TN:190 The Beatles (Giles Martin)

Tape Notes

Host John Kennedy joins producer Giles Martin at Abbey Road Studios to discuss the technical and creative process behind the new special edition

Key takeaways

• Giles Martin utilizes 'demixing' technology, inspired by Peter Jackson's work on 'Get Back', to isolate instruments from old tapes.
• The remixing process for 'Rubber Soul' focuses on respecting the original mono intent while providing modern spatial separation.

Main topics

• Beatles Rubber Soul Remix
• Demixing Audio Technology

Notable quotes

Recording is a timestamp of, it's time travel.

Conclusion

A profound look at how cutting-edge technology can be used to honor an

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:04) Hello, I'm John Kennedy and joining me for this episode of Tame Notes is Giles Martin to talk about his work bringing the Beatles' Rubber Soul new special edition to the world. We were very excited about this. One of the big inspirations behind Tape Notes was the Beatles Anthology TV series and seeing that incredible footage of the band working with Giles' father, George Martin, and getting an insight into how those records came together was always amazing and mind-blowing. So, to be sitting in Abbey Road with Giles, digging into the original four-track recordings, talking us through them track by track, and hearing how he approached remixing them for today felt like a real full circle moment and it was also a real thrill just to be in abbey road i'd never been to abbey road and i'd always wanted to go with a purpose and the purpose in this instance was to talk to giles and get into his inner sanctum and be shown all this stuff it really was amazing and as you'll hear there's lots to get into if you'd like to see giles navigate through his pro tool sessions complete with the original recordings and updated version. The full video podcast is available to watch on the Tape Notes Patreon page at patreon.com forward slash tape notes. I think it's well worth a watch. Honestly, it's behind the scenes gold. thank you as well to our partners at Tape It for supporting the podcast. For those of you who don't know, Tape It is the iPhone voice notes recording app crafted specifically for musicians with fantastic features including layering new recordings, creating markers at specific points, shared mixtapes and loads of other things. To try it for yourself and to get a special offer on the pro version, head to tape.it forward slash tape notes. But now without further ado, let's get started. Speaker 2 (1:53) Giles Martin is a British composer, producer and arranger. The son of Sir George Martin, the producer behind 12 of the 13 albums from the Beatles. As a teenager, Giles began to work as an assistant for his father, becoming his ears as his hearing began to decline in the mid-70s. As well as taking on numerous other projects across the music world, Giles has remained closely involved with the Beatles' catalogue, serving as producer on the 50th anniversary remix and deluxe editions of albums including Revolver, Sgt Pepper's, The Beatles, Abbey Road and Let It Be, among others. He has won two Grammys and an Academy Award for his composition and production work, as well as an Emmy Award for the acclaimed 2022 Apple TV series The Beatles Get Back. Giles' most recent project is a new special edition of the Beatles' 1965 album Rubber Soul, a record widely regarded as a defining moment in both pop music history and the Beatles' story. Newly mixed by Giles and engineer Sam O'Kell, the special edition features new stereo and Dolby Atmos mixes alongside previously unreleased session recordings and home demos, opening the studio doors on the Beatles' creative process during the making of this seminal album. Today, I joined Giles at his studio in Abbey Road. And what better way to start our conversation than by hearing something from the Rubber Soul new special edition. This is Day Tripper. Speaker 2 (3:54) It is Beatles with Day Tripper, which is now part of Rubber Soul Deluxe. And I'm very pleased to say that we have come to the studio, Abbey Road Studio, where that song was recorded, to talk to Giles Martin, who is the man behind the new Rubber Soul Deluxe. Hello, Giles. Hello, John. Nice to see you. It's great to see you too. It's so exciting trying to work out where to begin with this project, which you, in effect, have been working on for kind of 10 years, really, this whole new demixing technology being applied to various different Beatle eras. Speaker 4 (4:23) Well, I mean, the demixing technologies, since we did Get Back, which was our lockdown project with Peter Jackson. To give you some background on demixing, what that is, is that Peter had done some research into police tapes and audio tapes and surveillance process of trying to find gangsters speaking into microphones that were hidden by other people's speech to clarify the dialogue and get back, because a lot of Get Back is on Nagra tapes that was... that have other people speaking on the background noise. And his dialogue editor was working on that. And while they were doing that, because I was mixing bits of the film and music for the film, I said, well, why don't we apply it to music and do that? And we were looking, I tried to do this with a Ron Howard project called Eight Days a Week with someone based at Abbey Road. And we did it for screams, removing screams from live music. But we sort of perfected it during Get Back, removing drums from guitars and bass. And the first album we used demixing on was actually Revolver. Right. I had previously mixed Sgt. Pepper's and the White Album and Abbey Road before that. And actually let it be, indeed. But that was the first time we used it. So the 10-year thing, the 10-year cycle with Sgt. Pepper's had no demixing on it at all. Speaker 2 (5:39) Right. So it's more recent than that. Yeah, yeah, Speaker 4 (5:42) correct, correct. I mean, for Sgt. Pepper's, we did what we did for Sgt. Pepper's. And I was, you know, To be honest, I was dead against doing any of these mixes, to be honest with you. And it was the Beatles that had asked me to get involved. I mean, I'd obviously done Beatles, I did Love Show and a few film stuff. And my father had just died, actually. He'd just died three months before, and I came into the studios. And I realised that Sgt Pepper's was interesting because it was a mono album that the stereo wasn't paid attention to. and a lot of it was four track bounces. And by just manually syncing the four tracks, we could then go back to the previous versions of the tape. So we're de-mixing by using pre-bounce four tracks, if that makes sense. So Little Half of My Friends, for example, is actually guitar, bass, and drums and piano on four tracks. It's then summed down to one track and the next four tracks. So we can take something like that, split it out, and then mix it. And that was the sort of why we mixed Sgt Pepper again. And that... Actually, immediately, I think we did three songs, I can't remember what they were, and the Beatles liked them, or Paul and Ringo liked them, and Danny Harris, Olivia, and Sean and Yoko. And so we ended up doing the rest of the album. That was the beginning of this cycle of doing special edition, deeper dives. And actually, finally, what's happened is it's the fans that kind of, you know, the question I get asked, you know, in the bakers is, when's Rubber Soul going to come out? It's that thing, you kind of go... I always ask the question, why are we doing this? I'm the first person to ask these questions. Actually, am I the right person to be doing this? And why are we doing this? The two questions I ask. Speaker 2 (7:21) Yeah, yeah. But the answer is because people want to hear what it sounded like. Yeah, Speaker 4 (7:26) they do. And there is a thing. There is a retrospective. And I know them. I knew my dad better than I think pretty much anyone. And obviously, I'm very close to Paul and Ringo and love them and the rest of the gang. And they sort of love the... What we can do now, and it's actually, if you think about recording, recording is a timestamp of, it's time travel. It's going back into that day that this was recorded. I mean, take Rubber Soul, which we're talking about today. The band are between the ages of 24 and 26. And they're still at age now on this record. And what technology does, it actually makes, it ages things. And what we do with this is we bring you close to the record. closer to them being in the room. And that's what they love about it. And that's always the intent. The intent isn't to actually gloss things up. It's actually to remove layers to get you closer to that recording. Speaker 2 (8:19) Yeah, and we're very lucky today because you're going to help explain how you did this. I'm going to try to help explain, yeah. Speaker 4 (8:25) If I can remember anything. Speaker 2 (8:27) I'm sure you will. The first song we're going to look at is Drive My Car. So maybe we should have a quick blast of the master, of the new master. That would be great. Speaker 3 (9:13) So Speaker 2 (9:13) that is Drive My Car by The Beatles from Rubber Soul Deluxe. How are you describing these mixes? What version do you call that? Is that the stereo 2026 mix? Speaker 4 (9:26) I think quite often it's other people's job to... I remember, I did a Stones project, and if you look on Spotify, it says, you know, Angie, Giles Martin mix. I think that's just terrible. I hate producers having their names on stuff. It's like, no, that is, you know, it's like, it's like, no, it's not a mix. It's just Angie. And hopefully you enjoyed the sound of it. So I don't know. It gets complicated because there's so many layers and versions of tracks, you know, that I get confused. I guess they'll call it the 2026 mix. I guess that's what they'll call it. If you, those of Speaker 2 (9:58) you Speaker 4 (9:58) who want to hear it. Yeah. Speaker 2 (10:00) So what did you, what did you want to do with it? I mean, obviously it's the start of the album. Was this the first track you would look at? Well, this Speaker 4 (10:08) actually, to be honest, I mixed before for the Red and Blue compilation. And what I don't do is I don't go back and remix and remix. Otherwise, it gets even more complicated than it already is. And the process that I have generally in this, and I knew my dad's opinion of these records, these records weren't meant for stereo, they were meant for mono. Because stereo, they didn't monitor in stereo. When this record came out, very few people, certainly UK, had stereo players anyway. And it just wasn't a format. It wasn't a thing. And so therefore, it wasn't until actually Capitol Records and the Americans got hold of things that they put instruments on one side of the band and the other. And by the nature of the way these recordings are made, because they weren't made with stereo in mind, they're mixed in a way where it's hard to make a good stereo of them, even though we're used to the way the stereos sound. So in the case of Drive My Car, it's a four track, fairly basic four track. And so on track one, you have, that's Paul on guitar, and that's Ozzy Ringo drums, John playing tambourine. And the shadow guitar at the very beginning is George playing live the lead guitar part, which is on track two. Speaker 4 (11:37) I think on the release record, that's all the left hand side. Because you can't, because if you're making a stereo, you're making a stereo, you can't, or you put the vocals in one side, you've got to decide where you put stuff. So when I mix material, I'm using this de-mix process, I can put the drums in the middle and the guitar off to the side. So I'm making a, I'm sort of respecting the monos, if that makes sense, but making a stereo version of the monos. And of course, it sounds... really stupidly logical. But if you want more power from something like a drum kit, it coming out of two speakers as opposed to one is a better option. Speaker 2 (12:10) Simple Speaker 4 (12:10) as that. Speaker 2 (12:11) So Speaker 4 (12:11) that's what I tend to do. My approach is always to try, if I can, put vocals and drums in the center and then put instruments either side in a very basic way. Another reason why that is is because so much music is listened to on headphones nowadays. And if you have just one side, it can be distracting. And I don't like the idea of my kids or a younger generation thinking that a record sounds old. I don't want to dismiss it because it sounds old. Because as I said before, it's not old. They're younger than a lot of pop stars are now when they're making Robert Soul. And that's the way I see it. I see it as young people making music. Does that make sense? Speaker 2 (12:52) Yeah, it does, totally. But it's interesting with stereo because it can be a thrill at the same time to hear things with different ears. Yeah, Speaker 4 (13:00) absolutely. And I still think you need separation. But I think that, I know from the Beatles, but that's not what they wanted. That's not what they wanted. They wanted things flying around, of course, and get to things like Revolution No. 9, the White Album, and Iron the Walrus, and whatever. You get that. But I think that they're a rock band, and they want it to be in your face. Yeah. And it's interesting, if you listen to the 2026 mix, and it's by no means... to meaning the record went on before because obviously it's iconic and great there is a bit more power there vocally and drums wise because they're in the center and people think i've turned the drums up but i haven't they're just it's just they're in the mono right yeah yeah that makes Speaker 2 (13:40) sense yeah that's really interesting it's it that just simply repositioning something can make it feel well it's Speaker 4 (13:46) it's the sort of psychoacoustics of mixing especially if it's it's really interesting this d mix um when when i did uh revolver on here, there and everywhere, there's a, with the backing vocals at the end, I think, Paul's just clicking his fingers and it's on the backing vocal track. And what we did is suddenly, you know, it was given back to me and I had separate finger snaps. So where'd you put them? And I went, I don't remember. There'd be finger snaps on here, there and everywhere. And I go back and listen to the original and I can hear finger snaps because I've now heard them. It's like one of those things. You notice a spot on someone's face, you've got to stop looking at the spot. It's one of those things. It's just a weird way of looking at stuff. And so then you go, are they too loud? Are they too quiet? I don't know because I've never heard them before. And there's a whole thing where you, and people go, people will say to me after the mix, I never noticed that was there before. And they go, well, I haven't put it there. And I haven't really met. So go back and listen to the record and they'll go, oh yeah, it's there before. It's just because if you reposition something sometimes, and you have to be careful sometimes when you, if you put something to the, if you pass something far left or far right, it does become louder. You know, it does, you notice it more and all this stuff, especially if you're doing special audio stuff. Speaker 2 (14:54) Yeah. Yeah. I always feel when listening to the, the demixing versions that it feels as if you're in the room more than you might've been in the past. Speaker 4 (15:03) Yeah. And you have to be careful. I am really, really careful. that there's no sort of ghosting going on and weird stuff going on, phasing and all that sort of thing. And there has been times where just the sensibility of it doesn't make sense. So I remember doing Yellow Submarine on Revolver, and Yellow Submarine has the drums and acoustic guitar and drums together. And I separate them because, again, I wanted the drums and the center acoustic guitar off the left, I think it was at the time. And they just didn't, it sounded like there was something missing. I felt like I left my keys behind. It was that, it was like, these need to be together. Even though individually they sound like an acoustic or a drum kit, there's something as a transient, there's something going on. So I'm quite careful that it doesn't, there's no point doing something for the sake of it. It's like when earlier there was a stereo, where people just like go, great, this is crazy, we can fly things around your head. It is about the music, it's about the song, it's about how that song, that's the key. It's not about technology, it's about the music. Speaker 2 (16:02) Yeah, yeah. So with Drive My Car, what did you want to do? As we have a listen to more Speaker 4 (16:08) of the mix. Shall I go through for people what the ingredients are? That would be great, Speaker 2 (16:13) yeah. Speaker 4 (16:13) So actually, I'll play the very first take. Speaker 3 (16:16) Drive My Car, take one. Speaker 4 (16:18) So this is George on one track. That's George there. And then, as I say, on track two, a little bit of practice. Speaker 3 (16:32) One, two, three, four. Speaker 4 (16:44) So Ringo and John's full playing guitar and John playing tambourine. And George just standing there. Having played the guitar intro. Speaker 2 (16:55) Yeah. Just waiting to return. Speaker 4 (16:57) Waiting to return, yeah. And this actually breaks down. Speaker 2 (17:03) I mean, they're still a pretty tight band. Yeah, amazing. Speaker 4 (17:09) And it's great for people to know that this is, everything's on one track. There we are. Speaker 3 (17:17) Two. Speaker 4 (17:19) And that's them breaking down. So that is essentially track one. And what they did is then they recorded their vocals to that track. So the next track was this. Speaker 3 (17:28) That's the girl, what she wanted to be. And she said, baby, can't you see? I want to be famous, a star of the screen. But you can do something in between. So two Speaker 4 (17:43) part and three part. Maybe Speaker 3 (17:44) you can drive my car. Yes, I'm going to be a star. Speaker 3 (17:52) So Speaker 2 (17:52) they're singing to this. Speaker 3 (17:56) Yeah. Speaker 2 (17:57) And there's a tiny bit of bleed, isn't there? Yeah. From their headphones. Speaker 3 (18:02) And Speaker 4 (18:07) then they went back to the track that George recorded his guitar lead on, where he re-recorded his guitar lead. And then we have Cowbell on this track as well, which I think is Ringo, probably Ringo playing Cowbell. So they're essentially being done at the same time. Right. And then you have John playing piano. Speaker 4 (18:52) fluffing the piano. So what you have on the three tracks is this. Speaker 4 (19:09) And what's interesting about this for people listening is this is, and I get credit for stuff I shouldn't get credit for, because this is just the raw tapes. Yeah. It's Speaker 2 (19:18) not Speaker 4 (19:18) processing. This is just what they sound like. And it's that thing about so much time is spent mixing now. They mixed as they went along. They've made decisions early and they knew what they knew. My dad and Jeff Emmerich and more important, the Beatles knew what they wanted to sound like. and they just filled in the, they painted the gaps as it were. And so what's interesting about Drive My Car and going back to thoughts about how they compete with the Americans as far as making their records loud and getting that Motown bass sound, they put the bass down afterwards. So they record everything and so rare. I mean, how many people put, you know, do the bass track last? And so on track four, you have bass guitar and backing vocals. Right. And so actually Paul's playing bass and singing backing vocals at the end, you know, with George and John. Right. Speaker 2 (20:07) So the backing vocals are done at the same time as they're laying down the bass. Yeah. Speaker 4 (20:16) So there's a little spill. Speaker 2 (20:34) But this was all to make sure that the bass could be as loud as possible. Speaker 4 (20:38) So you have a bass on a separate track. Speaker 2 (20:41) Yeah. And then you can decide how, you know. Speaker 4 (20:53) So we go to the end, you can hear Paul has to come in with the refrain. Speaker 2 (21:20) Wow. And so that last guitar part was George. Yeah, that's George on track two. Yeah. Correct. So that'll be here. And that had already been laid down. Yeah. So then when they were doing track four, they had all of that to play along to. Speaker 4 (21:39) Because don't forget, they'd already laid down these vocals. Speaker 4 (21:44) Track one, guitar, drums, tambourine. Track three, but it's really the second track they recorded, was vocals, all through them singing. Then they added piano, lead guitar, and cowbell. And then they put the bass and double track back in vocals at the end. John's double track vocals at the end. So then what you have, if you think about that track split, we have only a choice of four things to put on two speakers. And so essentially it's a mono. It's a mono recording, that's what it is. It's meant to come out of one speaker, because as soon as you put something just in one speaker, it loses its power. So you can put that on one side, bass on the guitar, kind of want vocals in the middle, really, or you put, you know, your choice is limited. And that's why we go through the sort of demix process, if you like, of separating drums, guitar, surface switch to. Well, here... Speaker 4 (22:39) So suddenly we have separated from here. I just solo this as well. Sounds a bit like the Flintstones. Now it's not perfect, but that's a separate drum kit from Basement. And Speaker 2 (23:02) so have you been able to apply that to every single aspect? And so you've ended up with how many elements are in that song? So it's like you've got 10 tracks. Speaker 4 (23:12) I'm Speaker 2 (23:12) missing a drum track Speaker 4 (23:13) there. Speaker 4 (23:16) So out of those three I can have a separate guitar. That's roomed. Is there a piano from there? So you can see now that now we're beginning to have a... This is some room. We tend to, what we do here is we tend to re-record things back through Abbey Road Studios to create a room sound if you like, to make it real. Right. And so already if I just play this, we have a stereo image. Speaker 2 (24:15) And when you use demixing, how does it work? Is this a magic button that then suddenly separates everything? Well, no, Speaker 4 (24:22) I mean, there are magic buttons, and actually the technology is moving really rapidly. You know, Logic now do a demixing. You can demix through Logic and all that sort of stuff. What we tend to do is actually very bespoke. So we have our own programs that we run that are very kind of like... Essentially, it's like facial recognition for sound. So the machine has to know... as much as it does on what that sound it's looking for is in order to get the best version of that from the track. And we tend to, because we're working from raw,