Hey Jude

Story Section status: Outdated

Recording

This is the first Beatles master committed to eight-track tape, and it was not made at Abbey Road. Two nights in Studio Two on 29 and 30 July 1968 ran the song from take 1 to take 25 — a reduction of take 23 into takes 24 and 25, and a stereo remix off the end of it — and none of it was kept. The account of those nights is that they were more like rehearsals than sessions.¹ On 31 July the group moved to Trident Studios in St Anne’s Court, off Wardour Street, and started again from take 1.¹

The reason for the move was the tape machine. Trident had an eight-track Ampex and a claim to be the first working eight-track studio in London; Abbey Road’s own 3M machines were still being inspected and modified by Ken Townsend and had output cards and a varispeed facility to be fitted before they could be used.² The very first eight-track Beatles recordings at EMI did not happen until 3 September, five weeks after this one.¹ So for a month the group had a choice between four tracks at home and eight tracks in Soho, and for this song they took the eight.

What the extra tracks bought is audible in the second half. The basic rhythm track went down on 31 July in four takes with overdubs onto take 1 the same night; the following evening brought more overdubs and then, from 8.00 until 11.00pm, an orchestra.¹ Thirty-six instruments were recorded for the long refrain, and the players were then asked whether they would mind contributing handclaps and backing vocals — the “nah, nah nah” that runs to the fade — which meant a doubled fee.¹

The mixing is where the record nearly came apart. Trident mixed it, at Trident, on 2 and 6 August; the mono that resulted was made, unusually, from the best available stereo mix rather than from the eight-track tape.¹ Played back at Abbey Road the tapes had almost no top on them at all, and the released mono was rebuilt in Studio Two on 7 and 8 August with an EMI valve tone-control unit doing the repair.¹,² The single went out on 30 August 1968 as Apple R 5722, and the finished record carries an undeleted expletive at 2′59″.¹

Equipment

Recording Timeline

• 29 July 1968 — Studio Two, Abbey Road, 8.30pm–4.00am — the first attempt, takes 1 to 6, with Ken Scott engineering and John Smith as second engineer; no producer is credited on the session sheet. The night is described as closer to rehearsal than to recording, and nothing from it reached the record. The drum sound on these early takes is a single AKG D19c used as an overhead — the sparse set-up Norman Smith had settled on years earlier, a D19c over the kit with a D20 on the kick and sometimes an extra KM56 under the snare.¹,²
• 30 July 1968 — Studio Two, 7.30pm–3.30am — the second attempt, takes 7 to 23, then a tape reduction of take 23 into takes 24 and 25, and a stereo remix made from take 25 before the night ended. George Martin produced, Ken Scott engineered, John Smith assisted. Two full nights and twenty-five takes had now gone by, on four-track, with a remix already cut — and the next session started the numbering again from one, in a different building.¹
• 31 July 1968 — Trident Studios, 2.00pm–4.00am — the re-make: takes 1 to 4, then overdubs onto take 1, which became the master. George Martin produced and Barry Sheffield engineered; the second engineer is not recorded. Take 1 of this session is the take every subsequent mix descends from. The house piano was Trident’s 1898 Bechstein grand, whose tendency to distort when driven hard is the character heard on the finished record.¹,²
• 1 August 1968 — Trident, 5.00pm–3.00am — further overdubs onto take 1, and then from 8.00 until 11.00pm the orchestra. Thirty-six instruments were recorded: ten violins, three violas, three cellos, two flutes, one contra bassoon, one bassoon, two clarinets, one contra bass clarinet, four trumpets, four trombones, two horns, one “percussion” and two string basses. Most of the players are unidentified; Bobby Kok was one of the three cellists and Bill Jackman was among them.¹
• 1 August 1968 — the players sing — with the orchestral parts down, the musicians were asked whether they would mind contributing handclaps and backing vocals to the run-out, the repeated “nah, nah nah” that carries the record to the fade. Agreeing meant a doubled fee. One of them remembered the coda simply as “We just played the refrain over and over” — “the repeated riff which plays in the long fade”.¹
• 2 August 1968 — Trident, 2.00pm–1.30am — stereo mixing. Three stereo remixes of the completed song were made from take 1, the third marked ‘best’. George Martin produced; Barry Sheffield engineered. This is the mixing stage at which the monitoring difference between the two studios did its damage, because the room the mix sounded right in was not the room it would be cut in.¹
• 6 August 1968 — Trident, 5.30–7.30pm — the first mono remix, made, unusually, from the best available stereo mix rather than from the original eight-track tape. That is one generation down before the mono has even been struck, and it is the mix that was later described as sitting two generations removed from the multi-tracks.¹,²
• 7–8 August 1968 — Studio Two, back on the eight-track — the mono was remade at Abbey Road, the 8 August session (6.40pm–6.30am) producing mono remixes 2 to 4 from take 1 — from the multitrack this time, not from a stereo fold. George Martin produced, Ken Scott engineered, John Smith assisted. The high end that the Trident tapes had arrived without was restored in the same pass.¹,²
• 30 August 1968 — released — coupled with ‘Revolution’ as Apple R 5722, the first single on the group’s own label and, at 7′11″, certainly their longest.¹

Studio Notes

• Why the session left Abbey Road at all. Trident had been running eight-track for some time and could claim to be the first working eight-track studio in London, while EMI’s own 3M machines were still in the hands of Ken Townsend, who was inspecting and analysing them before they went into service; output cards had to be installed and a varispeed facility added before the machines could do the job they had been bought for. The very first eight-track Beatles recordings at Abbey Road are dated 3 September 1968, five weeks after this record was finished. The move was not a search for a different room; it was a search for four more tracks.¹,²
• The console was not the desk Trident is remembered for. In the summer of 1968 the control room carried a custom-made 20-input, eight-output Sound Techniques board, designed by Geoff Frost and fitted with the Painton quadrant faders EMI also used. That desk was moved upstairs in January 1969 and a larger 20-input, 16-output Sound Techniques board took its place; the famous Trident consoles of the 1970s came later still. Anything written about this recording that puts a sixteen-output board in the room has the chronology a year early.²
• The monitoring trap, which is the real story of the mix. The Trident control room ran two Lockwood cabinets with Tannoy “Red” drivers, and on them the mix sounded phenomenal. Played back at Abbey Road the following day the same tape had absolutely no high end on it whatsoever. The gap between the two monitoring systems had flattered a mix that was in fact dull, and the discovery came late enough that acetates were already being cut.²
• The Curve Bender did the repair. EMI’s UTC valve tone-control unit — known in the building as the Curve Bender, and designed for disc cutting rather than for this — was used to salvage the muddy mixes of a record that had been recorded externally at Trident. It is the unit’s best-known appearance anywhere in the catalogue, and it is the reason the released mono has top on it at all.²
• Tape equalisation was a second, separate mismatch. Trident’s American machines used the NAB equalisation standard; Abbey Road used the European CCIR. A tape cut to one standard and replayed on a machine aligned to the other does not sound like itself, and because a “banded” master had eventually to conform throughout, Trident-originated tapes had to be handled for the difference at EMI. The monitoring gap and the equalisation gap are separate faults that happened to point the same way — both made the tape sound brighter where it was made than where it was finished.²
• Machine speed was a third. Trident’s machines could play back significantly faster than their EMI counterparts, and a “Mains varispeed” unit was built to control the problem. Speed, equalisation and monitoring are three independent ways for a tape to arrive somewhere else sounding wrong, and this record ran into all three inside a fortnight.²
• The mono took the long way round. The 6 August Trident mono was folded from the best of the three stereo remixes rather than struck from the eight-track, which puts it two generations away from the multitrack before it reaches a cutting lathe. The 8 August Abbey Road mono remixes 2 to 4 went back to take 1 and did it the conventional way. Which of the two the buyer ended up with is not a detail: it is the difference between a copy of a copy and a mix off the master.¹,²
• Vocals at Trident used a microphone Abbey Road was slower to adopt. The Neumann U67 was among the mics used to record the group’s vocals at Trident — a house choice rather than an EMI one, and part of why the vocal sound on this record sits slightly apart from the Abbey Road sessions on either side of it.²
• Thirty-six instruments, not thirty-six players. The session sheet counts instruments, and the distinction matters because doubling was normal — the scoring itself is set out in the Recording Timeline. What the sheet does not give is the personnel: the musicians’ names are no longer known, with two exceptions — Bobby Kok, one of the three cellists, and Bill Jackman.¹
• The independent-studio moment. Such independent studios were setting up all over London at this point, and this session is the group using one for the first time on a record that mattered. Trident’s piano, its eight-track machine and its house engineer all leave marks on the finished single, and the Beatles went back to the building repeatedly over the following year.¹,²
• The expletive at 2′59″. An undeleted expletive survives at that point in the finished record. Geoff Emerick’s memoir identifies the off-mic curse as Paul’s and records that it was deliberately left in place, buried just low enough so that it can barely be heard. The memoir is first-hand recollection rather than documentation and is treated here as such; the presence of the expletive itself is on the session record.¹,³

Releases

Every released version descends from take 1 of the 31 July Trident session. What separates them is which mix was struck, and from what.

• 1968 UK mono single — ‘Hey Jude’ / ‘Revolution’ (30 August 1968, Apple [Parlophone] R 5722, A-side) — the reference version, and the one with top on it. Full-length at 7′11″, running about five seconds longer than any stereo appearance. The orchestra and massed vocals in the coda sit centred and dense rather than spread, and the off-mic curse just before three minutes is audible if you know where it is.
• 1968 US mono single (Apple 2276) — the same mono as the UK pressing, not a stereo issue. American buyers in 1968 heard the identical centred mix; the stereo that later became the familiar version did not exist yet.
• 1968 US mono flexi-disc (Apple/Americom M-221) — a heavily edited mono running just 3:25, cut down to fit the format. The coda is gutted; as a listening experience it is a different song, and it is the shortest official appearance of the recording.
• 1970 US stereo LP — Hey Jude (Apple SW-385) — the first outing for the stereo mix, made on 5 December 1969, more than a year after the single. The drums are noticeably louder than in mono and the coda opens out across the image. This, not the 1968 single, is the ancestor of nearly every stereo copy since.
• 1973 UK stereo LP — The Beatles 1967–1970 (Apple PCS-P718) — the same 1969 stereo, and the pressing through which most listeners met it. Some compilations in this lineage fade the coda early, so a stereo copy is not automatically full-length.
• 1982 US stereo LP — 20 Greatest Hits (Capitol SV-11245) — an edit labelled on the sleeve as the “Short Version”, running 5:05. Two minutes of the refrain are gone; the fade arrives while the record is still at full strength.
• 1988 CD — Past Masters, Volume Two (EMI CDP 7 90044 2) — the 1969 stereo on compact disc, and the first time the full-length stereo was widely available digitally.
• 2006 stereo remix — Love (Apple 79808-2) — a distinct 2006 mix made for the stage production, not a remaster of the 1969 tape. Elements are rebalanced and recombined against other recordings, so it is a listening object in its own right rather than a cleaner version of the single.
• 2015 stereo remix, carried forward to 1967–1970 (2023 Edition) — a fresh stereo mix from the eight-track tape, with the orchestra and backing vocals sitting in a wider and more separated field than the 1969 mix allows. The official 2023 tracklist shows this song carried by the 2015 stereo mix alongside a 2023 Dolby Atmos mix; it did not receive a new 2023 stereo remix, unlike most of the songs around it on that release.
• 1996 CD — Anthology 3 (Apple CDP 8 34451 2) — take 2 from the abandoned 29 July Abbey Road session, in stereo. This is the four-track version the group walked away from, and hearing it is the clearest way to understand why they started again at Trident.