Good Day Sunshine

Story Section status: Outdated

Recording

Equipment Section status: Outdated

Recording Timeline

• 8 June 1966 (Wed) — rhythm track and lead vocal, Studio Two — EMI Studios, Studio Two, 2.30pm–2.30am. P: George Martin. E: Geoff Emerick. 2E: Richard Lush. Recording: ‘A Good Day's Sunshine' (takes 1–3). The evening opened in the Studio Two control room only, 1.00–2.00pm, editing And Your Bird Can Sing mono remixes 9 and 10; the band then moved into the room. A long taped rehearsal preceded any numbered take, and only three were needed — bass guitar, piano and drums. Take one was marked best and the tape spooled back for Paul's lead vocal with John and George backing. The session ran to 2.30 in the morning for what is, on paper, a two-minute song.¹
• 9 June 1966 (Thu) — overdubs, drop-ins and six mono remixes, Studio Two — EMI Studios, Studio Two, 2.30–8.00pm. P: George Martin. E: Geoff Emerick. 2E: Phil McDonald. Recording: SI onto take 1. Mono mixing: remixes 1–6 (from take 1). A five-and-a-half-hour day, against the previous night’s twelve. Ringo's additional drums and cymbals went on first, then the varispeed honky-tonk piano solo for the middle eight, then handclaps from all four, then the closing harmonies from John, Paul and George dropped in over the existing vocal track. Six remixes followed before home-time — the first of the end vocal overdub only, the remaining five of the whole song — and the sixth was called best. None of them was released.¹
• 22 June 1966 (Wed) — the mixes that shipped, Studio Three control room — EMI Studios, Studio Three (control room only), 7.00pm–1.30am. P: George Martin. E: Geoff Emerick. 2E: Jerry Boys. Mono mixing: remix 7 (from take 1). Stereo mixing: remix 1 (from take 1). A six-and-a-half-hour mixing marathon that also finalised Eleanor Rigby, She Said She Said, Yellow Submarine, Tomorrow Never Knows and Got to Get You into My Life for the LP. The mono made here is the released master, logged under the wrong number; the stereo made here is the only stereo the song has ever had from 1966 tape.¹
• 5 August 1966 (Fri) — LP release — Revolver, Parlophone PMC 7009 (mono) / PCS 7009 (stereo), with the song opening side B. Seven weeks separate the last note played and the record in the shops, and in that gap the mono the band signed off on 9 June was quietly replaced.¹

Studio Notes

• Which piano, and a discrepancy the sources do not close — Abbey Road held three Steinways, one per studio: a “B” grand in Studio Two, a second “B” grand in Studio Three, and a “D” concert grand in Studio One. The Studio Three instrument “is almost certainly the instrument used on” Lady Madonna, Hey Bulldog and this song — a hedge worth keeping, because the session sheets put every piano date for this song in Studio Two. Either the Studio Three piano was moved for the date, or the attribution is one room out; neither source says which, and the safe reading is that the identification is probable rather than settled.^1,2
• What 56 cycles per second actually does to a piano — Mains-locked tape speed in Britain was “the standard 50 cycles per second”, and the solo was cut with the machine driven above that. Recording fast and playing back at standard speed lowers the pitch and slows the attack of everything captured, so a piano played straight at 56 comes back flat, slack and a little further from concert tuning than it started — the barrelhouse sound the middle eight is remembered for is a machine artefact, not a prepared instrument or a different piano.^1,2
• 1966 is the year the speed control became an instrument — The varispeed table collects the year's uses in one place, and the pattern is that no single part of a record was exempt: a rhythm track on I'm Only Sleeping, a lead vocal on Here, There and Everywhere, a lead vocal on Rain, and here a solo on a keyboard the band did not even play. What had been a corrective — nudging a take into tune — had become a way of writing a part that could not otherwise be performed.²
• One of only four Revolver tracks with real echo on it — Geoff Emerick made “very little use of the studio's echo chambers” across the album, and this is one of four songs that got an appreciable amount — with Here, There and Everywhere, Yellow Submarine and For No One. On a record whose reputation rests on effects, the chambers were the effect that was mostly switched off, which makes their presence here a deliberate choice about this song rather than a house sound applied to the album.²
• The bass stayed dry, and the reason was Paul — Chamber on the bass was tried and kept coming off: “Paul always detected it and hated it, so nine times out of ten I ended up taking it off.” The practical consequence is audible on a record built from the bottom up — the low end sits forward and unblurred while the voices and the piano carry whatever room sound the mix has, and the separation between the two is the mix's main depth cue.²
• The stereo is the conservative kind — This mix follows “the standard music-Left-and-Right/vocals-Centre approach that Norman Smith had been so fond of” before Rubber Soul — the same treatment given to Paperback Writer, Taxman, She Said She Said, For No One and Got to Get You into My Life. Five of the album's fourteen songs and the single that preceded it, mixed to a formula inherited from the previous balance engineer, on the record that is otherwise the argument for abandoning formulas. Later in the same sequence of mixes the room began “to pull the music toward the Centre and leave the vocals” out at the sides — the reverse arrangement — but this song was mixed before that turn and keeps the older picture.²
• Why no one has ever remixed the 1966 stereo from the original tape — When the catalogue reached CD in 1987, George Martin had felt it necessary to remix the earlier albums, but “decided that the stereo mixes carried out in 1966 were quite fine and didn't warrant remixing”. That judgement is why the 1966 stereo remix 1 travelled unchanged through the 1987 CD and the 2009 remaster, and why the 2022 edition is the first release to put a genuinely different stereo of this song in front of a listener.²
• The drop-in as a four-track economy — Four tracks were full by the end of 9 June, so the closing harmonies could not have their own. Dropping in — unmuting the record head mid-pass, over material already committed — adds a part without costing a track, and it is irreversible: what was underneath at that point is gone. The audible seam nine seconds from the end is the price of the last overdub on a tape that had no room left for it.¹
• The room, as it stood in June 1966 — The year's standing setup had Geoff Emerick as primary balance engineer working to a Studer J-37 four-track, with mixdown to EMI BTR2 for mono and BTR3 for stereo. The drum kit was taken with an AKG D19c overhead, a Neumann KM-56 under the snare and an AKG D.20 on the bass drum; bass took a D20 as well; vocals and electric guitar took Neumann U47s and U48s. Outboard was a Fairchild 660 limiter and an RS127 presence box. The bass, piano and drums of 8 June went to tape through exactly that chain.²
• Three tape ops, three sessions, one roster — Richard Lush sat second engineer on 8 June, Phil McDonald on 9 June and Jerry Boys on 22 June. All three are named on the 1966 tape-op roster, and the rotation is the point: the producer and the balance engineer stayed fixed across the song's three dates while the third chair changed every time, which is how the studio ran a staff rather than a team.^1,2

Releases

• 1966 UK mono LP — Revolver (5 August 1966, Parlophone PMC 7009, side B track 1) — The mix the band and the producer attended to. Everything is summed to one place, so the handclaps, the closing harmonies and the varispeed piano sit in a single dense column with the drums, and the balance between them is the only spatial information there is. This is the 22 June mono, not the one finished on 9 June.
• 1966 UK stereo LP — Revolver (5 August 1966, Parlophone PCS 7009, side B track 1) — Voices in the centre, instruments split hard to the two sides. The effect is that the piano and drums pull away from each other and the vocal stack sits in a gap between them, which is a very different listen from the mono and noticeably wider than the album's more adventurous stereo mixes. The drop-in near the close is easier to catch here.
• 1966 US Capitol LP — Revolver (Capitol T-2576 mono / ST-2576 stereo, side B track 1) — The same two 1966 mixes, pressed in the United States. No Capitol-specific remix is documented for this song, so what differs is the cutting rather than the mix.
• 1987 CD — Revolver (EMI CDP 7 46441 2) — Carries the 1966 stereo unaltered. Where the earlier albums were remixed for their CD debut, this one was not, so the 1987 disc is the first digital issue of exactly what was cut in Studio Three on 22 June.
• 2009 CD remaster — Revolver (Parlophone 99458 2) — A remaster, not a remix: the transfer and the levels are new, the mix decisions are the 1966 ones. The mono companion issued in the same programme carries the 1966 mono master.
• 2022 remix — Revolver Special Edition (28 October 2022, Apple) — The first genuinely new mix of the song. Giles Martin and Sam Okell worked from the original four-track tape, separated by the de-mixing technology developed at Peter Jackson's WingNut Films, which allows the piano, bass and drums of that single 8 June take to be placed independently for the first time; a Dolby Atmos mix accompanies it. The edition also restores the 1966 mono from its own master tape. No outtake of this song was issued on the sessions discs.