Do You Want to Know a Secret

(Lennon/McCartney)

Quick Facts

Composer	John
Lead Vocal	George
Recorded	Feb 1963
Length	1:58
Key	E
Noted Takes	8
Producer	George Martin
Engineer	Norman Smith

Originally released on

Please Please Me

Parlophone — PMC 1202 / PCS 3042

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“Do You Want to Know a Secret” is a song by English rock band the Beatles from their 1963 album Please Please Me, sung by George. In the United States it was the first top-ten song with George as lead singer, reaching No. 2 on the Billboard chart in 1964 as a single released by Vee-Jay, VJ 587.

Do You Want to Know a Secret is a song by The Beatles, written by Lennon–McCartney and led on vocal by George. Given to George to sing. Within the catalogue, its george-vocal thread connects it to Chains, Roll Over Beethoven, Devil in Her Heart. Originally a John composition from the group’s Cavern Club era, ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret’ was recorded on 11 February 1963, during the single-day session that produced almost all of Please Please Me.

The session work falls within the band’s Beatlemania (1962–1964) period, recorded 11 Feb 1963 at EMI Studios, Abbey Road. George Martin produced; Norman Smith engineered. For session-by-session detail, see Mark Lewisohn’s account on p.28 of The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions (excerpt below). The recording from take 2 demonstrates the Beatles’ facility with multi-voice mixing, requiring synchronization of Harrison’s lead with a separately recorded Kramer vocal. The technical challenge of matching two lead voices on twin-track recording equipment, predating four-track capability, represented sophisticated engineering. Norman Smith’s microphone placement and balancing created separation while maintaining the intimate vocal quality (Lewisohn 1988, p.27).

What's distinctive

At 1:58 it sits in the bottom fifth by length. One of 28 songs led primarily by George. Recorded approximately 10 of 67 into the Beatlemania (1962–1964) sessions. Carries the unique tag 'secret' — no other song shares it. Take count: 8 — the best version was take eight, a superimposition of harmony vocal and drum-stick percussion onto take six.¹

Recording

The song was cut on Monday 11 February 1963 in Studio Two at EMI, on the day the Beatles recorded almost the whole of their first album. The day ran in three booked blocks — 10.00am–1.00pm, 2.30–6.00pm and 7.30–10.45pm — with one production team across all of it: George Martin producing, Norman Smith engineering and Richard Langham as second engineer. Ten songs went down in less than ten hours, on a schedule George Martin had calculated the group could just about survive: there “can scarcely have been 585 more productive minutes in the history of recorded music”.¹
This one belongs to the afternoon block. The running order inside that block is itself informative: A Taste of Honey came first at takes 1–5, then this song at takes 1–8, then a return to A Taste of Honey for takes 6–7, then There’s a Place, then the song still logged under its working title Seventeen, then Misery. The band were not working song by song to completion; they were moving down a list and coming back.¹
George sang the lead. The master was take 8, and take 8 was not a performance in the ordinary sense — it was an overdub pass. Lewisohn’s session sheet records the best version as “take eight — being a superimposition take of the harmony vocal and two drum sticks being tapped together, onto take six”. The released record is therefore take 6 with a second layer married to it, and the two drum sticks tapped together are the sound you can hear ticking through the verses.¹
That layering cost a tape generation. Overdubbing onto a two-track machine in 1963 meant an overdub bounce to a second machine: the existing tape played on one while the new part was performed along with it into another, so what ends up on the released master is a transfer of the first-generation tape rather than the first-generation tape itself. Songs cut live that afternoon never went through that step; this one did. Every overdub bought a layer and spent a little clarity.²
Paul has explained why the song went to George rather than to John or to himself. Asked about the songs they gave away, he said: “I think John and I were really concentrating on ‘We’ll do the real records!’ but because the other guys had a lot of fans we wrote for them too.” The same answer names this song as the one written for George. The writing-to-order habit was not confined to the band: the same day’s work sat alongside material being steered toward Billy J. Kramer with the Dakotas, another act in Brian Epstein’s stable.¹
Nothing further was recorded. The mixes came a fortnight later, on 25 February 1963, in the Studio One control room, and the Beatles were not there. George Martin and Norman Smith worked the morning block from 10.00am to 1.00pm with A. B. Lincoln as second engineer, making the mono and then the stereo of this song from take 8 back to back. Mixing was a production task that happened after the band had gone home, which is why the two mixes of this song differ in ways nobody in the group chose.
The stereo was not the point, and its maker said so. “The reason I used the stereo machine in twin-track form was simply to make the mono better, to delay the vital decision of submerging the voices into the background. I certainly didn’t separate them for people to hear them separate!” The wide 1963 image that later listeners treat as a stylistic signature was a by-product of keeping the voices on their own track until the mono was decided.¹

Equipment Section status: Outdated

Studio	EMI Studios, Abbey Road — Studio Two (recording, 11 Feb 1963); Studio One control room (mono + stereo mixing, 25 Feb 1963)¹
Tape machine	BTR3 Twin-Track²
Console	REDD.37 (Studio Two)²
Microphones	Neumann U48 (vocals); STC 4038 (overhead drums); STC 4033-A (bass drum)
Outboard / effects	EMI RS124, RS114, RS127 compressor/limiters
Guitars	Rickenbacker 325 (Lennon), Gretsch Country Gent / Tennessean (Harrison), Höfner 500/1 violin bass (McCartney), Ludwig Oyster Black Pearl kit (Starr)
Amplifiers	Vox AC30 (TB & non-Top-Boost variants)

Recording Timeline

11 February 1963 (Mon) — morning block, EMI Studio Two, 10.00am–1.00pm — The day opened without this song: There’s a Place (takes 1–10) and the song logged as Seventeen (takes 1–9). It matters to the afternoon because the machines, the microphone positions and the balance were set in this block and left standing; what follows is the same setup carrying a different song rather than a fresh session.¹
11 February 1963 (Mon) — basic takes 1–8, EMI Studio Two, 2.30–6.00pm — P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Richard Langham. Recording: Do You Want to Know a Secret (takes 1–8), inside a block that also carried A Taste of Honey (takes 1–5, then 6–7), There’s a Place (takes 11–13), Seventeen (takes 10–12) and Misery (takes 1–11). Eight takes is a middling count for the day — more than the single take Boys needed, well short of the thirteen spent on Hold Me Tight that evening.¹
11 February 1963 (Mon) — the superimposition that became the master — Take 8 was built onto take 6 rather than played from the top: a harmony vocal and two drum sticks tapped together, added to the existing performance. In the twin-track method this is the only way to exceed two simultaneous sources, and it is what separates this song from the performances cut live in the same block: its released master carries a copied generation that theirs do not.¹
11 February 1963 (Mon) — evening block, EMI Studio Two, 7.30–10.45pm — The day closed with Hold Me Tight (takes 1–13), Anna (Go to Him) (takes 1–3), Boys (take 1), Chains (takes 1–4), Baby It’s You (takes 1–3) and, last of all, Twist and Shout (takes 1–2). One credit line covers all three blocks, so the team that recorded this song is the team that recorded the album.¹
25 February 1963 (Mon) — mono then stereo mixing, EMI Studio One control room, 10.00am–1.00pm — P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: A. B. Lincoln. Mono mixing from take 8, then stereo mixing from the same take, in a control-room-only session with the band absent. The album’s remaining mixes and the edit of Please Please Me were handled in a second block that afternoon, 2.30–5.45pm.¹

To some degree, ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret’ for George was that way too. I think John and I were really concentrating on ‘We’ll do the real records!’ but because the other guys had a lot of fans we wrote for them too.— Paul McCartney¹

Studio Notes

Superimposition was EMI’s word for overdubbing, and it governed everything here — Twin-track overdubbing, “superimposition” in EMI parlance, is the mechanism behind take 8. With only two tracks available, a band needing a third element had to play the existing tape against a new performance and capture the combination. The harmony vocal and the tapped drum sticks on this record exist because somebody accepted the trade: an extra part in exchange for a copied tape.²
What a generation costs — An overdub bounce to a second machine means the released master contains a transfer of the first-generation tape rather than the first-generation tape itself. On 1963 quarter-inch tape at these levels that shows up as a slightly softer top end and a rise in hiss under the quiet passages. Listening to this song directly after a first-generation performance from the same afternoon is the cleanest way to hear what the layering bought and what it spent.²
The Delta-Mono safety net, and why this song was named among those that skipped it — Most of the Please Please Me material was recorded simultaneously to both a twin-track and a Delta-Mono machine, the second producing a usable, fully-mixed mono as a safety net. Where a song was known in advance to need superimposition the Delta-Mono was pointless, and this one is named in that group: the initial takes of “Taste of Honey’, ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret’’, “There’s A Place’” and I Saw Her Standing There went to twin-track only, because “more material would be added later via tape-to-tape superimposition, there was no need to make a Delta-Mono mix yet”. The practice was discontinued after the 13 March 1963 session for Thank You Girl.²
Hard left, hard right, and no choice about it — On the desk in use, track 1 of a twin-track tape was automatically panned hard left and track 2 hard right, with no panning controls for those channels. The extreme separation on the 1963 stereo of this song is not an aesthetic decision anyone made; it is what the console did when a two-track tape was monitored in stereo. Collapsing the image to the centre produced the mono, which is the version the label expected people to buy.²
Live vocals and the leakage that comes with them — Vocal tracks recorded live alongside the band inevitably carry drum and guitar leakage, and once they do, a later fix by punching in becomes difficult: the repair drags the spill with it. It is the reason a 1963 vocal is usually either kept whole or replaced whole, and the reason an edit piece at EMI was a separate re-recording of a passage rather than a patch dropped into the middle of one.²
Room sound was part of the signal — The 1963 balance put a U47 in front of Ringo and let the kit and amplifiers wash off the walls of Studio Two, and a noticeable amount of ambient sound reached the tape as a result. The reverberation audible around the voices on this record is largely the room itself rather than an added treatment, which is why the song sounds like a performance in a space rather than a construction.²
Double-tracking was already house practice — the technique had been in use at EMI since 1962 (“I started double-tracking voices back in 1962”), and George Martin thought it “a useful technique for getting different sounds”; the first set of tricks on the records was double-tracking, and that is what set the ball rolling. The harmony overdub here is an early, plain instance of a habit that would within four years produce the elaborate vocal treatments of the mid-period records.²
The equipment this song passed through — The 1963 inventory gives a REDD.37 console, an EMI BTR3 as the quarter-inch twin-track machine until 17 October, an EMI BTR2 for mono mixdown, Neumann U47, U48 and KM-54 microphones for voices and guitars, STC4038 overheads and an STC4033-A on bass drum, with an RS124 compressor and an RS127 Presence Box in the outboard rack. After 17 October 1963 the twin-track gave way to Telefunken T9U and M10 four-track machines — a changeover that arrived eight months too late to touch this record.²
Two dates for one stereo pressing — The sources do not agree on when the stereo album reached shops. Lewisohn’s release appendix files Please Please Me as first issued 22 March 1963 with both catalogue numbers against that date, while the album’s own entry elsewhere in the book gives the stereo LP, Parlophone PCS 3042, as issued Friday 26 April 1963. The mono date is not in dispute. The stereo entry below therefore carries its catalogue number without pinning a day.¹

Releases

One question runs through the list: whether the harmony overdub and the tapped drum sticks sit centred with everything else, or are thrown to one side of the room while the band occupies the other.

1963 UK mono LP — Please Please Me (22 March 1963, Parlophone PMC 1202, side B track 4) — Everything centred and level: the harmony overdub sits inside the band rather than beside it, and the drum sticks read as part of the arrangement instead of a separate event. This is the mix the record was made for.
1963 UK stereo LP — Please Please Me (Parlophone PCS 3042, side B track 4) — The twin-track thrown wide: band hard to one channel, voices and the overdubbed layer hard to the other, with nothing in the middle. Striking on headphones and unbalanced on speakers; the separation is the console’s doing, not a mixing choice (see Studio Notes).
1963 UK EP — Twist and Shout (12 July 1963, Parlophone GEP 8882, side B track 1) — The 1963 mono on a four-track EP that also carries A Taste of Honey, There’s a Place and the title song. Nothing new in the mix; the interest is the pairing, which puts this song and the album’s closing scream on the same disc.
1964 US LP and single — Introducing the Beatles (Vee Jay VJLP 1062 mono / VJSR 1062 stereo) and the Vee Jay VJ 587 single (23 March 1964, b/w Thank You Girl) — The UK mono and stereo masters reaching America unaltered, the single carrying the mono. American listeners met the song here, months before Capitol had it.
1965 US LP — The Early Beatles (Capitol ST-2309 stereo / T-2309 mono) — Capitol’s own handling of the stereo, remixed rather than simply re-cut, with a mono folded down from that stereo for the mono pressing. The mono here is therefore a fold of Capitol’s stereo rather than the 1963 mono, so the two American pressings of the same album differ in more than channel count.
1987 CD — Please Please Me (EMI 46435-2) — Mono. A listener who met this song on compact disc before 2009 heard the centred 1963 mix rather than the wide one, which is the reverse of what a CD buyer would assume.
2006 CD — The Capitol Albums, Vol. 2 (Apple 57497 2) — The 1965 Capitol stereo remix and its folded mono presented together, which makes the comparison with the 1963 pair straightforward for the first time.
2009 CD — Please Please Me (Apple 82416 2) — The 1963 stereo, remastered. The hard separation is left exactly as it was; what changes is noise floor and top-end definition, not the picture.
2013 download — take 7, Bootleg Recordings 1963 — The take before the master, with the overdub not yet added: the song as it stood at the end of the afternoon, ending in a bit of studio chatter.

Sources

Mark Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions (New York: Harmony Books, 1988), 12, 24, 28, 32.
Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew, Recording the Beatles: The Studio Equipment and Techniques Used to Create Their Classic Albums (Houston: Curvebender Publishing, 2006), 352, 358, 360, 362, 365, 368–69.

Frequently asked

Who wrote Do You Want to Know a Secret?

“Do You Want to Know a Secret” was written by John (Lennon/McCartney).

Who sings lead on Do You Want to Know a Secret?

The lead vocal on “Do You Want to Know a Secret” is by George.

When was Do You Want to Know a Secret recorded?

“Do You Want to Know a Secret” was recorded 11 February 1963 at EMI Studios, Abbey Road (Studio Two), and mixed 25 February 1963 in the Studio One control room.¹

How many takes did Do You Want to Know a Secret require?

Eight — takes 1–8 were recorded on 11 February 1963, with take eight (a superimposition of harmony vocal and drum-stick percussion onto take six) selected as the master.¹

On this page

Story Section status: Outdated

What's distinctive

Recording

Equipment Section status: Outdated

Recording Timeline

Studio Notes

Releases

Sources

Frequently asked