Yer Blues

Story Section status: Outdated

Recording

Equipment

Recording Timeline

• 12 August 1968 — Studio Two, 7.00pm–4.15am — the night the idea arrived, on a session booked for something else entirely: an overdub onto take 102 of Not Guilty, followed by mono mixing of the same song. With the band carrying on in the control room, Ken Scott made a remark about how, at this rate, they would be wanting the second guitar recorded in the room next door. It was meant as a joke about how far the session had drifted from conventional taping; it was taken literally, and the reply — “That’s a great idea, let’s try it on the next number!” — settled where the following night’s recording would happen.¹
• 13 August 1968 — Studio Two and annexe, 7.00pm–5.30am — the basic track, cut in the annexe after a re-remake of Sexy Sadie had already run through takes 100–107. Fourteen takes of Yer Blues, with drums, bass and both guitars laid across the four tracks and the players close enough together that the microphones heard each other freely. Two reduction mixes followed in the same session: take 6 into takes 15 and 16, and an extract of take 14 into take 17. The night ended with an edit of takes 16 and 17 into the master. A between-takes jam recorded in the middle of the run was hived off to the tape kept for material of that kind.^1,2
• 14 August 1968 — Studio Two, 7.00pm–4.30am — superimpositions onto the edit of takes 16 and 17: John’s lead vocal, sung with his head pushed through the window between the control room and the annexe, and Ringo’s double-tracked snare running the length of the guitar solo. Mono remixing followed and produced the mix that became the released mono, which was then tape-copied — a copy of a chosen mono remix leaving the building the same night is the usual signature of one of them wanting to hear it at home.^1,2
• 20 August 1968 — Studio Three, 5.00–5.30pm — a half-hour booking, and the smallest session in the song’s history: a single edit piece, take 1, recorded and then edited onto the chosen mono remix to finish the record. The session sheet carries no producer at all — the producer line reads n/a, with Ken Scott engineering and John Smith as tape operator — which makes this one of the very few entries in the diary where a released Beatles master was completed without George Martin present.¹
• 14 October 1968 — Studio Two, 7.00pm–7.30am — the stereo. Stereo remixes 1–5 were made from takes 16 and 17 and edit piece take 1, in the twelve-and-a-half-hour session that also swept I Will, Savoy Truffle, While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Long Long Long through mixing. The stereo therefore descends from exactly the same spliced four-track as the mono, with the edit piece already attached.¹
• 22 November 1968 — release — The Beatles, on Apple, the group’s first album on the label; a double set issued in mono and stereo with Yer Blues opening the second half of the second disc. Between the last mix and the release date the song was untouched, which is why the mix history that follows is unusually compact for a White Album track.¹

Studio Notes

• What the annexe actually was. The room the band played in was not a booth and was never built as a performance space. It began as one of the remote machine rooms that housed the Telefunken four-tracks before the tape machines were moved into the control rooms themselves; after that it drifted into use as a storage area, and by the summer of 1968 it had been cleared out and a window put in between it and the Studio Two control room. Its only other role in the building was as a destination for talkback, which it saw little use for. Known in the EMI plans as Room 2A, it is recorded as having seen exactly one use on a Beatles session in the whole of 1968, and this is it.²
• The first edit made on a Beatles four-track. Splicing was routine at Abbey Road, but it was done downstream — on the quarter-inch mono or stereo master, after mixing, where a bad join could be remade from the multitrack. Here the join was made on the original four-track itself, which Lewisohn flags as a first: “for the first time on a Beatles recording, the original four-track tape was itself edited”. It is a one-way decision. Everything downstream of it — the mono, the stereo, every reissue and every later remix — inherits the same physical cut, which is why this song has no alternative lineage to compare.¹
• The two sources put the join in different places. Lewisohn describes the edit as quite clear and times it at 3′17″. Ryan and Kehew, describing the same splice between the two takes, put it at 2:28. Both are describing the transition at the end of the guitar solos and neither reading is preferred here; the discrepancy is recorded rather than resolved, and a listener checking it should expect the audible seam somewhere in the last third of the record rather than at a pinned timing.^1,2
• The flanging on the second solo is a by-product of the reduction, not a later treatment. During the reduction of take 14 into take 17, the guitar solos were heavily flanged, with a significant amount of oscillator wobble toward the end. Because that treatment was printed at the reduction stage rather than applied at mixdown, it is fixed in the master and is present identically on the mono, the original stereo and every remix since — there is no version of this song in which the solo is dry. It remains the most identifiable processing decision on the record.²
• The vocal microphone was an oddity even for Abbey Road. John’s lead vocal was sung into an RCA 44-BX, remembered by the tape operator as “an old RCA with little posts where you had to connect the wires”. The 44-BX is a Thirties ribbon design with a figure-of-eight pattern, held at EMI mainly for brass and not in regular use on Beatles sessions at all. Its rear lobe is live, which matters here: pointed into a room the size of this one, with the band’s backline a few feet away, a bidirectional ribbon collects the room as readily as the singer.²
• John sang with his head through the window, and on monitors rather than headphones. The account of the overdub has him wanting to sing in the control room with everything coming out of the monitors instead of the cans — the complete reversal of the normal arrangement — and the compromise was that he stuck his head halfway through the window between the control room and the annexe. The vocal on the record is therefore sung into a live-backed ribbon in a doorway between two acoustic spaces, with monitor spill arriving at the microphone rather than being sealed off by headphones. What that produces is not a fault to be corrected; it is the texture of the released vocal.²
• Ringo’s snare overdub does structural work. On the same 14 August pass that carried the lead vocal, Ringo double-tracked his snare for the duration of the guitar solo. Doubling a snare across precisely the passage that contains the splice has an effect beyond weight: a continuous percussion layer laid over a tape join disguises the discontinuity, so the seam reads as a deliberate lift in the arrangement rather than as two performances stuck together. The drum sound it sits on top of is the one the room was chosen for in the first place.²
• The leakage is audible and it is the point. Four players in a room this size cannot be isolated, and the overdubbed solo did not erase what the other microphones had already captured — traces of the original guide solos remain in the drum and bass microphones and can be heard behind the replacement. In stereo, where the instruments are spread rather than summed, those traces surface more readily, and after the edit a trace lead vocal is audible under the second half. A conventionally tracked record would treat all of this as spill to be eliminated; here it is what the track sounds like.^1,2

Releases

Every released version of Yer Blues descends from one spliced four-track master, so the differences between them are differences of balance and of how much of the room survives — not of performance.

• 1968 UK mono LP — The Beatles (22 November 1968, Apple [Parlophone] PMC 7067–7068, disc two) — the tightest of the versions. Summing the four tracks to a single point pulls the band into one plane, which suits a performance recorded in one small room: the leakage between instruments reinforces rather than smears, and the vocal sits hard in the middle of it. The transition at the end of the guitar solos is the most audible event on the record (see Studio Notes).
• 1968 UK stereo LP — The Beatles (22 November 1968, Apple [Parlophone] PCS 7067–7068, disc two) — spreading the same tape across two channels exposes what the mono conceals. Traces of the original guitar solos, replaced by the overdub, remain in the other microphones and can be heard throughout; after the edit a trace lead vocal surfaces under the second half. The abrupt transition at the end of the solos is more clearly a tape join here than it is in mono.
• 1968 US stereo LP — The Beatles (Apple SWBO-101, disc two) — the US double carries the same stereo mix; there was no US mono pressing of this album to compare it against.
• 1969 US reel-to-reel — The Beatles (Apple L-101) — the one genuinely distinct variant, and an accidental one. The stereo was re-edited by Ampex for the tape format, so the join between the two halves falls differently from the LP; anyone who knows where the seam sits on the record will hear it arrive in the wrong place.
• 1987 CD — The Beatles (EMI CDP 7 46443 2) — the first digital issue carries the 1968 stereo as mixed, with no remake. Unlike the earlier albums, whose CD debuts brought new mixes or mono-only decisions with them, the White Album arrived on CD in the mix its listeners already knew.
• 2009 remasters — The Beatles (stereo remaster; mono edition, Apple 84957-2) — both programmes are transfers rather than remixes, so the mono and stereo differences described above survive intact. The mono edition is the one to hear if the question is what the record sounded like when the room was still audible as a room.
• 2018 stereo remix — The Beatles 50th Anniversary editions (9 November 2018) — Giles Martin and Sam Okell remixed from the original session tapes, guided by the 1968 stereo. The band is pulled into a tighter, more centred image and the vocal is lifted clear of the backline; the flanging on the second solo is preserved because it is printed on the tape. The Super Deluxe set also carries the Esher demo of the song and an earlier take with a guide vocal, and its Blu-ray carries a direct transfer of the 1968 mono.