Giles Martin on remixing A Hard Day's Night | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

There’s an interesting interview with Giles Martin on Music Radar, where he talks about restoring the soundtrack to AHDN for the film’s reissue.

I didn’t know some of the songs were recorded on two-track.

What I found out was that half of A Hard Day’s Night is two-track. He had four-track available to him, only he didn’t use it. I guess there was no point, as the band was writing these instant hits. You didn’t really think about what was going to happen in the future.

Some songs were four-track and others were two-track. A Hard Day’s Night and I Should’ve Known Better were four-track; I’m Happy Just To Dance With You and Tell Me Why were two-track. The very early stuff was two-track. Trying to do a 5.1 to She Loves You was hard. That song is in the live performance section, and it’s in mono. Because of that, you have nothing to play around with; you just have everything on one track.

On the slower mix of And I Love Her :

I read that the mixes of the songs in the film were slower than the album versions. Why was that?

“Yeah, and that’s something I asked them to change. When I was working on the Martin Scorsese-George Harrison film, I noticed it. And I Love Her was a semitone down. It’s got to do with frame rates. I asked them, ‘Can you change the frame rate of the film?’ and of course, you can’t because that would speed up the film. Pitching the music but keeping it at the same speed might have worked, but then you’re going into a digital world that’s kind of unpleasant. It’s a bit like plastic surgery, and you don’t want to be doing that, putting a new face on something. The thing about And I Love Her in the film is, it’s a different mix. It’s not a double-tracked vocal, whereas the original is.”

I’m not sure how I feel about this bit: re-creating and adding effects and voices.

You said that you had to track down the tapes of dialogue and sound effects. Did you have any problems with those tapes once you found them?

“Oh, yeah, massive. That was a massive problem because quite often the dialogue and effects were together. We ended up sampling and looping various things, like the sound of a train, for example. On the 5.1, you hear the same train sound going around as you do the dialogue and effects. But the weird thing I found was, if I added more effects, they almost canceled the original sounds out.

“Just think, if you have George knocking over an amp, which he does in one scene, we wanted that in there – it’s more immersive. We cheated certain things. It bothered me that when the girls were shouting The Beatles’ names in the concert, you couldn’t hear them. So I got some girls to scream their names [laughs]. It’s very subtle. You wouldn’t notice it. I probably shouldn’t have told you that. [Laughs]

“But this is what Paul says, and my dad says it as well: ‘You do what you can if they could do it now.’ It’s not about re-creating anybody’s vision – it’s preserving it. I didn’t want to change what The Beatles or Richard Lester or my dad did. You just have to have empathy for what they did and preserve it.”

Read the full article, it’s good. I also learnt something right at the end, which Giles didn’t know either: that The Beatles are never mentioned anywhere in the film.