Getting Better

Story Section status: Outdated

Recording

Equipment

Recording Timeline

• Thursday 9 March 1967 — Studio Two, 7.00pm–3.30am: takes 1–7, reduced into takes 8–12. P: George Martin. E: Malcolm Addey / Ken Townsend. 2E: Graham Kirkby.¹ The take-1 tape held acoustic guitar with piano on track 1, Lowrey organ on 2, drums on 3, and a guide vocal with maracas on 4; by take 6 the piano had gone, take 7 was ‘best’, and a tamboura drone replaced the guide vocal on track 4.² The reduction that followed took take 7 down to a single track and opened three more — the standard four-track manoeuvre, and the point at which the night's balance became permanent.
• Friday 10 March 1967 — Studio Two, 7.00pm–4.00am: superimposition onto take 12. P: George Martin. E: Geoff Emerick. 2E: Richard Lush.¹ Track 1 of the new tape carried the mixed-down basic rhythm from take 7; Paul's bass went onto track 3, Ringo's drums were superimposed onto track 2, and a droning tamboura onto track 4.¹ Bass added after the reduction rather than with the band is a Pepper-era habit worth flagging: it lets the bass be balanced against a finished rhythm bed instead of competing with it in the room, and it is one reason the album's bass lines sit so far forward.
• Tuesday 21 March 1967 — Studio Two, 7.00pm–2.45am: take 12 reduced into takes 13 and 14, superimposition onto take 14. P: George Martin. E: Geoff Emerick. 2E: Richard Lush.¹ The same session also carried overdubs and fifteen mono remixes for ‘Lovely Rita’, which is why the night ran to nearly three in the morning. The second reduction is what made room for the handclaps, congas and mallet piano that fill the last third of the record.
• Tuesday 21 March 1967 — the vocal that stopped. John said that he felt ill; George Martin, not knowing the reason, took him onto the roof of Studio Two for air. He was in the middle of an LSD trip.¹ The practical consequence for the tape is small — the backing track was already done and the night was a vocal session — and the usual telling leaves out the detail that gives it its shape: Paul and George Harrison were still ready for work, and the session continued around the interruption.¹
• Thursday 23 March 1967 — Studio Two, 7.00pm–3.45am: superimposition onto take 14, reduction into take 15, superimposition onto take 15; mono remixes 1–3 from take 15. P and E: Peter Vince. 2E: Ken Scott.¹ Backing vocals went on at this session. Three mono remixes is a short mixing run by Pepper standards — ‘Lovely Rita’ took fifteen two nights earlier — and it tells you the balance had effectively been settled in the reductions rather than at the desk.
• Friday 7 April 1967 — Studio Two control room, 7.00pm–1.00am: stereo mixing, remix 1 from take 15. P: George Martin. E: Geoff Emerick. 2E: Richard Lush.¹ The stereo mix was made in a single pass during the marathon session that also produced the LP crossfades and the stereo mixes for ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’, ‘Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!’ and ‘Fixing A Hole’. One stereo remix against three monos is the clearest measure available of which format the album was actually mixed for.
• Thursday 1 June 1967 — released on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The song is the fourth title in the album's running order, between ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ and ‘Fixing A Hole’.¹

Studio Notes

• A keyboard part that changes mechanism halfway through — the pianet in the intro and choruses is played from the keys; through the verses the tines are plucked by hand instead.² The instrument sounds a metal reed by pressing a sticky pad against it and then releasing it, which gives a struck note a soft, slightly compressed onset and a short decay. Pluck the same tine directly and none of that happens: the attack is instantaneous and bright, the harmonic content is far richer at the top, and the note rings a little longer because no pad is damping it. On the record this reads as two different instruments alternating, which is exactly what a listener hears and exactly what the session sheet does not say. It is also a decision about arrangement made at the level of playing technique rather than orchestration — the sort of choice a four-track session rewards, because it costs no extra track.
• What was lost when Martin's piano was dropped — take 1 put acoustic guitar and piano together on track 1, and by take 6 the piano had been decided against.² Sharing a track is the constraint that makes this a real decision rather than a mixing preference: with both instruments printed to the same piece of tape there was no way to lower one against the other afterwards, so the choice was binary and had to be made in the room, in front of the band, before the take that mattered. Take 7 was the one marked best, and it is a take without the piano. Everything keyboard-shaped that survives on the record arrived later, as overdub.
• The drone that erased a vocal — once take 7 was best, Harrison's tamboura went onto track 4, wiping John's guide vocal.² A guide vocal exists to be wiped, so this is not a loss; what it demonstrates is how tightly the four-track tape was being managed on a song that would eventually need two reductions. There was no spare track for a drone, so a track that had already done its job was reused. A tamboura is an unfretted drone instrument with a curved bridge that makes each string buzz across a wide band of overtones, so it does not sit in one place in the spectrum — it fills the gaps between everything else, which is why it can be almost inaudible as a part and yet obviously missing if it is removed.
• Phasing printed into the tape, not added at the mix — George's acoustic guitar was phased and flanged during the reduction itself.² The distinction matters more than it sounds. Effects applied at the mix stay reversible: any later remix that returns to the four-track can leave them out. Effects applied while bouncing are copied into the new track along with the performance, and no later engineer can undo them — which is why the phased acoustic is still there on every subsequent stereo remix of this song, however far back to the tapes that remix goes. Committing an effect during a bounce is a bet that the sound will still be wanted years later, and on a four-track it is a bet that gets made constantly.
• Two reductions, and what they cost — takes 1–7 were bounced into 8–12, and take 12 was bounced again into 13 and 14, with a third pass into 15.¹ Each bounce mixes existing tracks together onto one track of a fresh tape, freeing three, and each costs a tape generation. The parts recorded first — guitar, organ, drums — therefore reach the master through more copies than the handclaps and congas added last, and the audible signature is a rhythm bed that is slightly softer at the top and slightly noisier than the percussion sitting on it. On a record this dense that reads as depth rather than degradation, but it is the same physical process either way.
• Three balance engineers on one track — Malcolm Addey took 9 March, Geoff Emerick 10 and 21 March, and Peter Vince produced and engineered 23 March.¹ Addey came in because Emerick had been working a long run of late nights; Ken Townsend handled the reduction on that first evening. Continuity of engineer is normally what gives an album its consistent sound, so a track that passed through three of them is a useful control case — and the fact that it does not stand out on the finished LP says something about how much of the Pepper sound was set by the room, the desk and the Studer rather than by whose hands were on the faders.
• Bass after the fact — Paul's bass was superimposed onto the reduced take-12 tape rather than played with the basic track.¹ Recording bass as an overdub against a finished rhythm bed lets the player hear exactly what he is answering and lets the engineer set a level against a fixed balance instead of guessing. It also means the bass is a first-generation signal sitting on top of a bounced rhythm track, which puts it in front automatically, without any decision being taken at the mix. The forward, melodic bass that people describe as characteristic of this album is partly a consequence of that working order.
• What a mallet on a piano does — the piano added after the first reduction was struck with a mallet rather than played from the keys.² Striking a string directly bypasses the action, so there is no key noise and no hammer felt to soften the contact; the note arrives with a harder, more percussive front and a longer, less controlled decay because the damper is not being managed by a finger on a key. Alongside the handclaps and congas recorded in the same pass, it is a percussion part that happens to be pitched — which is a fair description of how the piano is used across most of this album.
• A session booked for seven that started at eleven — the session record notes a booking due to begin at 7pm at which the first arrival came in around eleven and ordered fish and chips, the others later still, after which they all hung around a keyboard.¹ Studio time in 1967 was open-ended for this group in a way it had not been for any earlier album, and the four-hour gap is a small piece of evidence for what the shift cost and bought. It is also a reminder that the tidy chronology of a session sheet — 7.00pm–3.30am, takes 1–7 — compresses a night in which very little happened for a third of the booked time.
• Mono was the record — three mono remixes were made from take 15 on 23 March; the stereo took a single remix in the 7 April control-room session that mixed most of the LP.¹ The mono was mixed by the team that had just finished the recording, at the end of the night the record was finished; the stereo was made a fortnight later, in a batch, alongside the album's crossfades. Anyone comparing the two is comparing a mix made with the session still in the room against one made from the same tape by people working through a list.

Releases

Which released versions of “Getting Better” 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, fourth track) — the mix the record was made for. Everything is centred and packed tight: the phased acoustic and the pianet share the same space as the drums, the tamboura reads as texture rather than instrument, and the handclaps sit hard against the snare. This is the reference for everything below.
• 1967 UK stereo LP — Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1 June 1967, Parlophone PCS 7027, fourth track) — a single-pass mix made a fortnight after the mono, and it shows. Rhythm bed and vocals pull to opposite sides in the era's hard-split manner, separating the pianet from the acoustic far more clearly than the mono but hollowing out the middle and stranding the tamboura on one side.
• 2009 stereo remaster — Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (9 September 2009, Apple/EMI) — a remaster of the 1967 stereo, not a remix, so the hard split stands. What changes is resolution within each side: the plucked tines separate from the strummed acoustic instead of merging into one bright attack, and the mallet piano reads as a struck string rather than a click.
• 2009 mono remaster — The Beatles in Mono (9 September 2009, Apple/EMI) — the 23 March mono remastered, and the version to reach for first. Denser and more forward than any stereo of this song, with the tamboura filling the gaps between guitar and organ rather than sitting off to one side.
• 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 drums and bass and rebuilding the picture around them instead of splitting it. The phasing on the acoustic survives untouched, because it was printed into the tape during the reduction (see Studio Notes).

Sources

1. Mark Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions (New York: Harmony Books, 1988), 102, 104, 108, 200.
2. Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew, Recording the Beatles: The Studio Equipment and Techniques Used to Create Their Classic Albums (Houston: Curvebender Publishing, 2006), 455, 471.