If I Needed Someone

“If I Needed Someone” is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written by George. It was released in December 1965 on their album Rubber Soul, except in North America, where it appeared on the June 1966 release Yesterday and Today. The song reflects the reciprocal influences shared between the Beatles and the American band the Byrds.

If I Needed Someone is a Harrison composition and one of his two contributions to Rubber Soul (alongside Think for Yourself). The song demonstrates Harrison’s increasing confidence as a songwriter by late 1965. Its basic rhythm track was recorded on the same evening session as the Day Tripper vocal overdubs on 16 October 1965, with vocal and instrumental overdubs completed two days later on 18 October.

• If I Needed Someone exists on tape as a single take. It was taped at EMI Studios, Abbey Road, in Studio Two on the evening of Saturday 16 October 1965, in a 7.00pm–12.00 midnight session that had opened with superimpositions onto take 3 of Day Tripper; the afternoon before it, from 2.30 to 7.00pm, had gone on Day Tripper’s own takes 1–3. George Martin produced, Norman Smith engineered and Ken Scott sat in the second engineer’s chair, and the same three worked every session this song touched.¹
• What went down that night was a rhythm track and nothing else. The overdubs waited until Monday 18 October, a 2.30–5.45pm session in the same room, and they were the day’s first priority — George’s lead vocal onto track three of the four-track tape, John and Paul’s backing vocal onto track four, and a tambourine from Ringo. The remainder of that afternoon went to In My Life, takes 1–3.¹
• Two tracks of a four-track tape carrying the whole vocal arrangement is the shape of the machine showing through the record. The Beatles worked 1965 on the Studer J-37, the four-track that took over from the older Telefunken machines and stayed with them for the rest of their EMI career, through the REDD.51 desk with the Fairchild and Altec outboard behind it; Norman Smith was by then running more compression on the vocals than he had the year before, which lifted the low-level leakage along with the voice.²
• Mixing was done in batches rather than song by song. The mono came first, on Monday 25 October, in a 10.00am–1.00pm control-room session that ran Drive My Car, In My Life, this song, Day Tripper, Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) and Nowhere Man in one sitting, with Ken Scott at the tape machine. The stereo followed the next morning, Tuesday 26 October, 10.00am–12.30pm, the same list in a slightly different order and Ron Pender on second engineer. Both mixes came from take 1, because take 1 was all there was.¹
• Neither of those two mornings was revisited for this song. Where several of their neighbours were mixed again — some within weeks, some a year later — the 25 and 26 October 1965 masters are the ones that went to the cutting room, and the stereo of them stood until a new mix was made for compact disc two decades on.^1,2

• Saturday 16 October 1965, Studio Two, 2.30–7.00pm. The afternoon belonged to another song entirely: three takes of the Day Tripper rhythm track, instrument-only, with no scratch vocal put down against them. That is worth holding onto as a measure, because it is the working rate of the same four musicians, in the same room, on the same day — three attempts at a backing track before anybody was satisfied.^1,2
• Saturday 16 October 1965, Studio Two, 7.00pm–12.00 midnight. After a break the session resumed with superimpositions onto Day Tripper’s take 3, and only then turned to the new song. The group had spent part of the afternoon rehearsing; with the evening running out, they cut one take of If I Needed Someone and stopped there, leaving everything vocal for another day. George Martin produced, Norman Smith engineered, Ken Scott was second engineer.¹
• Monday 18 October 1965, Studio Two, 2.30–5.45pm. The session sheet reads superimposition onto take 1, and the song took the head of the queue: George’s lead vocal went to track three of the four-track tape, John and Paul’s backing vocal to track four, and Ringo added a tambourine. With that the recording was finished, three hours and fifteen minutes of studio time after it started, and the rest of the afternoon went to the first three takes of In My Life.¹
• Monday 25 October 1965, Studio Two control room, 10.00am–1.00pm. Mono mixing, six songs in three hours: Drive My Car from take 4, In My Life from take 3, If I Needed Someone from take 1, Day Tripper from take 3, Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) from take 4 and Nowhere Man from take 4. Ken Scott was second engineer. Half an hour a song, mono, with the album due in the shops in six weeks.¹
• Tuesday 26 October 1965, Studio Two control room, 10.00am–12.30pm. The stereo pass over the same six songs, done faster than the mono — two and a half hours against three — with Ron Pender taking the second engineer’s chair. If I Needed Someone was again mixed from take 1. The order of attention in 1965 is legible in those two figures: mono was the record, stereo was the obligation.¹
• Wednesday 10 November 1965, Room 65, 2.30–5.30pm. A later stereo session in a different room remade mixes for Run For Your Life from take 5 and We Can Work It Out from take 2, with Jerry Boys as second engineer. If I Needed Someone is not on that list, nor on any list after 26 October; its pair of mixes was left alone.¹
• Friday 3 December 1965. Rubber Soul reached the shops, thirteen tracks after the mixing finished and seven weeks after this song was recorded. It closed the only year in which the group released two albums of wholly new material.¹

• One take is a fact about rehearsal, not about luck. The session sheet records a single take of the rhythm track and no second attempt, in an evening that had already produced superimpositions onto another song’s take 3, and in a day whose afternoon had taken three tries to land a different backing track. A group that cannot get a take does not get one at midnight; a group that has worked the arrangement out beforehand does. The afternoon is described as partly given over to rehearsal, and the evening’s single take is what that rehearsal bought.¹
• The four-track tape is why the overdub session looks the way it does. Two of the four tracks went to voices — lead on three, backing on four — which leaves the rhythm track occupying at most two, and it had to, because it was recorded before anybody knew exactly how much room the vocals would need. The tambourine had to find space inside that same afternoon. The 1965 machine is a Studer J-37, the four-track that displaced the older Telefunken decks and carried the rest of the group’s EMI career; a fifth idea would have cost a reduction mix and a generation of tape, and nobody spent one here.^1,2
• More compression on the voice, and what it brings with it. By 1965 Norman Smith was running more compression on vocals than he had the year before, and the documented consequence is that the low-level leakage came up with them — the spill of everything else in the room into the vocal microphone, ordinarily buried, raised toward audibility by the same gain that steadied the voice. On a song whose lead sits on one track and whose three-part backing sits on another, that trade is doing real work: the vocals hold a constant level across the phrase without riding, and the price is a faint sense of the studio arriving with them. It is a characteristic sound of the year rather than a decision taken for this title.²
• Batch mixing, and what it tells you about mono. The mono and stereo masters were not made for this song; they were made for six songs, back to back, in two consecutive mornings. Mono got three hours for the six, stereo got two and a half for the same six the following day. Neither figure allows much deliberation, but the ratio is the point, and it is the ratio the whole catalogue of the period shows: mono was the mix the record was judged on and stereo was the second pass.¹
• The mixes were never remade, and several of their neighbours were. Two weeks after the October mornings, a Room 65 session on 10 November 1965 produced fresh stereo for Run For Your Life and We Can Work It Out with Jerry Boys second-engineering. The two sides of the December single went further still: their stereo mixes were not created until a full year later, in 1966, and were made by Peter Bown in Room 65 on Studio Two’s retired REDD.37 console — neither Norman Smith nor his successor Geoff Emerick had a hand in them. If I Needed Someone appears in none of this. Its stereo master is the one made on the morning of 26 October 1965 and never touched again.^1,2
• The stereo that most listeners know is not the 1965 stereo. The 1965 mix distributes the tape the way 1965 mixes do — the vocals panned hard to one side, the backing to the other, very little held between them. Faced with that when the album was prepared for compact disc, George Martin chose to remix both Help! and Rubber Soul for their 1987 CD release, referring back to the original stereo LPs for guidance rather than treating the multitracks as a blank sheet. The result is a distinct stereo mix of this song, made twenty-two years after the recording, and it is the one the CD era has carried.²
• Norman Smith’s last album at the desk. Rubber Soul is the end of Smith’s run as the group’s balance engineer; in February 1966 he was promoted into EMI’s A&R department at Manchester Square, which led to his first work as a record producer, and Geoff Emerick took the chair for what followed. The affection was mutual and documented — they called him ‘Normal’ and, occasionally, ‘2dBs Smith’, and he left with a gold carriage clock inscribed to him by all four. This recording is among the last things he balanced for them.^1,2
• No outside players on the album at all. Whatever is audible on this record was played by the four of them. The Rubber Soul sessions did not call on any outside musicians, which sets the album apart from the year that followed it and makes the arrangement here — two guitars, bass, drums, tambourine and three voices — a complete account of who was in the room.²
• The twelve-string question, left open. The song’s signature is a chiming electric twelve-string figure, and a Rickenbacker 360 sits in the documented 1965 studio inventory alongside the 4001 bass, the Epiphone Casino, the Gibson ES-345, the Gretsch 6120 Nashville and the Stratocaster. George is photographed with his Rickenbacker twelve-string and a volume pedal at the February 1965 sessions earlier that year. What neither primary source records is which instrument was plugged in on the evening of 16 October 1965 — there is no session-sheet instrument list and no equipment note for this title — so the guitar is left as the inventory has it rather than stated as fact.²
• Where the song sits in the year. 1965 gave the group two albums of entirely new material, and Rubber Soul was the last time that happened. The record it closes was cut, overdubbed and mixed inside roughly seven weeks, and this song — one evening take, one afternoon of overdubs, two mornings of mixing — consumed something in the order of nine hours of studio time in all, counted from the first downbeat on the evening of 16 October to the finished stereo master on the morning of 26 October.¹

Three distinct mixes of this song have been issued: the 1965 mono, the 1965 stereo, and a new stereo remix made for the album’s compact-disc debut in 1987.

• 1965 UK mono LP — Rubber Soul (3 December 1965, Parlophone PMC 1267, side B track 6) — The mix the record was made for. Everything sits in one image: the twelve-string figure, the bass and the drums are locked to the voices rather than set opposite them, and the tambourine reads as part of the rhythm rather than as an overdub sitting apart from it.
• 1965 UK stereo LP — Rubber Soul (3 December 1965, Parlophone PCS 3075, side B track 6) — The period stereo, and audibly a 1965 one: the vocals are pushed hard to one side and the backing to the other, with very little held in the middle. The three-part harmony is easy to follow because it is isolated; the band sounds like a separate recording alongside it.
• 1966 US LP — Yesterday and Today (20 June 1966, Capitol T-2553 mono / ST-2553 stereo) — The song’s first North American home, and not the US Rubber Soul, which had left it off. Both mixes are the UK ones; what changes is the company the track keeps and the album it opens the side of.
• 1987 CD — Rubber Soul (EMI CDP 7 46440 2) — The extremes of the 1965 stereo are pulled in: the voices move off the wall and toward the centre, the guitars gain body, and the balance comes closer to the mono’s sense of one performance in one place. This is a new mix made in 1987 rather than a remaster of the old one, and it is the stereo the compact-disc era has carried.
• 2009 mono CD — Rubber Soul (Parlophone 99457 2) — The 1965 mono, remastered rather than remixed. The 25 October 1965 master is what plays; the remastering lifts the level and clears the top end without changing what is where.