Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby

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Recording

Equipment

Recording Timeline

• 18 October 1964 (Sun) — recording, EMI Studio Two, 2.30–11.30pm — P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Geoff Emerick. Recording: Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby (take 1). Eight titles were logged across the one booking: Eight Days a Week (takes 14–15, edit pieces), Kansas City/Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey! (takes 1–2), a Mr. Moonlight re-make (takes 5–8), I Feel Fine (takes 1–9), I’ll Follow The Sun (takes 1–8), this song (take 1), Rock and Roll Music (take 1) and Words of Love (takes 1–3). The day was “a somewhat hectic one”, and the pressure was external — a UK tour had begun on 9 October, and the group were “having to cram in recording sessions on” the days it left free. The running order explains why this song came where it did. First on the agenda was the Little Richard cover, “recorded at blistering pace in just two takes”; then the Mr. Moonlight re-make; then I Feel Fine, on which “takes one to eight concentrated on the rhythm track and the vocals were added on take nine, the final” take. The songs that needed working out were taken while the room was fresh. The three stage covers that took five takes between them closed the night.¹
• 21 October 1964 (Wed) — mono mixing, Abbey Road Room 65, 2.30–5.45pm — P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Ron Pender. The mono remix of this song was made here, from take 1, in a batch that also carried I Feel Fine, I’ll Follow The Sun and She’s A Woman. The work was done in Room 65 rather than a studio control room; the following day’s mono remixing moved to Studio One, and the batch five days later to Studio Two, so the album’s mono mixes were made wherever a room was free. Three days after the session, and six weeks before the LP appeared, this song’s mono master was finished.¹
• 4 November 1964 (Wed) — stereo mixing, Studio Two control room, 10.00am–1.00pm — P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Mike Stone. The stereo remix, again from take 1, was made in a single morning that cleared most of the remaining album: I’ll Follow The Sun, this song, Words of Love, I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party, I’m A Loser, No Reply and I Feel Fine. Two different tape operators therefore sit behind the two mixes of this track, a fortnight apart, working from the same four-track master.¹

Studio Notes

• What STEED actually was — Engineers at Abbey Road recalled the name as an acronym for “Single Tape Echo / Echo Delay”; the session sheet for this day expands it slightly differently, as “single tape echo and echo delay”. The two readings describe one thing. A tape machine — the BTR2 — was dedicated to putting a pre-delay into the echo chamber send, so that “a few milliseconds is heard between the” direct sound and the chamber return. That short gap is what separates a STEED vocal from a plain chamber vocal: the voice arrives, and then its reflection arrives behind it as a distinct event rather than a wash. Stacked up as heavily as it is here, the gap becomes the rhythmic tick that gives the record its slapping, boxed-in quality.^1,2
• Printed to tape, not added at the mix — The repeat-echo effect “was always printed to tape during this period, rather than being applied at the time of mixing”. That single procedural fact governs everything else about this recording. It explains why both vocal tracks on the track sheet are annotated with the echo, it explains why no mono or stereo remix of the song has ever differed in its treatment, and it explains why the effect cannot be dialled back on any later transfer. Whatever was committed in Studio Two on 18 October is what every issue of the song has carried since.²
• Where the taste came from — This song and Rock and Roll Music are the two recordings named as the era’s repeat-echo examples, and the reason offered for reaching for it is imitation rather than invention: the use of the effect here was “likely inspired by its similarity to the ‘slapback echo’ heard on many of the Beatles’ favourite records” by American “rock-a-billy” and R&B “artists such as Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, and Chuck Berry”. Both Perkins’ 1957 version of this song and Berry’s 1958 recording of Rock and Roll Music carried a similar effect. The group were not inventing a sound in October 1964; they were reproducing the one that had been on the records they learned the songs from, with a British studio’s equipment and a heavier hand.²
• What the desk did with two echoed vocal tracks — The console patching of the period was fixed and, crucially, tied to the tape: “Main Faders I and II always had RS124 Altec compressors inserted”, while III and IV “always used the RS114 limiters” before early 1964 or “Fairchild 660 limiters (after early 1964)”. That patching “was directly tied to the four-track tape layout”. Read that against this song’s track sheet and the signal path falls out of it: the rhythm and electric guitar on tracks 1 and 2 went through the Altec compressors, and both echo-soaked vocal tracks, 3 and 4, went through Fairchild 660s. The limiters were not chosen for this record — they came with the track number.²
• An echo comparison made the same evening — Immediately after this recording the group cut Rock and Roll Music, also in one take, “with a slightly echoed Lennon vocal”. The two performances are minutes apart, on the same tape, through the same desk, and both are named as repeat-echo examples — yet one is described as slightly echoed and the other as sounding like a man singing inside a tin can. The difference is a matter of how much was sent, not of what was available, which makes the pair the clearest demonstration in the Beatles for Sale sessions that the treatment on this song was a deliberate quantity rather than a house default.^1,2
• The autumn microphone changeover — By the September sessions Norman Smith had “retired the STC4033-A on bass drum”, “completing the move from all-STC rhythm section mics” to AKG: a D19c overhead and a D20 on the bass drum, with a second D20 on the bass rig, because he “preferred to have his bass drum and bass” amp microphones match each other. The 1964 inventory dates both AKG assignments to the second half of the year, so an 18 October date sits inside the new arrangement rather than the old one. The change stuck: those microphone choices became “standard for the rest of the group’s” years at the studio.²
• The Fairchild had only recently been accepted — The 660 limiters that this song’s vocal tracks passed through were new enough to have been resisted. By the time the Beatles for Sale sessions were under way Smith “had made his peace with the 660”, and from that point a pair of them were in permanent use on the desk. The heavily echoed vocal on this track is therefore an early example of the two defining pieces of 1964 outboard working together: a chamber-fed tape delay in front, a Fairchild behind it.²
• An album made in the gaps — The record this closes was the group’s “fourth LP in 21 months”, and the fatigue is part of its documented character. “They were rather war weary during Beatles For Sale,” says George Martin. “One must remember that they’d been battered like mad throughout 1964, and much of 1963.” Three stage covers taken in five takes at the end of a nine-hour day is what that pressure looks like in the log — not carelessness, but a group falling back on material it could deliver first time while the calendar closed in.¹
• What is not on record — No microphone is documented for George’s vocal on this date, and no equipment feature covers the 18 October session specifically; the assignments above are the studio’s standing practice for the second half of 1964, not a sheet for this song. Nor is the number of repeats or the delay time of the STEED setting written down anywhere. The effect can be described from the record and its mechanism from the studio’s documentation, but the settings used on the night were not kept.^1,2

Releases

• 1964 UK mono LP — Beatles for Sale (4 December 1964, Parlophone PMC 1240, side B track 7) — The album closer. The tin-can vocal, the echoed spill on the backing and the tambourine all arrive in one central image; because the echo sits on the tape rather than in the mix, nothing about the treatment is specific to this issue (see Studio Notes).
• 1964 UK stereo LP — Beatles for Sale (4 December 1964, Parlophone PCS 3062, side B track 7) — The stereo counterpart, made a fortnight after the mono from the same take. No audible difference between the two is documented for this title, which is what a master carrying its own effect would predict: what changed between 21 October and 4 November was the number of channels, not the treatment.
• 1964 US LP — Beatles ’65 (Capitol T-2228 mono / ST-2228 stereo) — The song’s American home. Both configurations were issued, and they carry the two UK mixes respectively: the mono LP the 21 October mono, the stereo LP the 4 November stereo. A US buyer’s copy of the song therefore depends entirely on which of the two sleeves they picked up.
• 1987 CD — Beatles for Sale (EMI CDP 7 46438 2) — The first digital issue of the album is a mono disc, and this song is the mono on it. Anyone who came to the track on CD in the twenty-two years before 2009 heard the 21 October mix, not the stereo.
• 2009 CD — Beatles for Sale (Apple 82414 2) — The remastered issue moves the album to stereo, so this is the point at which the 4 November mix becomes the standard digital version of the song. The echo treatment is unchanged; what the remaster affects is transfer quality, not the mix.