Chords for How The Beatles Recorded Bass in 1967

Hey, Clay Blair, Boulevard Recording Academy.
I wanted to continue my video series on bass sounds and focus on one of my favorites, which
was actually the Jeff Emmerich Sergeant Peppers era Beatles bass sound.
This is a Rickenbacker 4001C64.
It's a reissue of the bass that McCartney used throughout the Beatles and his Wings career.
This is a 1966 Fenner Shoman in a matching cab with two 15-inch JBL D130s.
The difference in this amp and what they were using in Abbey Road at the time was this is
a little bit bigger, heftier, a little more headroom.
But there were showmans around during Sergeant Peppers as well as bassmen.
And what they were doing is mixing a direct signal [G]
with the amp.
But the amp technique is a little bit different than you're used to.
Jeff Emmerich used a C12 off the amp, anywhere from five to eight feet.
This is about between that.
This is about five feet or so off the amp.
And it's also in figure eight, so you get a bit of the room.
It's a really neat sound.
I actually use it a lot when I make records.
And I'm going to show you in the control room in a minute what we're doing in there to combine the signal.
So I'm back in the control room, and I kind of wanted to show you guys a little bit of
what that sounds like.
So basically, the direct injector, the DI, was invented at Abbey Road.
The actual DI box is something that they had made for them by a guy named Ken Townsend.
And so what Jeff would do is he would take a DI and an amp on Sergeant Peppers, and he
would blend the two.
And he would compress them through an RS124, which is the famous McCartney Abbey Road Altek compressor.
So what I've got now is I've got the RIC bass.
I'm back in the control room.
I've recorded myself a version of A Day in the Life.
And I'm just going to play the bass up against it and let you guys hear what's going on.
We have two Red 47 preamps going.
They're bussed through the console through the RS124.
And what you're hearing is a blend of the DI and the amp.
And I'm going to play along through different parts of the song, and then I'm going to show
you some stuff at the end too.
_ _ _ [E] _ [Bm] _ [Em] _ _ _
_ [C] _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ [G] _ _ [Bm] _ _ [Em] _ _ _
_ [C] _ _ [Em] _ _ [A] _ _ [Am] _
_ [G] _ _ [Bm] _ _ [Em] _ _ [G] _
_ [C] _ _ [F] _ _ [Em] _ _ [G] _
_ [C] _ _ [F] _ _ [Em] _ _ [C] _
_ [E] _ _ _ _ _ _ _
I woke up, fell out of bed, drank a cold milk [D] off my head.
_ [E] I'm on my [C#] way [B] downstairs to drink, [Em]
waking [B] up to a sound of a drum.
[E] Down the road, grabbed my hat, pulled across the street.
[D] _ _ _ [Em] I'm on my way [B] upstairs to have a smoke.
[E] Somebody's [B] stroking a winter [C] tree.
I, _ _ [G] _ _ _ _ [D] _
_ _ _ [A] _ _ _ _ [E]
I, _ _ [C] _ _ _ [G] I, _ _ [D] I, I, I, _ _ [A] _
_ _ _ [E] I, I, I.
[C] What I have going on right now for this song is kind of, it's a neck pickup with the tone
rolled almost all the way off.
So this whole, _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
it's pretty dark.
You listen to the record, you might be a little lighter.
Like it's _ too much.
So it's a very fine line.
A lot of people get confused because they think,
oh no, it's the Hofner, but what he did a lot
is he palm muted, so like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
It sounds to me like it was both pickups,
so I'm palm muting. _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ So _ you can see it's really short, like the Hofner.
But he [D] muted.
_ [C] So same deal, help from my friends
was both pickups probably. _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ So you can actually hear the room a bit in that.
On the recording too, you can hear a lot of the room.
I'd say stuff like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,
it felt like it was more of a DI sound.
You can almost bet yourself that if you hear room
on the bass, there's room on the bass,
and if it's a lot quieter on Sgt.
Pepper's
as far as the room goes, it's probably more of a DI blend.
There's some common misconceptions about when
the Rick was used, when the Hofner was used.
There's not a single picture of a Hofner bass
on the Sgt.
Pepper's sessions.
It was very much the Rick bass.
And if you hear it, you know, he loved to mute.
_ There's a lot of muting going on,
which was the sound of the Hofner,
so it's kind of like he probably did it
because he liked that sound, but he had the ability
to let the notes ring out, which you hear on
What Day in the Life when he does these.
_ When they ring out like that, you can't do that really
with a Hofner, and I mean, you can't,
it won't ring that long, though.
This is one of the techniques that I use a lot here
when I make records at Boulevard Recording,
and it's one of the techniques that I teach people as well
when they come and do the classes.
My technique's slightly different than Jeff Emmerich's
technique because the room at Abbey Road
is obviously different than my room,
and you have to adjust a little bit,
but I basically do the very same thing,
but the distance is a little different.
A lot of people find it really bizarre
to pull a mic way off of a bass amp,
and Jeff Emmerich was quoted as saying
he sometimes backed it up as far as eight feet,
and he put it in figure eight.
You probably will never, ever hear of anyone
putting a bass mic in figure eight
or anything else like that in figure eight,
but he did it because they really liked
the sound of the room, and that's what I have going on here.
You can _ hear the room. _ _ _ _
In a mix, it really sounds great.
I gotta say, it's kind of something different.
It's not something I think people are too used to these days
with everybody putting the mic right on the speaker
or just having a DI, which are all great things,
but I take the DI and the amp, and I mute them,
and what I do is I bus through two channels on the console,
and the bus will hit the compressor.
You can also do it in Pro Tools, too.
You can totally do a hardware insert
and make a bus in Pro Tools and do whatever you want with it
and not touch your original DI and bass amp track
if you want to go back to them and revisit them
and use them differently,
but I really like recording in the style
of committing to something,
which if I were doing this on tape with a band,
we would definitely not take a DI and an amp.
If this was the sound I was going for,
this would be it, and we would live with it.
Hope you enjoyed the video.
That's one of the many out-of-the-box,
weird recording techniques that we've been teaching
at Boulevard Recording Academy.
I want you guys to come to the classes
and learn some more of them.