Mojo - The Music Magazine

Giles Martin talks to MOJO's Andrew Male about his journey into the Abbey Road archives to unearth the music and chat for The Beatles: Rock Band game.

THE BEATLES: ROCK BAND... Yes, I saw that face, MOJO reader. Just for kids? A chance to watch some cartoons of the Beatles while thunking away on a plastic instrument over pre-existing Fabs tracks (these ones, to be precise) And yet, bound up in the Rock Band game play, sonic surprises are in store for even the most sceptical Beatle nut.

Brought in to work on Rock Band following the ground-breaking work he and his father Sir George Martin accomplished on The Beatles' Love soundtrack, Giles Martin and his team have remixed the 45 songs for the game, bringing astonishing clarity to everything from I Feel Fine to Revolution. Suddenly there's no mistaking John's guitar for George's on Abbey Road's The End.

Moreover, as Giles explained to me last month, they've unearthed a wealth of previously unheard studio chatter for the beginning and end of each song, gems of incidental Fabs babble salvaged from the Abbey Road studio master tapes. So, from the game's release date of September 9, where can you go to travel through magical 3D settings from Mathew Street, L2 to 3 Savile Row, WS1 whilst listening to The Beatles as you've literally never heard them before? Step aside kids, dad fancies trying out some rooftop guitar on Dig A Pony!

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How long did it take to get the music together for Beatles Rock Band?
It's taken about a year and a quarter. But it would have taken far longer if the tape hadn't been in such good shape. These tracks were recorded 40 years ago and they're still of incredibly high quality - the best quality audiotape ever employed. You can put the reel on the machine and it still sounds exactly like it did all those years ago. You don't have to bake those tapes. You get stuff from the mid '80s or early '90s and you have to bake them all the time, but the Beatles stuff was pristine. It sounds like it did when they recorded it. It's the perfect storage medium.

What was the biggest challenge you faced?
The hardest challenge was on the early stuff, through to Sgt Pepper. You'd quite often have bass and guitar all on one track, or drums and guitar like on Sgt. Pepper Reprise. When they recorded on 4-track the first run-through of the band would usually be on one track with overdubs on the other three tracks. Our challenge, for Rock Band, was to separate out bass, guitar, drums and vocals, so gamers could play along with each in isolation.

Fortunately, there's this new audio restoration program which allows you to remove a bassline without taking out the bass frequencies across the board. We wouldn't have been able to do that even three years ago. We've managed to demix stuff that previously it was impossible to de-mix and you can now get deeper into a song than ever.

There's lots of incidental audio, studio chat, which really adds to the feeling of involvement.
My intention was to put people into the privileged position that I've been in, of feeling like they're in the studio with the band. And also to try and get across the fact that the Beatles were human. The more you get exposed to that - the incidental speech from all those tapes - the more incredible they become. It's such a strange feeling when you hear the outtakes where they stop and start again and suddenly they sound like the record.

For the loading screens for each song, what I did was... say you choose a song like I Am The Walrus or Here Comes The Sun, I would then go and get every single take they did of those songs and not listen to the takes but the bits before and after to see if there was enough dialogue - because the loading time is generally about eight to twelve seconds - so I'm looking for twelve seconds of stuff before the song starts. When you select your song there's a picture of the control room looking down on the studio, and you hear what you would have heard in a control room.

So what happens if you pull off Paul's Taxman solo? Or mess up the Hard Day's Night chord?
If you can finish the song, and you do well, you hear 'That was a great take' or 'How was that?, 'Was that good?' in the Beatles' own voices. Or if it's bad, they go 'Oh God, you'd better do that again'. I think I found about two thousand fragments like that. But when they're recording, even when it gets to Take 37, they never really get pissed off with each other. You don't really hear that.

How much input did you get from the surviving Beatles?
Paul would come in here, because he lived nearby, and sit for three to four hours, and actually spend time going through the game. I'd show him Shea Stadium and how we'd done it and he'd say, 'What's that end bit?' because quite often I'd have to finish songs, add new endings, because the original recording would fade out and fades are rubbish in the game. So that's a challenge in itself. How do you finish I Feel Fine? Paperback Writer, Daytripper? These are Beatles classics and I have to finish them.

Where possible, I'd try to source the material from a live version. So I'd listen to Budokan, Shea Stadium, whatever, and if it was good quality I'd chop in that ending and filter it. So I put the Shea Stadium ending on I Feel Fine and was rather pleased with it. Paul was in one day, and at the end of I Feel Fine he said, 'What's that noise?' and I said, 'That's your bass, Paul, feeding back!' And he was like... 'You're not putting that in!' And I was like, 'But that's what happened!' I did change it in the end. He is the boss, after all!

Interview by Andrew Male

Check out our exclusive Beatles Rock Band screenshots below!