Penny Lane

Story Section status: Outdated

Recording

• The song took nine sessions at EMI Studios, Abbey Road, between Thursday 29 December 1966 and Tuesday 17 January 1967, and for the whole of that time the session sheets called it ‘Untitled’. The first night ran from 7.00pm to 2.15am in Studio Two and produced takes 1 to 6 and nothing else. George Martin produced throughout, Geoff Emerick engineered and Phil McDonald was second engineer.¹
• Only nine takes were ever numbered, and two of the nine are not performances at all. On 30 December take 6 was reduced into take 7; on 6 January take 7 was reduced into take 8 and take 8 into take 9. Take 9 is the master, and almost everything a listener recognises — the flutes, the trumpets, the piccolo trumpet, the bells, the second piano, most of the percussion — was superimposed onto it after 6 January. The record is a foundation with eleven days of overdubs standing on it.¹
• Paul asked for a particular sound and got an unusual method. He wanted a “really clean American sound” on this song, and the way to reach it was to record each part in tight isolation rather than let the room do the blending, so the balance could be settled afterwards instead of at the microphone.³ That is why the arrangement can carry as much as it does without turning to mud: nothing on the tape is bleeding into anything else.
• A surprising amount of it was recorded at the wrong speed on purpose. The piano was played at half-speed and then speeded up on playback, which raises its pitch and hardens its attack into the bright, slightly brittle sound the record opens with.¹ The harmonium and the cymbal were done the same way, and the shrill drawn-out cymbal roll at the end was recorded slow and sped up.² The vocal is varispeeded too, listed at 47.5 cycles against the normal fifty, so the voice on the record is a little higher and a little quicker than the one that was sung.²
• The brass and woodwind arrived in two separate instalments, and they are not the same players. On 12 January, in Studio Three between 2.30 and 11.00pm, four flutes, two trumpets, two piccolos and a flugelhorn were overdubbed in one afternoon and evening.¹ That ensemble sits together on track three of the four-track tape.² The piccolo trumpet everybody remembers came five days later and is a separate overdub by a separate player.¹
• David Mason of the New Philharmonia played it on 17 January in Studio Two. Paul had seen him playing Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto Number 2 in F on a late-night BBC2 television series and asked for that sound.¹ Mason chose the instrument himself, settling on the B-flat piccolo trumpet as the most appropriate.² Nothing was written down in advance; Paul sang the parts he wanted and the two of them spent three hours working it out, and it went onto the tape as two overdub takes.¹
• Every mix made in 1967 was mono. Remixes 1 and 2 came off take 7 on 30 December, remixes 5 and 6 off take 9 on 9 January, remixes 9 to 11 on 17 January and remixes 12 to 14 on 25 January, the last of them in the Studio One control room between 6.30 and 8.30pm.¹ Remix 11 was copied and sent to Capitol; remix 14 became the master for the general release.¹ No stereo mix of this song was made during the sessions at all, and none existed for another four and a half years.^1,4

Equipment

Recording Timeline

• 29 December 1966 (Thu) — takes 1–6, Studio Two, 7.00pm–2.15am. The song went onto tape under the working title ‘Untitled’, and the first night produced six takes and a mono mix of them. Paul had the piano part before he had anything else, and it is the piano that the six takes are built around; the rest of the record does not exist yet.¹ Lyrically the song is Paul’s nostalgic answer to the record John was making in the same weeks.²
• 30 December 1966 (Fri) — reduction take 6 into take 7, superimpositions, mono remixes 1–2, Studio Two, 7.00pm–3.00am. The first reduction cleared space almost immediately, which is the shape the whole song takes from here on. The piano was recorded at half-speed and speeded up on playback in this stretch of work, and the tape was slowed to weld the parts together.¹ Two mono remixes were pulled from take 7 the same night, six weeks before anything was released.¹
• 4 and 5 January 1967 (Wed–Thu) — superimpositions onto take 7, Studio Two, 7.00pm–2.45am and 7.00pm–12.15am. Two consecutive nights of overdubbing onto the same take, with no mixing and no new takes on either. Nothing was numbered and nothing was mixed, which is why these two sessions are invisible in most accounts of the song — roughly twelve hours of work that shows up only as extra material on take 7.¹
• 6 January 1967 (Fri) — superimpositions and two more reductions, take 7 into 8 into 9, Studio Two, 7.00pm–1.00am. The busiest night of the sessions and the one that fixes the record’s architecture. More was added to take 7, the tape was reduced into take 8, more was added again, and take 8 was reduced into take 9. Conga drums went on limited and slowed down, and by the end of it all four tracks of the tape were full.¹
• 9 January 1967 (Mon) — superimpositions onto take 9, mono remixes 5–6, Studio Two, 7.00pm–1.45am. The first work on the master take, and the first mono mixes taken from it. Handclaps, a further piano part and the orchestral chimes belong to this run of overdubs; the chimes are the sound placed against the lyric’s fireman.^1,2
• 10 January 1967 (Tue) — superimpositions onto take 9, Studio Three, 7.00pm–1.40am. The song moves rooms for the first time. Another six hours of overdubbing onto take 9 with nothing mixed, in a studio the band used far less often than Two — a reminder that the record was assembled wherever the diary allowed, not in one settled place.¹
• 12 January 1967 (Thu) — woodwind and brass overdub, Studio Three, 2.30–11.00pm. Four flutes, two trumpets, two piccolos and a flugelhorn were overdubbed in a single afternoon-and-evening session, the largest outside ensemble the Beatles had used on a record to that point.¹ They occupy track three of the tape as a block, which is why they move together in the mix rather than being placeable one against another.²
• 17 January 1967 (Tue) — piccolo trumpet overdub, mono remixes 9–11, Studio Two, 7.00pm–12.30am. David Mason’s B-flat piccolo trumpet went on in two overdub takes after three hours of working the part out by ear, and further Mason figures were taped at the very end of the song. Three mono remixes followed the same night, and remix 11 was copied and sent to Capitol for the American pressing.¹
• 25 January 1967 (Wed) — final mono mixing, remixes 12–14, Studio One control room, 6.30–8.30pm. Two hours in a control room, eight days after the last note was played. Remix 14 was copied and became the master, and the Mason figures at the very end are not on it. The record was finished as a mono object and released three weeks later.^1,4

Studio Notes

• Nine takes, and the record is not in them — The take numbers run to nine and stop, which makes this look like a quickly captured song. It is the opposite. Takes 1 to 6 are the piano-led foundation from the first night; take 7 is a reduction of take 6, and takes 8 and 9 are reductions made one after the other on 6 January. So of nine numbered takes, three are bounces and none of them contains the flutes, the trumpets, the piccolo trumpet, the bells or the finished vocal. Reading the take count as a measure of effort would put this among the easiest things the band ever recorded, when in fact it took nine sessions across three weeks.¹
• Half-speed is the colour of the record, not a trick in it — Recording at half-speed and playing back at normal speed raises the pitch by an octave and doubles the attack rate, so a part played comfortably comes back sounding brilliant and slightly inhuman. The piano was done this way, and so were the harmonium and the cymbal.^1,2 The shrill drawn-out cymbal roll at the end of the song was recorded slow and sped up, which is why it has an edge no cymbal struck in real time produces.² The technique is doing the work that reverb or EQ would do on another record: it is a way of making the top end glitter without adding anything to it.
• The voice is running fast as well — The vocals sit in the varispeed table at 47.5 cycles against a normal fifty, meaning the tape was travelling slow while Paul sang and comes back higher and quicker on playback.² The effect is small enough that most listeners never name it, and large enough to explain why the vocal sounds younger and more forward here than it does on the songs recorded either side of it. It also stacks with the half-speed keyboards: two separate speed manipulations, pulling in the same direction, on the same record.
• What a “clean American sound” meant in practice — Paul’s brief was for a “really clean American sound”, and what it produced was a change of recording method rather than a change of equipment.³ Each part was recorded in tight isolation instead of being blended in the room, so nothing bleeds into anything else and the balance could be decided afterwards. That is why an arrangement with two pianos, a wind ensemble, a solo trumpet, bells and layered percussion stays legible: the density is in the arrangement, not in the sound.
• The piccolo trumpet was the player’s choice, not the producer’s — Paul had heard the sound on television and knew what he wanted; nobody in the room knew which instrument would make it. David Mason settled on the B-flat piccolo trumpet as the most appropriate, and the part was arrived at by singing rather than by notation, over about three hours, before going down in two overdub takes.^1,2 The solo that defines the record is therefore a collaboration between a composer who could not write it and a player who could not have guessed it, worked out in a single evening.
• The bell in the lyric is an actual instrument — The fireman keeps his machine clean, and the sound placed against him is Abbey Road’s Premier orchestral chimes, used to give the sonic equivalent of a fireman’s bell.² It is a small piece of literalism in a song otherwise built out of pictures, and it is the kind of decision that only shows up as a decision when you know the instrument was fetched for it. The two primary accounts name different instruments for the effect: orchestral chimes in one, and in the other a hand-bell taken from the trap room fireman or his fire-engine.¹²
• Two pianos, and one of them is famous — A second piano part was added after the foundation was down, and the studio’s 1905 Steinway Vertegrand upright — the instrument that got its nickname from a different record entirely — features prominently on this song.² Its tuning and its worn hammers give a honky-tonk edge that a concert grand does not have, and against the half-speed piano underneath it the two keyboards read as one wide, bright instrument rather than as two.
• Four tracks, and no room left by 6 January — All four tracks of the tape were full at the end of the 6 January session, which is why the reductions came when they did rather than at a tidier point.¹ Every reduction is a permanent decision: once take 8 is bounced into take 9, the balance between the parts inside that bounce can never be changed again. The record’s dense middle — percussion, harmonium, the first piano — is frozen at whatever it was on the night, and only the later overdubs remained adjustable at the mix.
• There was no stereo mix until 1971 — Every mix made while the song was being recorded was mono, and the mixing stopped on 25 January 1967.¹ A true stereo mix of this song was not made until 30 September 1971, at AIR, more than four years after the record came out and after the band had ceased to exist.⁴ Anyone who grew up with this song in stereo grew up with a mix nobody involved in the sessions signed off, which is an unusually clean case of the mono being the record and the stereo being an afterthought.
• Which record has the extra trumpet at the end — Mason taped further figures at the very end of the song on 17 January, and they survive on remix 11, the mix copied and sent to Capitol.¹ The general release took remix 14 from 25 January, which does not have them. The version with the closing trumpet is the American promotional pressing, not the commercial single, and it is one of the most-hunted Beatles 45s for exactly that reason.^1,4 A 1980 American compilation later spliced the tag onto the stereo body, and the 2017 anniversary set issued the promotional mix itself.

Releases

Which released versions of “Penny Lane” sound different, and what the listener hears on each.

• 1967 UK mono single — “Strawberry Fields Forever” / “Penny Lane” (17 February 1967, Parlophone R 5570) — The record as it was made: everything summed to one point, the wind ensemble sitting inside the rhythm rather than beside it, and the piccolo trumpet stated once, in the solo. The song ends on the last chorus with no trumpet after it.
• 1967 US promotional mono single — Capitol 5810, promotional copies only — The same mono line taken from an earlier mix, and the only period pressing that keeps David Mason’s closing trumpet figures. The last few seconds are the whole difference, and they change the ending from a stop to a flourish.
• 1967 US mono LP — Magical Mystery Tour (Capitol MAL-2835) — The commercial mono, the same one the British single carries, gathered onto the American album that put the year’s singles on side two. No closing trumpet here either.
• 1973 stereo — The Beatles 1967–1970 (Apple PCSP 718 / SKBO-3404) — The first appearance of a real stereo mix, made at AIR on 30 September 1971. It spreads a record that was never designed to be spread: the wind ensemble moves off to one side as a block, the vocal sits apart from the piano, and the density that makes the mono work is loosened.
• 1980 US LP — Rarities (Capitol SHAL-12060) — A hybrid: the 1971 stereo body with the promotional mono’s closing trumpet grafted onto the end. For twenty years this was the only easily bought record with the trumpet tag, and it is why the tag is often described as belonging to the stereo mix, which it does not.
• 1987 CD — Magical Mystery Tour (EMI CDP 7 48062 2) — The 1971 stereo on disc, unaltered, which is where most listeners since have met the song.
• 2009 remaster — Magical Mystery Tour (9 September 2009, Capitol 99460-2) — A cleaner transfer of the same 1971 stereo, with more definition on the flutes and a firmer bottom end. Not a remix, so the wide, slightly hollow picture stands.
• 2017 stereo remix — Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band anniversary edition (2017, Apple, Giles Martin and Sam Okell) — A new mix from the four-track tapes that centres the rhythm and rebuilds the wind ensemble around it, which is the closest a stereo mix has come to the mono’s balance. The set also carries a 5.1 surround mix, a previously unreleased instrumental take 6, and — on the super deluxe — the Capitol promotional mono itself, so the trumpet tag is finally on an official release in its own right.