I Want to Hold Your Hand

(Lennon/McCartney)

Quick Facts

Composer	John & Paul
Lead Vocal	John & Paul
Recorded	Oct 1963
Length	2:24
Key	G
Noted Takes	17
Producer	George Martin
Engineer	Norman Smith

Originally released on

I Want to Hold Your Hand (single)

Parlophone — R 5084

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"I Want to Hold Your Hand" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written by John and Paul. Recorded on 17 October 1963 and released on 29 November 1963 in the United Kingdom, it was the first Beatles record to be made using four-track recording equipment.

Paul and John wrote it in the basement of Jane Asher's parents' house in late September 1963. Their brief from Brian Epstein was explicit: 'Write a song to crack America.' Capitol Records had refused to release the previous two UK No.1 singles in the US; this was the song that finally changed their mind. An original Lennon-McCartney composition recorded 17 October 1963, 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' became the Beatles' first major American chart hit and their most commercially successful single to date. The song's direct fan-address strategy placed it squarely within the Lennon-McCartney template of personal, intimate messages to listeners. The track's meticulously crafted production and infectious melodies established the single as a landmark of 1960s pop (Lewisohn 1988, p.32). The ambitious introduction features guitar chords as a springboard that propels the listener into the verse; released one week after With the Beatles, the song achieved remarkable commercial success, selling 1.5 million copies in six weeks (Kozinn 1995, p.73-74).

Cut on 17 October 1963 — the band's first session on the four-track machine that EMI had just installed. Seventeen takes. Hand-claps were overdubbed to fill the stereo image; the song was the band's first to be properly stereo-mixed. The track was recorded efficiently from take 2, suggesting the group's complete preparation and arrangement clarity before entering the studio. Two-track recording required precise coordination of all instrumentation and vocals performed simultaneously. George Martin's arrangement, with its distinctive guitar riff and clear harmonic support, created maximum radio impact within the technical constraints of early 1960s recording (Lewisohn 1988, p.32). The use of four-track recording provided George Martin and Norman Smith greater control over instrumental balance compared to two-track limitations; both felt the song might exceed She Loves You in commercial potential (Emerick 2006, p.202).

It'll still go straight to number one, you mark my words.- George Martin, Emerick 2006, p.205

…and sing 'The Twelfth Of Never' and she said "He loves me" because he sang it right at her off the telly. We were aware that that happened when you sang to an audience. So 'From Me To You', 'Please Please Me', 'She Loves You'. Personal pronouns. We always used to do that. 'I Want To Hold Your Hand'. It was always some…— Mark Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, p.9

What’s distinctive

The first Beatles record made on four-track. Seventeen takes on 17 October 1963 turned a song the group had already perfected into the single that broke them in America, with John and Paul sharing the lead and George’s answering guitar licks as the hook. Three months later a copy of the same backing travelled to Paris as hand luggage and came back with a German vocal on it.^1,3

Recording

Four tracks, at last. Abbey Road had owned two Telefunken four-track machines, a T9U and an M10, since 1959, but at first “they were used primarily for opera recordings”, and on the pop sessions of the day they “seemed unnecessary”. “It was accepted by EMI that pop music was mono,” says George Martin. With a successful first album and the massive She Loves You in their favour, the Beatles “were finally granted use of the Telefunken four-tracks”, and the session of Thursday 17 October 1963 in Studio Two “marked the dawn of a new era for the Beatles at Abbey Road: four-track recording, ushering in entirely new processes”. Only two of their 1963 recordings were made that way: this song and its B-side, This Boy.^1,2
A song perfected before the tape rolled. The session tapes show that “the Beatles had the song perfected before the session, the first take sounding not unlike the last”. Two early ideas came and went. On take two the group tried hushing the vocal on the line “And when I touch you”, and on take four Paul brought in “the not uncommon 1963 Beatle ‘h’” (“shay that shomthing”). Geoff Emerick, second engineer that day, heard the same thing from the first run-through: the song “had ‘hit’ written all over it, and there was little George Martin could do to improve it.” Seventeen takes were recorded, and take 17 is the master.^1,3
Built in layers. Four tracks changed the order of work. Instead of catching the whole performance at once, the group could lay down a backing and add to it: “After the backing track was done, John and Paul did their usual fine job overdubbing the vocals.” Norman Smith’s usual layout put drums and bass on one track, John’s and George’s guitars on a second and the vocals on a third, with the fourth kept as “the ‘catch-all’ track for whatever sweetening George Martin wanted to add”. On this song the sweetening was handclaps: George Martin “wanted the double-time handclaps to occur in each verse”, and all four Beatles gathered round a single microphone to add them.³
The record that opened America. At home the single “sold one million copies on British advance orders alone”, and within a week of its 29 November release it had replaced its predecessor at the top. Its larger effect was across the Atlantic. The song “broke the group into the US market”, and by the time the Beatles flew to the USA, two days after returning from France, it “had smashed its way to number one within three weeks of release”. The same backing had one more job to do first: a German vocal for EMI’s West German branch, Odeon, recorded in Paris (see Studio Notes).¹

Equipment

Studio	EMI Studios, Abbey Road: Studio Two (recording, 17 Oct 1963; German mono mixing, 10 Mar 1964); Studio One, control room only (mixing 21 Oct 1963, 8 Jun 1965 and 7 Nov 1966; tape copy 24 Jan 1964); Studio Three, control room only (German stereo mixing, 12 Mar 1964); EMI Pathé Marconi Studios, 62 Rue de Sèvres, Boulogne-sur-Seine, Paris (German vocal, 29 Jan 1964)¹
Tape machines	Telefunken four-track, in a remote machine room; Abbey Road’s pair were a T9U and an M10, and which one ran this session is not recorded. BTR machines were still in use in 1963^2,3
Console	REDD.37, still in place in the control room through 1963²
Microphones	Norman Smith’s 1963 set-up: drums on an STC 4038 overhead and an STC 4033-A on the bass drum; bass amp on the 4033-A; guitar amps on a Neumann U47 or U48 each; vocals on Neumann U47 and U48, the U48 used more in 1963²
Outboard / effects	RS124 Altec compressors and RS114 EMI limiters; the vocals were recorded through the RS114²
Guitars / amps	John’s and George’s Vox AC30 amplifiers; guitar models not recorded. Handclaps by all four Beatles at one microphone^2,3

Recording Timeline

17 October 1963 (Thursday) — recording, takes 1–17, Studio Two, 2.30–5.30pm and 7.00–10.00pm. P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Geoff Emerick. The first Beatles session on four-track. The day also took in one more take of You Really Got A Hold On Me, tried “on four-track, but then gave up”, the speech for the first of the group’s seven Christmas flexi-discs for the fan club, and This Boy, also in seventeen takes. Take 17 of I Want to Hold Your Hand is the master.¹
21 October 1963 (Monday) — mono and stereo mixing, Studio One (control room only), 10.00am–1.00pm. P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. A mono mix from take 17 and a stereo remix 1 from take 17, with the mono remixes and edit of This Boy between them: “Mono mixing for the single, stereo for unforeseen future use.” The stereo is the first ever made by George Martin from a four-track tape.^1,4
29 November 1963 (Friday) — UK single release. Parlophone R 5084, I Want to Hold Your Hand / This Boy, issued a week after With the Beatles. The single “crashed into the charts while ‘She Loves You’ was enjoying its second spell at number one”, and within a week the Beatles held numbers one and two on the singles chart.¹
20 January 1964 (Monday) — US LP release. Meet The Beatles!, Capitol T-2047 (mono) and ST-2047 (stereo), with I Want to Hold Your Hand opening side A.¹
24 January 1964 (Friday) — tape copying, Studio One (control room only), 10.00–10.45am. E: Norman Smith. 2E: A.B. Lincoln/Geoff Emerick. “A tape-to-tape copy of the ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ basic rhythm track, take 17 from 17 October 1963; hand-luggage for George Martin and Norman Smith, soon to be leaving for Paris and the Beatles’ first EMI recording session outside of Abbey Road.” Norman Smith took it to Paris “with the intention of replacing the English vocal track with the Beatles’ new German vocals”.^1,2
29 January 1964 (Wednesday) — recording, EMI Pathé Marconi Studios, Paris, late morning and afternoon. P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Jacques Esmenjaud. Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand, takes 1–11: German vocals added to “the English rhythm track of ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, mixed down from four-track to two-track”. “The ‘best’ versions were takes 5 and 7, with overdubbed handclaps, later edited together.” The same session went on to Sie Liebt Dich and the first takes of Can’t Buy Me Love.^1,2
10 March 1964 (Tuesday) — mono mixing, Studio Two, 10.00am–1.00pm. P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. A mono mix of Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand from the edit of takes 5 and 7, in a morning that also produced the experimental stereo mixes of Can’t Buy Me Love and three other songs.¹
12 March 1964 (Thursday) — stereo mixing, Studio Three (control room only), 10.00am–12.00 noon. P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. “Stereo remixes of the two German-language songs, equalised and compressed with added echo. Copy tapes were despatched to West Germany, and even to the USA, for record release.”¹
8 June 1965 (Tuesday) — stereo mixing, Studio One (control room only), 10.00–10.30am. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Ron Pender. “A curious exercise.” Norman Smith returned to the song to make a stereo remix 2 from take 17, “with the vocals placed in the centre of the stereo ‘picture’”, for reasons nobody recorded.^1,2
7 November 1966 (Monday) — stereo mixing, Studio One (control room only), 2.30–5.30pm. P: George Martin. E: Geoff Emerick. 2E: Mike Stone. “The third stereo remix of ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, incorrectly numbered as one”, made from take 17 for the compilation A Collection of Beatles Oldies. “Clearly neither of the two previous attempts — 21 October 1963 and 8 June 1965 — had been satisfactory.” George Martin had booked the afternoon for three songs; She Loves You was left to the next day.¹
9 December 1966 (Friday) — UK LP release. A Collection of Beatles Oldies, Parlophone PMC 7016 (mono) and PCS 7016 (stereo), the album that gave the single its first British stereo release.^1,4

With four-track one could do a basic rhythm track and then add on vocals and whatever else later. It made the studios into much more of a workshop.— Ken Townsend¹

Studio Notes

Banished to the machine room. The Telefunkens came with a working cost. They “were huge, unwieldy machines, requiring remote machine rooms which made communication with Tape Ops slow and clumsy”. Geoff Emerick found out what that meant on arrival, when Norman Smith told him the session was to be four-track: “That meant I would be banished to a windowless machine room, where I could no longer view the events unfolding in the studio below.” There were two such rooms, each “little more than a poorly ventilated broom closet”, and “There was no visual communication of any kind between the machine rooms and the control rooms and studios”; the tape operator worked by intercom. From that day, Emerick says, “the Beatles always recorded in multitrack”.^2,3
What the extra tracks bought, and what they cost. Abbey Road’s two Telefunkens “were responsible for recording some of the Beatles’ best-known work during the first wave of Beatlemania”, and nearly all of it, from this song through Help!, went onto them. The gain was control. Working in four-track instead of two-track “gave Norman a great deal more control over the balance of the instruments”, because the vocals and the handclaps now sat on tracks of their own. The price was time and money: the studio charged more for four-track, the tape cost more, and “four-track was less efficient, as it obviously required remix time”. That remix time is the other half of this song’s story. A mono and a stereo were made in one morning four days after the session, and two more stereo mixes followed over the next three years (see Recording Timeline), each one a new decision about where the four tracks should sit.^2,3
The vocal: attack, and the “sh”. What set the record apart for Emerick was “the attack on the vocal. Other records of the era weren’t like that—they were syrupy by contrast.” It was not an easy vocal to get: John “flubbed the lyrics repeatedly”. The “h” that Paul slipped into the words on take four was a habit with a purpose. Changing an “s” to an “sh” “was an affectation you heard on some American records”, it “helped make the Beatles sound more like their musical idols”, and it “removed any kind of potential ‘de-essing’ problems”, the sibilance that distorts on vinyl; the group used it “most notably on ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’”. The vocals went through the RS114, the valve limiter EMI designed for itself, and the vocals on this and “the other great early Beatles records were all recorded with the RS114”.^1,2,3
The hook is George’s. For Emerick, “those little answering guitar licks” that George “played in each verse provided the song’s definitive hook”, and he thought Norman Smith agreed. Allan Kozinn’s reading of the song places it beside its predecessor: it “reprises the celebratory sound of ‘She Loves You’, but is more conventionally structured”. Where She Loves You had opened on a tom-tom roll tumbling straight into the chorus, here “the introduction is more ambitious: guitar chords become a springboard, catapulting the listener into the verse.” It is a joint song in the strict sense, “a Lennon-McCartney collaboration”, sung by both its writers.^3,5
One backing, two languages. The German version needed a way to change the words without touching the band. Replacing the English vocal on the four-track “would either have to be done in long uninterrupted passes, or else require significant ‘punching in’; neither of these options proved practical”. The solution was to play the instrumental backing from the four-track and copy it to one track of a two-track machine “while the group simultaneously superimposed vocals onto the other track”. The German words were hard to perform, and of eleven takes not all were complete. The two accounts differ on the order of the last steps: Lewisohn has the handclaps overdubbed on takes 5 and 7 before they were edited together, while Kehew and Ryan have the edited takes “bounced once more to another two-track while handclaps were superimposed”. Either way, the released German track joins “two takes of the German vocal and handclap track” over a backing several copies away from the 17 October tape. Norman Smith did not enjoy the trip: “I found the studio very odd to work in, the equipment was alien to anything we were used to.”^1,2,4
The tape that was still there. The German version was possible only because the four-track master had been kept. Its session-mate had no such luck: for Sie Liebt Dich “the Beatles recorded a new rhythm track, the 1 July 1963 two-track tape having been scrapped once the mono master was prepared”. The second primary account puts it less firmly, as a master tape that “had either been misplaced or destroyed”, but the result is the same: She Loves You had to be played again from the start in Paris, while this song needed only a new vocal on a copy of the original. In Paris Sie Liebt Dich “was done in 13 takes, onto which they overdubbed, in one take, the vocals in the rhythm left/vocals right pattern of their earlier two-track tapes”, a two-track way of working that this song had already left behind.^1,2
Three stereo mixes, three pictures. Each stereo places the four tracks differently. The 1963 mix “has the rhythm instruments far left and vocal far right, like a twin track mix, leaving the lead guitar isolated in the center, which sounds odd since it only plays fills.” The 1965 mix puts the vocals in the centre, with “the lead guitar louder and the handclaps slightly louder, and somewhat more bass sound”; on the last “ha-a-a-and” the louder guitar covers the vocal. The more common 1966 mix “has slightly less bass but the cymbal sound is better”, two differences that “may be pressing or LP mastering, rather than the mix”, “but the handclap and particularly the lead guitar are mix differences”. One point is in conflict: Lewisohn says of the 1965 mix that “It was never used”, while Brennan finds it on German and Australian compilations (see Releases). Brennan names the records; the session log does not follow the tape once it leaves Abbey Road.^1,4

Releases

One mono made the single in Britain and America; three different stereo mixes followed over three years, and the one that became standard was the last.

1963 UK single — I Want to Hold Your Hand / This Boy (29 November 1963, Parlophone R 5084) — the 21 October mono, the mix the song was made for, with the handclaps driving each verse. The same mono is on the American single (Capitol 5112), the mono Meet The Beatles! (Capitol T-2047) and the 1989 CD single.
1964 US stereo LP — Meet The Beatles! (20 January 1964, Capitol ST-2047, side A track 1) — not a stereo mix: Capitol made a mock stereo from the mono. A second Capitol mock stereo, made in 1973, is on the American The Beatles 1962–1966 (Apple SKBO-3403).
1964 German version — Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand (1964, Odeon O 22 671 single; US Something New, 20 July 1964, Capitol T 2108 / ST 2108) — a German vocal and handclaps over a copy of the English backing, two takes joined. The 10 March mono is on the single and Mono Masters (2009, EMI 99463 2); the 12 March stereo, vocal on one side and instruments on the other, is on the stereo Something New, Rarities (UK 1978–79) and Past Masters (2009, Parlophone/Apple 46807 2).
1965 German LP — Beatles Greatest (1965, Odeon SMO 83 991) — the 8 June 1965 stereo: vocals centred, lead guitar and handclaps louder than in the later mix, a little more bass. Also on the later German The Beatles Beat and the Australian Greatest Hits 1 (1968).
1966 UK stereo LP — A Collection of Beatles Oldies (9 December 1966, Parlophone PCS 7016) — the 7 November 1966 stereo, the standard stereo ever since: better cymbals, a little less bass, and a lead guitar that covers the vocal less. It is on The Beatles 1962–1966 (UK 1973), 20 Greatest Hits (US 1982, Capitol SV-12245, the first true stereo in America) and Past Masters Volume One (1988, EMI CDP 7 90043 2).
1976–77 Australian single reissue — I Want to Hold Your Hand (Parlophone A-8103) — the 21 October 1963 stereo, its only release: rhythm far left, vocal far right, and the lead guitar alone in the middle playing its fills.

Sources

Mark Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions (New York: Harmony Books, 1988), 36–39, 42, 58, 86, 200–201.
Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew, Recording the Beatles: The Studio Equipment and Techniques Used to Create Their Classic Albums (Houston: Curvebender Publishing, 2006), 141–142, 221–222, 323–324, 353–354, 368, 383.
Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey, Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles (New York: Gotham Books, 2006), chs. 4–5.
Joseph Brennan, Usenet Guide to Beatles Recording Variations (rev. edn.), “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand”.
Allan Kozinn, The Beatles (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), 71.

Frequently asked

Who wrote I Want to Hold Your Hand?

John and Paul together, a genuine joint composition. Like all their shared catalogue it is credited Lennon/McCartney.⁵

Who sings lead on I Want to Hold Your Hand?

John and Paul, who overdubbed their vocals together onto the finished backing track.³

When and where was I Want to Hold Your Hand recorded?

On 17 October 1963, in Studio Two at EMI Studios, Abbey Road. It was the Beatles’ first four-track session.¹

How many takes did I Want to Hold Your Hand require?

Seventeen. The group had the song worked out before the session, and take 17 is the master.¹

Why is there a German version of I Want to Hold Your Hand?

EMI’s West German branch, Odeon, wanted it sung in German. On 29 January 1964, in Paris, the Beatles sang new German words over a copy of the English backing track, and the result was issued as Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand.^1,2

How many stereo mixes of I Want to Hold Your Hand are there?

Three: 21 October 1963, 8 June 1965 and 7 November 1966. The 1966 mix, made for A Collection of Beatles Oldies, is the standard stereo.^1,4

On this page

Story Section status: Outdated

What’s distinctive

Recording

Equipment

Recording Timeline

Studio Notes

Releases

Sources

Frequently asked