy them because they don't know the difference. I never hear them because I don't buy records at a store in Pennsylvania to see if my "Blow by Blow" is good enough, and I'm sure it isn't. Quality control is a hell of a problem because we don't know how good or bad it is. The record manufacturers really don't know. And I guess when it comes down to it the economics of the thing are pretty paramount.

Tom: What can artists, producers, engineers, or even the consumer do about it?

GM: They can only make noises to the record companies. The record companies can only make sure that their quality control is stepped up so that they don't issue too many duff records. But, then, there are always alibis. The record company can give the artist a perfect copy, saying that it just came out of the Scranton plant and there's no way that they'll ever get any better than that. Though the company knows perfectly well that all the records being pressed are full of carbon dust, or whatever.

Tom: Are their reasons legitimate – or are we expecting too much?

GM: I don't think we're expecting too much, no. But in relation to today's civilization it's just like buying a car. You'll get your Friday one as well as good ones. You buy a car from Ford and the advertisements look great. Then you take it on the highway and you find that the throttle cable is sticking. There's no way that you can do it except by attention to detail all the way down the line. Those people doing those terrible, boring jobs just have to do it a bit better. It's a big problem, and I don't think that it can be overcome very easily.

Tom: What do you say to people who write you letters. "Mr. Martin: How do I get into the business?"

GM: Don't. Too many people want to get into the business, that's one of the problems. An outside viewer of our business really has no idea what he's getting into. You don't have football pools in this country, do you? You have some kind of gambling?