Fixing a Hole

Story Section status: Outdated

Recording

• This is the only Beatles recording made at Regent Sound Studio, 164–166 Tottenham Court Road, London, and the only Sgt. Pepper track that was not cut at Abbey Road. The session ran on Thursday 9 February 1967 — the start and finish times are not on record — and produced takes 1 to 3. George Martin produced, Adrian Ibbetson engineered and the second engineer is unrecorded.¹
• They went out because Abbey Road was not free, and it was not a one-off habit that year: the band ventured out to Regent Sound in February for this song and to De Lane Lea in May for another.² George Martin’s verdict on the room was blunt — a “pretty awful little studio, very cramped and boxy”.¹ The record does not sound cramped, which is the first interesting thing about it.
• Regent Sound was better equipped than the description suggests. Its rooms ran mono and stereo Ampex machines, and the outboard included a Pultec EQP-1a equaliser and a Universal Audio LA-2A — American gear of a kind EMI did not use — alongside an echo chamber rated superb.² An independent studio in 1967 bought what worked; EMI built what it specified. The two philosophies met on this tape.
• The vocals went down at the same time as the band. Three takes were recorded with the singing live rather than superimposed afterwards, which by February 1967 had stopped being how the Beatles worked at all — every other song on the album separated the rhythm track from the voice so each could be handled on its own. Take 1 was marked master and take 2 final master, and it is take 2 that survived.¹
• The bass was plugged into the desk. Ken Townsend had designed a small transformer box that let an instrument go straight to the console with no amplifier and no microphone in front of it, and it was used on Beatles sessions for the first time anywhere in this period.^1,2 By 1967 the group indisputably made use of direct injection on the bass, “though it was rarely used alone” — it was usually combined with a miked amplifier.² Geoff Emerick never liked it: “It sounds wishy-washy to me and you don’t get the power of the amp.”²
• The clearest surviving evidence of the DI-alone practice is a setup sheet from four days later. Geoff Emerick’s sheet for the 13 February 1967 session — for ‘Only A Northern Song’, not for this song — specifies direct injection on the bass with no microphone at all.² It shows the method existed in that exact form in the same fortnight; it does not document this session, whose paperwork does not survive in that detail.
• The record was finished back at EMI. On Tuesday 21 February, in Studio Two between 7.00pm and 3.45am, a fresh take 1 was recorded, the Regent Sound take 2 was reduced into take 3, and superimpositions went onto take 3. Mono remixes 2 to 6 were made from take 3 the same night, and two of them — remixes 3 and 6 — were edited together into the master. Geoff Emerick engineered with Richard Lush as second.¹
• Stereo came seven weeks later. On Friday 7 April, in the Studio Two control room between 7.00pm and 1.00am, a single stereo remix was made from take 3 in a session otherwise given over to preparing the album’s crossfades.¹ One mix, one pass, in a sitting whose main business was something else — which is the ordinary status of stereo on this album.

Equipment

Recording Timeline

• 9 February 1967 (Thu) — takes 1–3, Regent Sound Studio, Tottenham Court Road, time unrecorded. The whole basic track in one visit to an outside studio, with the vocals sung live alongside the band rather than added later. Take 1 was marked master and take 2 final master, and take 3 is the one that broke down. George Martin produced and Adrian Ibbetson engineered; the second engineer is not on the sheet, and neither is the start or finish time, which is unusual enough in the EMI paperwork to mark this session out on its own. The room they were working in ran Ampex tape machines rather than EMI’s own, and its outboard included a Pultec equaliser and a Universal Audio LA-2A, so the signal path that day was American where every other day of the album was not.¹ The bass went to tape through a direct-injection box with no amplifier in the room — a method that had only just entered Beatles sessions.^1,2
• 21 February 1967 (Tue) — new take 1, reduction take 2 into take 3, superimpositions, mono remixes 2–6 and the master edit, Studio Two, 7.00pm–3.45am. Nearly nine hours, and the session that turned an outside tape into an EMI record. A fresh take 1 was recorded and set aside, the Regent Sound take 2 was bounced into take 3 to free a track, and the overdubs went onto that. Five mono remixes followed, and the released mono is an edit of two of them, remixes 3 and 6. Geoff Emerick engineered with Richard Lush as second.^1,3
• 7 April 1967 (Fri) — stereo remix 1 from take 3, Studio Two control room, 7.00pm–1.00am. The stereo was made in a control-room session whose main business was cutting the crossfades that join the album’s sides together, and it took one remix. Seven weeks separate it from the mono, and the band, who attended the mono mixing, were not part of it.¹ The gap is why the two mixes of this song differ in ways that have nothing to do with panning.³

Studio Notes

• The one session outside Abbey Road — Every other note on Sgt. Pepper was recorded at EMI. This song went to Regent Sound because Abbey Road was not available, and the trip was not an experiment in sound: it was a diary problem solved by hiring a room. What makes it worth knowing is that the tape came back and was kept. The band did not re-record the song at EMI when a studio freed up; they reduced the outside tape and built on it, which means the foundation of an Sgt. Pepper track was laid in a small independent room on Tottenham Court Road.^1,2
• What Regent Sound had that EMI did not — George Martin remembered it as cramped and boxy, and the equipment list tells a more interesting story than the verdict. The rooms ran Ampex machines rather than EMI’s own, and the outboard included a Pultec EQP-1a and a Universal Audio LA-2A — American units that an EMI engineer of the period would not have had to hand, since EMI built its own compressors and equalisers to its own specification. The studio also had a superb echo chamber of its own.² A different set of tools was in the signal path for one day, and this is the only Beatles recording where that is true of Regent Sound.
• The vocals were sung live, which by 1967 they never were — All three takes carry the singing at the same time as the playing.¹ On every other song on the album the rhythm track went down first and the voice was superimposed later, because separating them is what makes a vocal adjustable at the mix — you can compress it, double it, or re-sing it without touching the band. Doing both at once locks the two together permanently. It is the single most old-fashioned decision on the record, and it was made in the same weeks as some of the most elaborate overdubbing the band ever attempted.
• Two takes were marked as the master, and the second one won — Take 1 was marked master and take 2 final master; take 3 broke down.¹ Two complete performances out of three is a high strike rate for these sessions, and it follows from the live vocal: a take either worked as a whole or it did not, because there was no separating the good playing from the questionable singing afterwards. Take 2 is the one that was carried to Abbey Road and reduced.
• The bass has no amplifier on it — Ken Townsend’s direct-injection box took the instrument straight into the desk with nothing in between, and its first use on Beatles sessions belongs to this period.^1,2 What it removes is everything an amplifier contributes: the speaker’s frequency roll-off, the cabinet’s resonance, and the air between the cone and the microphone. What it leaves is the string itself, close and hard-edged. Geoff Emerick disliked it for exactly that reason, and the group used it in 1967 “though it was rarely used alone” — usually blended with a miked amplifier.² Where it is used alone, as it appears to be here, the bass sits unusually far forward and unusually dry.
• The setup sheet that proves the method, and the song it actually belongs to — The clearest surviving document of DI-alone at EMI in this fortnight is Geoff Emerick’s setup sheet of 13 February 1967, which calls for direct injection on the bass and no microphone. That sheet is for ‘Only A Northern Song’.² It establishes that the practice existed in that exact form four days after this session; it is not paperwork for this session, and no equivalent sheet survives for the Regent Sound date.
• The reduction is why the record is an EMI record — On 21 February the Regent Sound take 2 was bounced into take 3, and everything added afterwards went onto that.¹ A reduction is a one-way door: whatever balance existed between the parts inside the bounce is fixed at the moment it is made. So the Regent Sound performance survives on the finished record as a single pre-mixed layer, decided in a room George Martin did not like, while every later decision — the overdubs, the compression, the mix — was made at Abbey Road on top of it.
• The guitar solo is flanged — the catalogue-wide survey of flanging and phasing lists the solo at 1:16 on this song, in mono.² Flanging is two copies of the same signal drifting fractionally apart in time, which cancels and reinforces different frequencies as the offset moves — a sweeping, hollow whoosh across the top of the sound. It is applied to a short solo in a song otherwise free of studio effects, and it is the moment the record briefly declares which album it belongs to.
• The vocal is running a shade slow — The vocal sits in the varispeed table at 49 cycles against a normal fifty.² That is a small adjustment — nothing like the 47.5 used elsewhere on the album — and it drops the pitch and slows the delivery very slightly on playback rather than lifting it. The effect is a voice sitting a fraction heavier and later than it was sung, which suits a lyric about taking one’s time. It is also a reminder that varispeed on these sessions was a tuning and a mood control, not only a trick for making instruments sound impossible.
• The mono runs longer than the stereo — The two mixes are not the same length. The mono is an edit of two remixes joined together and it runs a few seconds longer, with a long fade the stereo does not have.³ That difference has nothing to do with stereo placement: it comes from the fact that the mono was assembled by hand on 21 February with the band in the building, and the stereo was made alone in a control room on 7 April as one pass among that evening’s other business. If you want to hear the ending the way it was built, the mono is the one to reach for.

Releases

Which released versions of “Fixing a Hole” sound different, and what the listener hears on each.

• 1967 UK mono LP — Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1 June 1967, Parlophone PMC 7027, side one, track five) — The record as it was meant to be heard: everything summed to one point, the keyboard and the bass occupying the same space, the flanged solo cutting across the middle of it. It runs a few seconds longer than the stereo and fades out slowly rather than stopping.
• 1967 UK stereo LP — Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1 June 1967, Parlophone PCS 7027, side one, track five) — A single-pass mix made seven weeks after the mono. The band pulls to one side and the voice to the other in the era’s hard-split manner, which opens up the keyboard part but leaves the middle thin; the ending is shorter and the long fade is gone.
• 1967 US LPs — Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Capitol MAS-2653 mono / SMAS-2653 stereo) — The same two British mixes, pressed in America; the sequencing and the sleeve are the same as the UK, which was unusual for a Capitol Beatles album and is why there is no distinct American version of this song.
• 1987 CD — Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (EMI CDP 7 46442 2) — The 1967 stereo on disc and, for a generation, the only version most listeners could buy: the split image became the default sound of this song for twenty-two years.
• 2009 mono CD — Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (2009, Parlophone 99459 2) — The 21 February mono on CD: two mono mixes edited together, a few seconds longer than the stereo, with the long fade intact. It is a transfer of the 1967 master, not a remix.
• 2017 stereo remix — Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band anniversary edition (2017, Apple, Giles Martin and Sam Okell) — A new mix from the four-track tapes, centring the rhythm and gathering the voice back into the middle, which recovers most of what the mono had. The deluxe set adds speech and take 3 from the sessions, so the reduction the whole record stands on can be heard on its own.