Blackbird

Story Section status: Outdated

Recording

• One Beatle, one evening. Blackbird was recorded on Tuesday 11 June 1968 in Studio Two, from 6.30pm to a quarter past midnight, with George Martin producing, Geoff Emerick engineering and Phil McDonald assisting. George and Ringo had flown to the USA on 7 June and were not back until 18 June, and John had a booking of his own in Studio Three, 7.00 to 10.15pm, gathering sound effects for Revolution 9. Paul “started and finished the recording” that night: takes 1 to 32, and six mono mixes before the session closed. When Mother Nature’s Son was begun on 9 August, it too was to feature no other Beatles, “the same as ‘Blackbird’, already taped”.¹
• Thirty-two passes, four tracks at once. Every take went onto all four tracks of the tape together: Paul’s voice on one, through a KM56, his guitar on a second, his feet on a third, and on the fourth a room microphone picking up the sound of Studio Two. Nothing was built up afterwards, so a slip anywhere meant starting again from the top. “It was a straightforward recording — no reductions necessary — and was perfected by the 32nd run through, just 11 of which were complete.” Take 32 was marked best, and Paul then sang a second vocal “in places” onto the fourth track, wiping the room sound to make space for it.^1,2
• The tick is a foot. Lewisohn hears “a metronome gently ticking away in the background”. Kehew and Ryan identify it as “the tapping of his feet on the studio floor, which were separately mic’d by Geoff Emerick”, and point out that the tempo wanders between 89 and 94 beats a minute over the course of the song, which no metronome does. The wandering settles it: the pulse under the guitar is Paul keeping time with his foot, recorded on a track of its own.^1,2
• Outdoors, or nearly. Geoff Emerick remembers a location the session sheet does not give. Paul told him he wanted the track “to sound as if he was singing it outdoors”, and Emerick took him at his word: “Fine,” I said, “then let’s do it outdoors.” There was “a little spot outside of the echo chamber with just enough room for him to sit on a stool”, and Emerick ran a long microphone lead out to it, “and that’s where we recorded ‘Blackbird.’” The sheet books the session in Studio Two and the four-track layout has a Studio Two room microphone on track 4; the accounts are not reconciled (see Studio Notes).^1,2,3
• Left bare on purpose. A film crew was at the session, and its sound records the arrangement being discussed while Paul worked. Paul pictured a string quartet after the second verse, “or something like that”, and George Martin agreed: “Well, it does want something like that…”, an “arranged sound coming from the distance”. John was present and actively involved, though it was a solo Paul venture, and over the talkback came the idea of “a very nice little bit of brass band… in the distance”. “In the end, George Martin was overruled, and no additional instruments would be added to the song.”²

Equipment

Recording Timeline

• 11 June 1968 (Tuesday) — recording and mono mixing, Studio Two, 6.30pm–12.15am. P: George Martin. E: Geoff Emerick. 2E: Phil McDonald. Recording: takes 1–32. Mono mixing: remixes 1–6, from take 32. Paul “started and finished the recording of ‘Blackbird’, a lovely new composition which featured his own lead vocal, double-tracked in places via an overdub, accompanied by his acoustic guitar”. Take 32 carried the foot on one track, the guitar on another, the lead vocal on a third and the room microphone on the fourth, until the vocal double replaced it. A short walk away, Studio Three ran 7.00–10.15pm on unnumbered sound-effects takes for Revolution 9, under the same credits, so that on paper the producer and engineers were “keeping an eye on John Lennon in studio three and Paul McCartney in studio two, both busy on separate ideas for the ‘White Album’” (see Studio Notes).^1,2
• 27 August 1968 (Tuesday) — tape copying, Studio Two control room, 4.30–5.00pm. P: n/a. E: Ken Scott. 2E: John Smith. A half-hour booking with no producer, in which a tape copy was made of Blackbird’s mono remix 6, the last of the six mixes from 11 June. The sheet does not say what the copy was for. Nothing else was done to the song between June and October: no reduction, no overdub session and no further mix, so the 11 June mono was the only mix of it through the summer, and it had no birdsong.¹
• 13 October 1968 (Sunday) — mixing, Studio Two, 7.00pm–6.00am. P: George Martin. E: Ken Scott. 2E: John Smith. Stereo mixing: remix 1, from take 32. Mono mixing: remix 10, from take 32. These are the two released mixes, made in one all-night session, and the stereo is the first stereo mix of the song ever made. The birdsong went on here, during mixing and not as a recorded overdub, and it was done differently in each of the two mixes. It came from the Abbey Road library tape “Volume Seven: Birds of Feather”; Tape Op John Smith was sent to fetch it, and the first bird found turned out to be a thrush (see Studio Notes).^1,2,4
• 16–17 October 1968 (Wednesday–Thursday) — sequencing and banding the album. The all-night session that put the double album in order and banded the master tapes, finishing on the Thursday morning: Alan Brown, arriving at 9.00am, found the Beatles still there: “They had been there all night”. Every join between songs was decided in this session. Blackbird’s place was settled partly by its title: most of “the songs with an animal in the title”, Blackbird, Piggies and Rocky Raccoon among them, “were placed together, in succession, on side B”, which puts Blackbird between I’m So Tired and Piggies.¹

Studio Notes

• Why there is nothing else on it. The argument on 11 June was not whether the song could carry an arrangement but whether it needed one. Paul’s own account of the decision is plain: “[The song] is simple in concept because [we] couldn’t think of anything else to put on it… maybe on Pepper we would have sort of worked on it”, but “it is just one of those ‘pick it and sing it’ and that’s it.” George Martin’s picture of a sound coming from a distance, “a bit of decoration that you’ve got on the back of a painting”, lost. Brass did arrive on a later solo piece instead: Mother Nature’s Son, begun on 9 August, was to receive a brass overdub and otherwise feature no other Beatles.^1,2
• Four tracks, filled live. By 1968 the Beatles had spent years on four-track machines, building a track in layers and bouncing them together to free space. Blackbird reverses that. All four tracks were filled at once on every pass, so there was no room to add anything without losing something, and nothing had to be bounced because nothing was added in the usual sense. The one later addition, Paul’s second vocal, had to go over the room microphone. What the record lost in that trade is the separate track of the room around him: the released song is voice, guitar and foot, with the ambient track gone.^1,2
• A double vocal “in places”. Both accounts use the same two words for the overdub: “Take 32 was deemed ‘best’, and Paul double-tracked himself in places on Track 4, wiping the room mic in the process.” So the voice on the record is not doubled from end to end. It is a single live lead, sung with the guitar and foot on the same pass, with a second Paul joining it for some lines and dropping out for others. Because it went onto the room track, the double could only be added at the cost of that track, and it was.^1,2
• Two accounts of where Paul sat. Geoff Emerick puts the recording “outside of the echo chamber”, with Paul on a stool and a long microphone lead run out to him, because Paul wanted to sound as if he was singing outdoors. Lewisohn’s sheet books Studio Two, and Kehew and Ryan describe a room microphone “picking up the ambience of Studio Two” on track 4. The two can be read together only so far: neither book says the takes moved, and Emerick does not say which of the 32 passes were made outside. Both readings are given here, without choosing between them.^1,2,3
• The thrush that nearly made the record. The birdsong was a library effect fitted at the mix. Ken Scott tells it: “Paul said he wanted a blackbird on it”, so John Smith was sent for the effects tape, a reel of bird calls separated by short leaders, and when counting through “a tape with short leaders like that it’s easy” to land on the wrong one. Ken Townsend heard the result and said, “That sounds great, but I think it is a thrush.” Paul “looked slightly crestfallen”, and the right call was found. Several bird-call experts, consulted much later, independently confirmed that the bird heard at the end of the song is a European blackbird, Turdus merula.²
• A garden recording from 1965. The blackbird itself is older than the song. It came from “Volume Seven: Birds of Feather”, part of the Abbey Road taped sound-effects collection, and the engineer who made the recording, Stuart Eltham, remembered where: “I taped that on one of the first portable EMI tape-recorders, in my back garden in Ickenham, about 1965.” Geoff Emerick’s memory differs on one point: most of the bird noises were dubbed on later from a sound-effects record, “but a couple of them were live, sparrows and finches” singing outside where Paul sat. The library tape is the documented source; the live birds are Emerick’s recollection alone.^1,3
• Two mixes, two birds. Because the effect was added by hand during mixing rather than recorded onto the multitrack, each of the 13 October mixes needed its own pass of the birdsong, and the two passes were not the same: the bird overdubs “were done differently, during mixing”. That makes the bird the only difference of content on record between the two. Voice, guitar and foot come off take 32 in both; the blackbird was performed again for each, and anyone comparing the two 1968 mixes should listen there first.^1,4
• Two studios, one production team. On paper George Martin, Geoff Emerick and Phil McDonald were credited to both rooms that night, which would have meant “keeping an eye on John Lennon in studio three and Paul McCartney in studio two”. In reality, “the triumvirate production team would have more or less left John to look after his own unique requirements”, and Chris Thomas went with John to find sound-effects tapes. Geoff Emerick’s memory matches: John, wanting to compile sound effects for Revolution 9, headed off to another studio with Chris Thomas and Phil, accompanied by Yoko, and that left George Martin and Emerick alone with Paul, which Emerick welcomed. Blackbird had the producer and engineer to itself while Revolution 9 began a short walk away.^1,3

Releases

Every released Blackbird comes from take 32, and both 1968 mixes were made on the night of 13 October, when the birdsong was added. The bird was put on by hand in each mix, so the mono and the stereo do not carry it identically.

• 1968 UK mono LP — The Beatles (22 November 1968, Apple PMC 7067–7068, side B track 3) — voice, guitar and tapping foot together in one centred image, with the blackbird added at the mono mix in its own pass (see Studio Notes).
• 1968 UK stereo LP — The Beatles (22 November 1968, Apple PCS 7067–7068, side B track 3) — the only stereo mix made in 1968, from the same night as the mono; the birdsong was dubbed again for this mix and differs from the mono’s.
• 1968 US LP — The Beatles (25 November 1968, Apple SWBO-101) — stereo only, carrying the British stereo mix.
• 1987 CD — The Beatles (EMI CDP 7 46443 2) — the 1968 stereo, the song’s first digital issue.
• 1996 CD — Anthology 3 (Apple CDP 8 34451 2) — take 4 from 11 June, in a stereo mix made for the set: an early pass at the solo performance, with no vocal double and no birdsong.
• 2009 CD — The Beatles mono (Apple 84957-2) — the 1968 mono back in print, with its own birdsong.
• 2018 — The Beatles (“White Album”) anniversary editions (9 November 2018, Apple) — a new stereo mix by Giles Martin and Sam Okell, the first new mix of the released take since 1968; the Super Deluxe edition adds a 5.1 surround mix.

Sources

1. Mark Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions (New York: Harmony Books, 1988), 137, 147, 151, 161–163, 200–201.
2. Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew, Recording the Beatles: The Studio Equipment and Techniques Used to Create Their Classic Albums (Houston: Curvebender Publishing, 2006), 170, 474, 484, 490.
3. Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey, Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles (New York: Gotham Books, 2006), ch. 11.
4. Joseph Brennan, Usenet Guide to Beatles Recording Variations (rev. edn.), “Blackbird” entries.

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