Beatles guitar tones: the abyss.

I played a show/church service last night at Church of the Redeemer that consisted of nothing but Beatles songs. For the occasion I put together a band with some of my favourite musicians including Scott Christian, Greg Wyard, Joe Power and Nick Wyard, Beatles experts or acolytes all.  We haven't played as a band for several months but with a few soundcheck screw-tightenings we were back at our capacity as a fully-functioning Beatles records reproduction machine. 

Most of the songs required me to play electric guitar, something that is always a tone quandary for me when it comes to Beatles performances.  Let me disclose now that I think of the Beatles as classical music, with really no irony.  First of all, they were the best band in the best era of popular music in recent memory (though I think overall the 1920s were the best era in the 20th century for popular music), which is best attested by their continued strong popularity even as all other sixties megabands and solo artists have waned.  Thus, their music should be reperformed as perfectly and as slavishly as possible, or ideally not at all.  I remember being introduced to this idea waaay back in around '92 by the great drummer, producer and Beatles psycho Dave King.  I couldn't understand why he, a huge Beatles fan, wouldn't want to play any Beatles songs in our bar trio of the time.  It was because we were a trio and could never reproduce the two-guitar arrangements.

Back to my tone quandary.  It consists in the fact that I don't have a proper Beatle guitar, for one thing.  The approved guitars are, for John Lennon, a Rickenbacker 325 in black (seen above) and later an Epiphone Casino.  For George, a Gretsch Country Gentleman in black and later an Epiphone Casino (though to be sure George, probably advised by Eric Clapton, played Fender products on many late Beatles sessions).  For Paul, a Hofner 500/1 violin-shaped bass and later a Rickenbacker 4001 bass.

And those are just the basic arsenal of any self-respecting Beatles tribute.  Good thing that I'm not doing a Beatles tribute - at least not in any way that would require the purchase of winkle pickers or a wig fitting.  This wikipedia article goes into satisfying, torturous detail on the many models of guitars that the Beatles used less iconically.  Even better is the coffee table labour-of-obsession Beatles Gear, written by Chesterfield Kings guitarist Andy Babiuk.  I had a chance to read/skim this book over a week a while ago and it went into very great detail about every piece of equipment that they used.  Another branch of this obsession is the body of research on Abbey Road's recording equipment and techniques as they pertain to Beatles recordings.  I was given a copy of Mark Lewisohn's Beatles Recording Sessions book and it is a classic of the genre.  I remember consulting it in the studio with the Munday Nuns back in the early nineties for recording ideas.

My Beatles tone MO has been this: for acoustic guitar, a midrange boost in the PA to approximate the honkiness of John and George's ladder-braced Gibson J-160Es with flatwound strings (thanks to David Love for this tidbit).  For electric guitar, I've settled on a Les Paul Junior copy that Brian Bennie built for me years ago.  It has P-90 "soapbar" pickups and thus can supply a thick, midrangy signal to the compressor, which does the work of the tube mics and tube mixing board that the Beatles so loved to overload to breaking point.  For early Beatles, a fuzztone does the job for "Paperback Writer", "Taxman" (guitar solo, played by Paul, is one, like "Stairway", that everyone should learn).  For later Beatles, it's amp overdrive - Abbey Road and Let It Be are the sound of hard-driven Fender Deluxe (only 22 watts, a small club amp), so I use a Boss Blues Driver to approximate a light overdrive.  Very early Beatles doesn't use tape overload and is in fact for the most part conventionally recorded early sixties pop.  It's when I'm playing songs like "All My Loving" or "She Loves You" that I'm really glad that I have the super-clean Fender Twin amp.  But let us turn our attention to one of the great Beatles guitar songs, "The Word," which we played last night:



"The Word" was, according to Lewisohn (p. 68) recorded on November 10, 1965 and mixed for mono and stereo the next day.  By the third take it was in the perfect form in which we receive it.  The guitar part consists of a chorus with repeated D7#9 chop (and subsequent similar blues progression) that foreshadows "Taxman," and a doubled low-string riff in the verses.  Alan Pollack beautifully deconstructs the form and other musical aspects here.  My hunch is that it's George on both parts, playing a Stratocaster (I could be completely wrong about this.  To be more sure, I would need to consult the magisterial book boxset Recording The Beatles, which rings in at a cool $144.95 US plus tax).  John, Paul and George don't yet have their matching Epiphone Casinos (Revolver was the beneficiary of this surprisingly surf-band-like matching instruments moment) and the Rubber Soul sessions seem to have been a searching time for the lads, guitar-wise.  The snarling tone, complete with low-action rattle amplified by Abbey Road's much-abused compressors, suggests the bridge pickup.  There is also some turned-up beefiness from the amps.  Geoff Emerick, in his pleasurable memoir as Beatles' chief recording engineer for many of their glory years, remembers the engineers spending a lot of time in this era futzing with the amps, trying to get just the right amount of volume and saturation.  The guitar tone in "The Word" is a classic example of this rather aristocratic tone alchemy. 

All of this obsessiveness was reduced last night to the 'brown guitar' (the LP Special I mentioned earlier) and the Twin.  I forgot the compressor at home, after all of that.