The pioneering way The Beatles managed to master ‘Abbey Road’

In just seven short years, The Beatles totally and forever changed the face and landscape of popular music. From the moment they burst onto the scene, seemingly perfectly formed and ready-made for super-stardom at the end of 1962 with their debut single ‘Love Me Do’, the pop music world was never going to be the same again.

With their seemingly inexhaustible levels of creativity, the Fab Four were constantly evolving. They tried out new sounds and styles, exploding and expanding the limits of what you could create in three minutes. Every album seemed to come with a complete reinvention of themselves and the pop music format. And it wasn’t just with their songs that were revolutionising the way that music could sound, either. They were just as creative when it came to how the music was recorded.

Right up until the end, they were breaking into new frontiers. While Let It Be was the last album released by The Beatles, it was actually Abbey Road that they recorded together last. Side one of the album is stacked with all-time classics like ‘Come Together’, ‘Something’, ‘Oh! Darling’, and ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’. Side two opens with one of the greatest of all their songs, the George Harrison-penned ‘Here Comes the Sun’, and then something strange happens.

From the next song, ‘Because’, all the way through to ‘The End’, the music never resolves or lets up. Each song flows directly into the next one, creating a collage effect, a dream-like web of wonderful music. Like a classical suite which features recurring motifs that permeate through its various movements, the second half of Abbey Road becomes one long, glorious journey.

Speaking to Guitar World in 1992, George Harrison explained where the idea to put all the tracks together came from, “All those mini songs were partly completed tunes; some were written while we were in India a year before. So there was just a bit of chorus here and a verse there. We welded them all together into a routine. Then we actually learned to play that whole thing live”. Some of them had been attempted at sessions for The White Album, while others were captured in part at the Let It Be recordings.

Having explained that they “worked it all out carefully in advance”, Harrison acknowledged that “obviously there were overdubs. Later, when we added the voices, we basically did the same thing. From the best of my memory, we learned all the backing tracks, and as each piece came up on tape, like ‘Golden Slumbers’, we’d jump in with the vocal parts. Because when you’re working with only four or eight tracks, you have to get as much as possible on each track”.

While The Beatles may well have been able to play the 16-minute medley straight through, other accounts of the recording sessions have it that the tracks we hear on the album were, in fact, recorded separately from each other and then blended together during the mastering process by Paul McCartney and George Martin, something that the session logs seem to attest to.

To increase the amount of scope they had for the overdubs that Harrison mentioned, which The Beatles took their time with, working on layering the tracks up throughout the whole of July 1969, the album was recorded on an eight-track reel-to-reel tape machine. Back in 1963, when they were recording their first album, Please Please Me, they had to make do with two-track recording equipment. But times has changed, in part, because of The Beatles pushing them that way themselves.

Having finally finished their tinkering and overdubbing on the side two medley, the group would share a studio for the final time together on August 20th, 1969, when they put the finishing touches to Lennon’s composition which was set to close side one of the new album, ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’.

The take for the final song they’d work on together as a band didn’t really have an ending, though – the group had continued “playing with no definite conclusion”, as audio engineer Geoff Emerick put it in his 2006 book Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of The Beatles, “So I assumed I would be doing a fadeout. John had other ideas, though. He let the tape play until just twenty seconds or so before the take broke down, and then all of a sudden he barked out an order: ‘Cut the tape here’.”

This left Emerick stumped, “‘Cut the tape?’ I asked, astonished. We had never ended a song that way, and an abrupt ending like that didn’t make any sense”.

An abrupt end to the song; an abrupt end to side one of the album, an abrupt end to the sessions (aside from a few minor tweaks to the mixes the next day and on August 25th), and an abrupt end to their time together as a band. The Beatles would never share a recording studio or a stage with each other again, would barely even promote the Abbey Road album when it came out and would break up before their next record, Let It Be, was even released, almost a year later.

What did The Beatles think of Abbey Road?
“I liked the ‘A’ side, but I never liked that sort of pop opera on the other side. I think it’s junk because it was just bits of songs thrown together. ‘Come Together’ is all right, that’s all I remember.” John Lennon, 1971

“The second side of ‘Abbey Road’ is incredible! ‘The White Album’, ninety-nine percent of it is very good. If I had Desert Island Discs, I’d take the White one or ‘Abbey Road‘, I think. I like the boys playing together, you know. I like a group.” Ringo Starr, 1969

“It still feels very abstract to me. I can’t see it as a whole. It all fits together, but it’s a bit like it’s something else. It doesn’t feel like it’s us. We spent hours doing it, but I still don’t see it like us. It’s more like somebody else. It’s a very good album.” George Harrison, 1969

“I don’t like people explaining albums. The only way you can explain it is to hear it. You can’t really use words about music, otherwise we’d do a talking album. The album is the explanation, and it’s up to you to make what you want of it.” Paul McCartney, 1969