You Won't See Me

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Recording

Equipment

Recording Timeline

• 11 November 1965 (Thu) — recording, Studio Two — EMI Studios, Studio Two, 6.00pm–7.00am. P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. Takes 1 and 2 of ‘You Won’t See Me’, with various overdubs on top of take 2, in a session that also produced takes 1–2 of ‘Girl’ and further work on ‘Wait’ and ‘I’m Looking Through You’. Paul was at the piano for the basic track and overdubbed his bass afterwards. Earlier the same day, the control room in Room 65 had been running remixes from 4.00 to 5.30pm.¹
• 11 November 1965 (Thu), overnight — overdubs — The overdub pass onto take 2 carried the bass, the vocals and the harmony stack. The session ran thirteen hours and closed the album’s recording entirely; it was also the last tracking work Norman Smith did as the group’s balance engineer before moving up to producing. He remembered the album without affection: “the Rubber Soul album was the most difficult one for me. It was much less enjoyable.”^1,2
• 15 November 1965 (Mon) — mono and stereo remixes, Studio One control room — Abbey Road, Studio One (control room only), 2.30–5.30pm. P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Richard Lush. Both remixes taken from take 2. This was the final remixing session for the album, handling ‘Girl’, ‘I’m Looking Through You’, ‘Wait’ and a second mono of ‘Michelle’ in the same afternoon.^1,3
• 3 December 1965 (Fri) — release — Rubber Soul issued in the United Kingdom on Parlophone, mono PMC 1267 and stereo PCS 3075, with ‘You Won’t See Me’ third on the first side, between ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’ and ‘Nowhere Man’. Eighteen days separated the last mix from the shops.^1,3
• 8 July 1966 (Fri) — EP — The mono mix reissued on the four-track Nowhere Man EP, Parlophone GEP 8952, with ‘Nowhere Man’, ‘Drive My Car’ and ‘Michelle’.¹

Studio Notes

• The Hammond organ that is not on the record — The Rubber Soul sleeve credits the group’s assistant, Mal Evans, with Hammond organ here, and the session documentation does not support it: “no such sound is detectable on the tape or disc”, and the instrument is not itemised on the tape box either. The only keyboard audible is a piano. Whether a part was played and lost at the reduction stage, or the credit was simply wrong, the mounted sources do not say, and this page does not guess. The sleeve makes a similar claim about ‘I’m Looking Through You’, which suggests the error is editorial rather than musical.¹
• The Fairchild on the drums, once — The kit here does not sound like the kit anywhere else on Rubber Soul. The song “almost certainly bears the distinctive sound of drums being recorded through a Fairchild”, and the comparison is the argument: “the effect is quite obvious and striking when one compares the drum sound on that song to that of every other track on the album”. Norman Smith had “almost always recorded the drums, bass and guitars through the RS124 Altec compressor”, so if the Fairchild is here it is a departure made on his last night of tracking.²
• Why that matters for what came next — Fairchild-limited drums became the signature of the two albums that followed, under the engineer who replaced him: “It became the sound of Revolver and Pepper really. Drums had never been heard like that before.” That leaves an open question worth stating rather than resolving — “would he too have begun using the Fairchild” had he stayed, or did the idea arrive twice, independently? The sources pose the question and leave it there.²
• The bass moves off the drum track for good — “Prior to late 1965, essentially every Beatles session had seen the bass recorded on the same track as the drums. At the tail end of the Rubber Soul sessions, however, Paul began to overdub his bass parts on a separate track. It had been out of necessity at that point.” Necessity is the right word for this song: a pianist cannot also be a bassist. But the habit stuck — “of the 18 songs recorded in 1966, the bass was recorded separately from the drums on 12 of them”.²
• What a separate bass track bought — Two things, and they compound. Having the bass on its own track “gave Paul the ability to refine his bass lines” over as many passes as he wanted, rather than living with whatever had happened while the drums were being played. And it gave the engineer a bass free of drum leakage to shape at the desk. The melodic, high-register bass playing that people describe as a 1966 development is in large part an artefact of this scheduling change made in November 1965.²
• “Two takes” is a smaller claim than it sounds — The log reads takes 1–2 with various overdubs, and the second half of that phrase is doing most of the work. Take 2 is the basic performance; the bass, the vocals and the harmonies were superimposed onto it afterwards, and no reduction was needed because the basic track had not filled the tape. It is one of the few Rubber Soul titles where what was issued descends from a single unbounced four-track master. That matters for how the record sounds against its neighbours: ‘Michelle’, cut eight days earlier, went through a reduction and carries the extra generation of tape that comes with one, while this track does not. Where a page elsewhere on this album has to explain which instruments were fused together and when, here the four tracks stayed four tracks from the first take to the mix, and the only decisions taken after the night of the eleventh were the ones taken at the desk four days later.¹
• Mixed in the dry period — The album’s mixes were made while Norman Smith had developed “a sudden and strong aversion to the chambers”; most of the tracks are “bone dry”. On a song built from a repeated piano figure and a stack of close harmony, the absence of chamber echo is structural rather than incidental — it is why the backing vocals sit right against the ear instead of behind the band. The album’s reverb was “very slight” where it appears at all, and a song whose whole tension comes from repetition has nothing to lean on but the playing. Heard next to a 1964 Beatles track, the difference is less about the songs than about a room that had been, for the duration of these sessions at least, deliberately switched off.²
• The last night of a six-album partnership — This session closed Norman Smith’s run as the Beatles’ balance engineer, and his account of the album is unsentimental: “the Rubber Soul album was the most difficult one for me. It was much less enjoyable… Something had happened between those two albums, but I’m not sure what it was. That was the beginning of the end, really.” Whatever else it is, this track is the sound of an engineer trying something new on the way out of the door.²
• The two engineers and the same discovery — The compressor question has a human shape. Norman Smith’s habit was the RS124 on drums, bass and guitars; his assistant “had discovered” what the Fairchild would do to a kit, and made it the house sound within months of taking over. If the Fairchild really is on this track, then the older engineer got there first, on the last thing he tracked, and never got to develop it — the second engineer then arrived at the same place independently and had two years in which to use it.²
• What the separate bass track did for the desk — The benefit was not only the player’s. A bass on its own track let him “record as many passes as necessary” to get the line right, and it gave the engineer “the ability to further refine the sound, both during recording and mixing” — a bass free of the drum leakage that had come with sharing a track for three years. Two of the most commented-on features of the records that followed, the singing bass lines and the weight of the bottom end, descend from a decision taken on this album because a pianist could not also play bass.²
• What Norman Smith did next — The strain was not only musical: “eventually the tension became more than Norman could comfort[ably bear]”, and he moved from the balance engineer’s chair to the other side of the glass. “I was busy trying to find new artists,” he said of the period after — and he “quickly stumbled upon a rising new group called The Pink Floyd and brought them into” the same building. The engineer who recorded this song spent the next two years producing the records made in the studio he had just left.²

Releases

• 1965 UK mono LP — Rubber Soul (3 December 1965, Parlophone PMC 1267, side one, track three) — The period mono, mixed on 15 November from take 2. Piano, bass and the harmony stack are summed into one close image, with the compressed kit sitting further forward than on anything else on the side.
• 1965 UK stereo LP — Rubber Soul (3 December 1965, Parlophone PCS 3075, side one, track three) — The same 15 November session, spread into the album’s characteristic wide picture: backing track to one side, voices and the bass overdub opposite, which separates the harmony parts far more plainly than the mono allows.
• 1965 US LP — Rubber Soul (6 December 1965, Capitol T-2442 mono / ST-2442 stereo) — The song survived Capitol’s reshuffle of the album and appears on both American pressings, carrying the same pair of mixes in a different running order.
• 1966 UK EP — Nowhere Man (8 July 1966, Parlophone GEP 8952) — The mono LP mix cut for 7-inch, alongside ‘Nowhere Man’, ‘Drive My Car’ and ‘Michelle’.
• 1987 CD — Rubber Soul (EMI CDP 7 46440 2) — A distinct stereo, made for the CD issue rather than transferred from the 1965 master, and the version that became the album’s standard stereo for the next twenty years.
• 2009 remasters — Rubber Soul (9 September 2009, Parlophone 99457 2), and the mono programme — The remastered stereo CD carries the 1987 mix, not the 1965 one; remasters of the original stereo were issued with the mono programme instead, which is where a listener has to go to hear the 1965 stereo picture in modern resolution.