Matchbox

Story Section status: Outdated

Recording

Equipment

Recording Timeline

• 1 June 1964 (Monday) — recording, Studio Two, 2.30–5.30pm. P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Ken Scott. Matchbox, takes 1–5, the first song of the day: five takes, three of them complete, with Ringo singing and drumming at the same time and Carl Perkins at Abbey Road to watch. The afternoon went on to I’ll Cry Instead, recorded in two sections (takes 1–6 and 7–8), and Slow Down (takes 1–6); the evening session, 7.00–10.00pm, recorded I’ll Be Back (takes 1–16). No superimposition onto Matchbox is logged, then or later.¹
• 4 June 1964 (Thursday) — mono mixing, Studio Two, 2.30–7.00pm. P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Richard Langham. The EP was put together in one afternoon: mono mixes of Long Tall Sally from take 1 and Matchbox from take 5, two remixes of I Call Your Name from takes 5 and 7 and an edit, and a piano superimposition onto take 6 of Slow Down before its mono mix. When I Get Home, Any Time At All and both sections of I’ll Cry Instead were mixed as well. This mono is the Matchbox on the EP. The day before, Ringo had been taken ill with tonsillitis and pharyngitis, “just 24 hours before the group was due to leave” on a five-country concert tour, and Jimmy Nicol, a 24-year-old session drummer, had been brought in as his temporary replacement.^1,3
• 19 June 1964 (Friday) — UK EP release. Long Tall Sally, Parlophone GEP 8913, in mono: Long Tall Sally and I Call Your Name on the A side, Slow Down and Matchbox on the B side, with Matchbox closing the record. It was the group’s fifth EP and the first to carry songs not otherwise issued. Two of its four songs had been recorded before the 1 June session and two at it, and all four were mixed for it on 4 June, so the whole EP reached the shops fifteen days after its last mix.^1,3
• 22 June 1964 (Monday) — stereo mixing and tape copying. P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Geoff Emerick. Studio One (control room only), 2.30–5.30pm: stereo mixing, Matchbox from take 5, in a run with Can’t Buy Me Love, You Can’t Do That, Tell Me Why, Things We Said Today, Slow Down, Long Tall Sally and I’ll Cry Instead. Then Studio Two (control room only), 5.45–9.00pm: tape copying, including Matchbox (copy of 4 June mono remix). “An exhaustive day’s remixing, predominantly for the A Hard Day’s Night LP. The Beatles themselves could not have been further away from the action – they were in Wellington, New Zealand, at the time.” This stereo is the one on every stereo issue of the song.^1,3
• 20 July 1964 (Monday) — US LP release. Something New, Capitol T-2108 in mono and ST-2108 in stereo, with Matchbox on both: the mono LP carries the 4 June mono and the stereo LP the 22 June stereo. Capitol also put Matchbox and Slow Down together on a single, Capitol 5255, in mono. American buyers could therefore hear both of the song’s mixes within weeks of their being made, on the two editions of one album.^1,3

Studio Notes

• Singing from behind the kit. Ringo sang Matchbox while he played it, “electing to sing and drum simultaneously”. That was a choice, not a house rule. “Whether vocals were recorded live or overdubbed seems to have been determined by the difficulty of the music and the band’s familiarity with the song; within a single session, the group might record live vocals for one song, but overdub vocals onto a backing track for another.” A number the group had played on stage was the obvious candidate for a live vocal, and George Martin, “very keen on capturing usable live vocal performances”, wanted the same thing: “I was out to get performance – the excitement of the actual live action… it was important to get the feeling rather than anything else.”^1,2
• Three tracks and a spare. By 1964 the four tracks were used to a pattern: “Drums, bass, and rhythm guitar were on one track, lead guitar on another; the voices on a third. The fourth track was reserved for any little extras, like piano overdubs or backing voices.” Ringo described the same habit from the studio floor: “Most of our early recordings were on three tracks, because we kept one track for overdubs. That also kept us together as a band.” Which track carried his voice on Matchbox is not on record.²
• Two mixes, eighteen days apart. 1964 was the first complete year of four-track recording, and it left many songs with mono and stereo mixes that do not match. Some of the differences are edits; others come “from mixing one of the tracks louder or softer than others”. Matchbox is one of the examples given of the second kind, a song “where the mix differences are audible and not due to simple editing.” Both mixes came from take 5, with George Martin producing and Norman Smith at the desk, but the mono was made on 4 June and the stereo on 22 June, while the group was in New Zealand.^1,3
• What changes between them. Both mixes put “generous reverb on the vocal”, and the stereo has more of it than the mono. One word Ringo sings at the end of a line is indistinct in the mono, “but that is corrected by an edit or overdub” in the stereo. And “the guitar solo ends differently”, so “at least one of the two has an edit there.” Anyone who plays the EP against Past Masters can hear all three for themselves.³
• A doubled solo. The guitar solo is double-tracked. 1964 was the year “the double-tracking of instruments became commonplace on Beatles sessions”, and Matchbox is one of six songs from that year with double-tracked guitar solos, alongside Can’t Buy Me Love, Baby’s In Black, Words Of Love, She’s A Woman and I Feel Fine.²
• The paperwork and the records disagree. One point is in conflict. Lewisohn’s session sheets log no edit and no superimposition for Matchbox: five takes on 1 June, a mono mix from take 5 on 4 June, a stereo mix from take 5 on 22 June. Brennan, working from the released records, marks both mixes as edited, hears a guitar solo that ends differently on each, and finds a sung word repaired in the stereo “by an edit or overdub”. Both accounts are given here; neither settles the other.^1,3
• The desk, the limiter and the microphones. Studio Two’s control room “was rearranged in January 1964” for the new REDD.51 desk, “positioned so that the Balance Engineer could look forward and maintain visual contact with the studio floor.” New that year too were the Fairchild 660 limiters, “which eventually replaced the RS124 limiters completely”, and the Fairchild 660 was the limiter Norman Smith preferred. The tape machine was the Telefunken M10 four-track. The A Hard Day’s Night sessions “made use of the same microphone setup employed in the previous years: STC 4038 and 4033-A on drums; STC 4033-A on bass; Neumann U47, U48 and/or KM54 on electric guitar; U47 or U48 on acoustic guitar, piano and vocals.”²
• What Norman Smith asked of the drummer. Norman Smith balanced every Matchbox session, and he knew what he wanted from the drums: “I requested that Ringo not hit the rim of the snare,” he says. “I asked him to hit it solidly in the middle of the drum.” On this song the same man was also the singer. The drum sound changed later in the year: from the Beatles for Sale sessions an AKG D19c became “the overhead mic on Ringo’s drums”, so Matchbox, taped in June, predates it.^1,2

Releases

Matchbox has two original mixes, made eighteen days apart from the same take, and they can be told apart by ear: the stereo has more reverb on Ringo’s voice, cleans up one word he sings indistinctly in the mono, and ends the guitar solo differently.

• 1964 UK EP — Long Tall Sally (19 June 1964, Parlophone GEP 8913, side B track 2) — the 4 June mono: generous reverb on the voice but less than the stereo, the one indistinct word, and the mono’s own ending to the guitar solo. The same mono is on the Rarities LP (Parlophone PSLP 261 and PCM 1001, 1978–79) and the 1991 CD EP box set.
• 1964 US single and LP — Capitol 5255, with Slow Down; Something New (20 July 1964, Capitol T-2108 / ST-2108) — the single and the mono LP carry the 4 June mono; the stereo LP carries the 22 June stereo, with its extra reverb, the repaired word and its different solo ending. The mono LP’s mix is also on The Capitol Albums, Vol. 1 (2004).
• 1976 LP — Rock ’n’ Roll Music (Parlophone PCSP 719; Capitol SKBO-11537) — the 22 June stereo.
• 1988 CD — Past Masters Volume One (EMI CDP 7 90043 2) — the 22 June stereo, the mix most listeners now know: more reverb on the voice than the EP, the word made clear, and the stereo’s version of the solo’s end.
• 1994 CD — Live at the BBC (EMI CDP 8 31796 2) — not the EMI recording at all, but a separate BBC radio performance of the song, in mono.