When I was about 21 I came to Abbey Road and I listened to the Beatles Anthology
when we were working on it and I heard A Day In The Life from the four track tape.
It didn't sound old, it didn't sound like a 30 year old record, which it was at the time.
It sounded like John Lennon was in the room.
The motivation behind everything we do here now is to try and get that feeling back.
Try and take away the layers of time and give people an experience where they can listen to The Beatles
as though it's the first time they've ever heard them.
We're working with a multitrack that is groundbreaking in so many ways.
It isn't often when you're making a record that you know the record that you're working on
is a seminal, fundamentally genre changing piece of material.
This album was the baseline for everything that came afterwards in our lives.
There's no better example of something to do and do it well,
if we were to take Sergeant Pepper's on its 50th anniversary and create something new out of it.
Part of our rack is 60 year old compressors and limiters that were used on the Beatle sessions
and part of it is brand new technology.
When Sergeant Pepper was originally made it was intentionally made as a mono record.
My dad and Geoff Emerick and the Beatles laboured over Sergeant Pepper to create a single mono disc
and it's amazing what they did, filtering down this incredible range of sounds
onto one vinyl record for one speaker.
And they concentrated and laboured over these mono mixes.
The band were present and they added their own effects.
When the stereo was done, which everyone knows today, it was done very quickly, almost as a throw away.
The band weren't present, it was "Let's do the stereo".
To go back, listen to these tapes,
what we're trying to do is we're trying to respect what the Beatles did in that mono
but turn it into a much more immersive listen.
You can hear everything now, you know, we look at the equipment we have around us
and that's the inspiration for us, is to listen to what they tried to do and open out that world.
So huge privilege working on on a record like this, you know,
there's something special about doing it here in the place it was recorded.
We take this original mono or stereo thing and explode it into Atmos
and then it's about creating a realistic sound field that envelops you and comes at you
from all directions but it keeps that original intent.
The way I think about this Atmos mix is that 50 years ago
actually in the next-door room to this brand-new room studio two its next door to the room we're sitting in now,
my dad and Geoff Emerick and the Beatles made Sergeant Pepper
and really what they tried to do is they tried to paint the walls of the studios with different colours of sound.
They created a picture of sound that no-one had heard before.
The fun thing is now, with all these speakers that we have around us and this experience,
we're actually bringing those walls to life.
You don't have a single speaker, the whole room can emanate with the sound of Sergeant Pepper,
and that's the exciting thing about this Atmos mix.
They're able to achieve something in this particular playback that has been
kind of the holy grail of record production from the very beginning which is
trying to ensure that the listener gets to hear the music the way you heard it when you were in the studio.
What I want to do is I want to give you an example of what Atmos does.
It's usually a tamboura, an Indian drone, which is a sound of Pepper, it's on three songs on Pepper.
I'll play it to you mono first, so...
what we're hearing now is a single tamboura coming out of the centre speaker,
this is what mono was in those days.
If we move into stereo, stereo is left and right speakers.
A tamboura in stereo sounds like this...
And now, the world of Atmos.
So what we can do is we can immerse you in that sound in the room
and it can rotate around you. So now listen to this...
So we have a tamboura all the way around us now.
This is a chance to go back again and turn out the lights,
don't watch an image and listen to your favourite album of all time.
My father loved technology but for the right reasons.
He loved groundbreaking technology, so I know what he would have thought of this
and he would have loved it. He would have loved the idea that, you know, he loved clarity.
The Beatles were very economical with the use of their instruments
as you can hear, you'll hear when you listen to the album.
But you can hear everything and you can hear everything that, in different spaces
and you can always fall into the record, and that's what my dad tried to create 50 years ago,