The Beatles' recording sessions
The recordings made by the Beatles, a rock group from Liverpool, England, from their inception as the Quarrymen in 1957 to their break-up in 1970 and the reunion of their surviving members in the mid-1990s, have huge cultural and historical value.
[1] While most have never been officially released, their outtakes and demos are seen by fans as collectables, and some of the recordings have appeared on countless bootlegs.
The only outtakes and demos to be officially released were on The Beatles Anthology series and its tie-in singles and anniversary editions of their studio albums .
Bits of some previously unreleased studio recordings were used in The Beatles: Rock Band video game as ambient noise and to give songs studio-sounding beginnings and endings.
[3] The recordings were pressed onto a mono 10-inch 78 rpm shellac disc*, then the sessions tapes were erased to be reused with new customers.
[4][5] Musicians: Production staff: The Quarrymen recorded several low-quality, homemade, mono demo tapes.
[9][10][11] In Hamburg, Germany, during the Beatles' first stint there, Lennon, McCartney and Harrison recorded a song as the backing group for Lu Walters, the bassist from Rory Storm and the Hurricanes.
The song, with a spoken advertisement as the B-side, was pressed onto nine mono 78 rpm acetate discs.
[12] Musicians: In what is now the Friedrich-Ebert-Halle, in the Friedrich-Ebert-Gymnasium (then known as Gymnasium für Jungen Harburg [English: Gymnasium for Boys in Harburg]), during the Beatles' second stint in Hamburg, the group, under the name "the Beat Brothers", recorded several songs with English rock and roller Tony Sheridan for an album called My Bonnie, produced by Bert Kaempfert.
The session tapes have since been destroyed, but some of the songs have been issued on numerous singles, EPs and albums, both official and unofficial.
The Beatles did not pass the audition, but their manager, Brian Epstein, kept the reel-to-reel tapes to present to other record producers.
Epstein arranged for the recordings to be pressed onto monoacetate discs, one of which was later heard by Parlophone producer George Martin, who offered them an audition which would turn out to be successful.
EMI would record a minimum of six single "sides" and the agreement would start on 6 June 1962, expiring a year later, but renewable.
[citation needed] After the contract was signed, Parlophone record producer George Martin gave the Beatles an audition at EMI Studios in London, to assess their musical quality and respective vocal talents.
Ken Townsend, who would become a regular at the Beatles' recording sessions, was on duty in the technical department that day.
[25] A complete tape of this session surfaced after the death of sound engineer Geoff Emerick on 2 October 2018.
They began work on Mitch Murray's "How Do You Do It", which Martin had chosen for them, but they disliked the song and wanted to release an original composition.
7–10pm Musicians: Production staff:[26] Concerned with Ringo's drumming, the producers hired session drummer Andy White for another attempt at recording the Beatles' first single.
The session tapes were later destroyed, thus there are no true stereo versions of the songs, although at least one mono recording has been discovered.
10am – 1pm Musicians: Production staff:[27] On 26 November, over a month after the release of the first single, the Beatles returned to Studio 2 to record their second.
In addition to the two sides of the single, they also performed an unknown number of takes of another original composition, "Tip of My Tongue", but Martin was unhappy with the arrangement.
The number of takes recorded is unknown, as the documentation and session tapes were later destroyed or lost.
