Here’s another acapella song by the Beatles…stunning. This was lifted from the Anthology 3 CD.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koJEpkskeBs

Geoff Emerick (The Beatles engineer for most of their songs from Revolver thru Abbey Road) talks about the recording of this song for about 3 pages in his book, “Here, There & Everywhere; My Life Recording The Beatles.” BTW, this is, hands down, the best book written chronicling The Beatles music. There are more detailed books (read “minutia”), but this is the guy who recorded, engineered and mixed some the best Beatles music.

Here are a couple of excerpts regarding this song:

“The following Monday everyone returned to the studio fresh and rejuvenated from a weekend off, ready to tackle the vocals. The only problem was that George Martin had worked out nine harmony parts for the Beatles to sing, but we only had five tracks to record them on. That was resolved easily enough when it was decided to have John, Paul and George Harrison sing their 3 part harmony together, instead of overdubbing each part one at a time, and then have them do two additional passes in order to add on the remaining 6 parts. It was as much an aesthetic as it was a technical decision, because their voices had always meshed so well naturally…”

“To get the phrasing spot-on, Paul was making hand gestures, conducting the others. It would take more than 5 hours to get those vocals done, and though John’s patience was sorely tried that afternoon, no one gave up. Perfection was the goal, and nobody was prepared to accept anything less.”

“They knew they were doing something special and they were determined to get it right. There was no clowning around or joking; everyone was very serious, very focused. Their goal was to be able to sing each pass all the way though from start to finish-it was almost a matter of pride…”

(Emerick did not use any compressors or limiting in the tracking of the song)

“I (Geoff Emerick) was so enamored of the sonic results of not using compressors or limiters that I even decided to mix the entire track without them…. Yet every word, every syllable is crystal clear on the final mix, due to the time and effort we all expended on getting the song recorded right in the first place.”