Free Beatles' Let It Be (33 1/3) by Steve Matteo

standards, which is not what rock ‘n’ roll records were all about. Bass was a big issue at EMI. We would listen to American records and the bass would sound so punchy, and we could never get that—and we tried!
    The Beatles had recently begun to make a more concerted effort to record outside of Abbey Road. They searched out studios that were more technically advanced. Abbey Road Studios, having had only four-track capability since October of 1963, had only started using eight-track equipment, at the urging of the Beatles, on September 3, 1968. The first recording the group did on eight-track was George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”
    The recording sessions that were about to take place at Apple would turn out to be completely different from any others that the Beatles had ever done.
    The man responsible for getting Apple Studios up and running was Alex Madras. “Magic Alex,” as he was known, had captivated John Lennon with his frequent pie-in-the-sky electronic ideas. He had been installed at Apple Electronics, at 34 Boston Place in Marylebone, and for nearly three years, at great expense, he attempted tocome up with groundbreaking electronic ideas to eclipse the seemingly antiquated technical standards of EMI.
    Madras’s first big test proved to be an immense failure and temporarily derailed the “Get Back” project. He had promised the group that not only would he furnish it with more than the eight-track capability of Abbey Road, but that it would also have a 72-track mixing console at its disposal. Also, each track would have its very own speaker. The 72-track, multi-channel console would be hooked up to the 3M eight-track recorder the group already had set up and waiting to be used at Apple.
    Dave Harries, who had started working at EMI’s factory at Hayes in 1964, first worked with the Beatles in October of that year and would go on to have a long career working for George Martin’s various AIR studios. He recalled the recording set-up concocted by Magic Alex: “Although it was very futuristic and it had some very good ideas on it, it just did not work professionally. We tried to get it working and did a couple of takes on it. Then we had to take it out and bring stuff over from EMI.”
    Harries went on to explain the recording desk Madras built in more detail:
    He had an oscilloscope as a meter. So instead of having level meters, he actually had the scope as a meter,which was a very good idea; but the trouble was, it interfered with everything in the desk because the scope had different types of electronics than the audio electronics. It was like an 8-channel bar graph meter made out of an oscilloscope. He should have attended to more basic audio things on the console before he went into little tricks like that.
    Keith Slaughter, like Harries, began at Hayes and became part of Abbey Road’s technical staff. He started in 1954 and stayed until 1969. Slaughter’s long tenure working at Abbey Road Studios included being on hand on June 6, 1962, the day of the Beatles’ audition for George Martin. In 1969, Slaughter went off to join George Martin for the building of Martin’s first AIR studio in Mayfair, near Oxford Circus, on the fifth floor of Peter Robinson’s department store. (The studio later moved to a converted church at Lyndhurst in the early 90s.) Slaughter also went on to build studios for Alan Parsons and Pete Townshend, among his many other recording endeavors.
    Slaughter was at Abbey Road on the day that it became apparent that the equipment installed at Apple was inadequate. He recalled, “We had this panic call from George Martin at Apple and he said, ‘For God’s sake, bring some equipment. We’ll never get anywhere with this lot.”’ Once George Martin had rung up Abbey Road and told them of the problem with the equipmentthat Madras had built, they sent over two Red 51 mixing consoles that had four-track output and eight channel inputs. In order to compensate for