Climb Aboard The Sargent Pepper Time Capsule With Geoff Emerick

I found a very interesting article about the remake of Sargent Pepper

NEW YORK, NEW YORK, October 5, 2007 — Commemorating the 40th anniversary of what many regard as the most influential rock album of all time, legendary engineer Geoff Emerick produced and engineered the remake of The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” using JBL LSR6300 Series studio monitors. In the new collection, the original 13 tracks are covered by some of the most popular recording artists in the world,

For the recordings, Emerick assembled much of the original equipment used on The Beatles’ album, including two of the original Studer one-inch four-track tape recorders and two of the original EMI mixing consoles provided by Mark Knopfler and Lenny Kravitz. Additionally, Emerick borrowed essential vintage AKG microphone models from the AKG Museum in Vienna, Austria. Richard Lush, who assisted Emerick on the original 1967 recording, joined Emerick as assistant engineer on this project, with Richard Cooper from British Grove Studios. Emerick’s technical approach was to stay true to the original, recording to four-track tape and mixing in mono. “Being four-track recordings, as were the original Beatles tracks, the drums were in mono,” Emerick noted. “The second track was typically bass, guitars or keys, which were all mixed together onto a single track. The third track was allocated to vocals and the last track was allocated to overdubs. So we just used what we had when we did the original.” As with the original “Sgt. Pepper” project, some of the four-track tapes were sub-mixed to a second four-track recorder, providing additional tracks for overdubbing.

The initiator of this great project was none other than Bob Geldof after he read Geoff s book “My life Recording the Beatles” and thought it would be a good Idea to to a BBC documentary on the rerecording of “Sargent Pepper”

Geldof thought it would be a great idea to produce a radio documentary and a TV documentary for the BBC of Emerick re-recording “Sgt. Pepper” using some of today’s top artists and the original equipment. “The first rule of the recordings was that we were going to have fun,” Emerick said. “ When I can, I still work in analog, so we were going to [record on] tape. That means if we mess up in the middle of the rhythm track, we go back to the beginning and start recording again. For me, the performance has to come almost in its entirety from the studio floor.”

Quite amazing to retrace steps of musical greatness!