CRP's Blog

Creating “Pictures in Sound” with Sir George Martin

By Ken Womack, author of Sound Pictures

For George Martin, the illustrious producer behind the Beatles’ unparalleled achievements in popular music, the recording studio emerged as a kind of magic workshop where sound could be transformed into musical imagery.

Martin was fond of employing an art metaphor for explaining the vast possibilities of musical production. “Drawing is not what one sees, but what one must make others see,” he later observed, paraphrasing the words of French impressionist Edgar Degas, and “in a way, that’s what we do in sound. The recording is not what one hears, but what one must make others hear.” As the years wore on, Martin’s impressionistic metaphor proved to be a powerful realization for him. “Gradually, I got hooked” by the studio’s artistic possibilities, he later observed. “I didn’t want to leave it. It enabled me to be creative. I could do things that I found very enjoyable.”

But for Martin, the real challenge, as he learned on more than one occasion throughout his life as a working record producer, was walking the tightrope between managing his acts’ artistic potential and serving as a creative director who wasn’t shy about sharing his hard-wrought experience. His clients needed to believe that the ideas he stimulated and brought to life were theirs alone, but at the same time, he had to be as forceful as possible to get the best out of his artists.

It made for a daunting task that Martin had to achieve with great tact, flattery, and efficiency—an unusual combination of personal traits by any measure. But Martin soon learned that he had all three qualities in spades. He was able to sublimate his artists’ larger egos inside the contrastingly less-threatening space of his humble presence. And it didn’t hurt that he was good-looking—tall, blond, and well-spoken with piercing blue eyes and a staid demeanor.

Martin quickly found that he commanded a quiet sense of authority and confidence from his artists. At times, they wanted not only to please him but to act as genuine collaborators in the recording enterprise. His artists soon found that the “squarish” seeming man with the soothing voice and the pressed shirt and tie was one of them.

During the later years of his career—as he challenged the Beatles to transform their beat-band sound into something larger and more expansive—he was able to create a series of “sound pictures” for the ages, studio recordings that vividly come to life with their own musical drama and imagery. In the examples, Sir George shows us how it’s done.

The Beatles, “Strawberry Fields Forever” (1967)

Along with “Penny Lane,” Martin would describe the band’s double A-sided February 1967 single as “the best record we ever made.” When John Lennon debuted the song for him, Martin was “in love” with the tune. But in short order, the Beatles and their producer transformed Lennon’s simple composition into a masterwork of musical color and artistic exploration—at one point, even merging two different segments (in different keys and tempos, no less!) into a seamless whole.

The Beatles, Abbey Road medley (1969)

With the symphonic suite that concludes the Beatles’ swan song, Martin challenged the bandmates to push the boundaries of rock as a musical form. “I wanted to get John and Paul to think more seriously about their music,” said Martin. “There would be nothing wrong with making a complete movement of several songs, and having quotes back from other songs in different keys. And even running one song into another contrapuntally but thinking of those songs in a formal classical way.” With the Abbey Road medley, Martin and the Beatles did just that. From “You Never Give Me Your Money” through “The End,” the Beatles’ lyrics and attendant music impinge upon the inherent difficulties that come with growing up and growing older. Appropriately, Paul McCartney concludes the medley with a quasi-Shakespearean couplet – “A cosmic, philosophical line,” in Lennon’s words: “And in the end the love you take / Is equal to the love you make.”

Jeff Beck, “Diamond Dust” (1975)

As possibly Martin’s favorite post-Beatles work, Jeff Beck’s “Diamond Dust” allowed the producer to work inside the confines of a jazz rock palette. “Jeff really used to paint music with his guitar, too,” Martin recalled. “He thought of it in that way, with sounds as well as notes. And the extraordinary thing was he used to be able to do it with the most primitive of weapons, too. His axes weren’t the best in the world sometimes, but he just used to make them sing.” For “Diamond Dust,” “I scored an accompaniment for strings,” he later wrote, “a duologue with Jeff’s guitar” and Martin’s dramatic orchestration that brought the song to a mesmerizing conclusion.

Cheap Trick, “World’s Greatest Lover” (1980)

In one of his most vivid creations, Martin transformed Cheap Trick’s longing romantic ballad “World’s Greatest Lover” into pure cinema. With the band from Rockford, Illinois, creating one of their most unforgettable love songs, Martin composed a soaring orchestral score that succeeded in making the heartbroken narrator’s plight even more tender and affecting.

John Lennon, “Grow Old with Me” (1998)

As perhaps his greatest production challenge, Martin was tasked by Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono with creating an orchestral accompaniment for “Grow Old with Me,” one of the former Beatle’s last demos, for the upcoming John Lennon Anthology box set. In addition to the emotional nature of working with his lost mate for the first time in decades, “Grow Old with Me” presented a number of technical issues as well, especially given that John frequently recorded his demos by placing his tape recorder on top of his piano at the Dakota, which resulted in the instrument being louder than the vocal. “What I did was construct an arrangement where I could take out the whole of John’s track when he wasn’t singing, rather than leaving the track in throughout and then trying to smother it,” Martin later wrote. The result was a spellbinding reunion between artist and producer for the ages.

Ken Womack is an internationally renowned Beatles authority regarding the band’s enduring artistic influence. He is the author, most recently, of Maximum Volume: The Life of Beatles Producer George Martin (The Early Years: 1926—1966) and Sound Pictures: The Life of Beatles Producer George Martin (The Later Years, 1966—2016). His previous Beatles-related books include Long and Winding Roads: The Evolving Artistry of the Beatles and The Beatles Encyclopedia: Everything Fab Four. You can learn more about Ken’s work at kennethwomack.com.

Sound Pictures is available now!

[Buy here] [Request a review copy]