George Martin's Role in the Beatles' Musical Success

The title of ‘The Fifth Beatle’ has been given to various people affiliated with the band over time, but nobody is quite deserving of the title than Sir George Martin. He was the composer, arranger and producer for the majority of the Beatle’s career and his inputs are a direct link to some of the band’s greatest influential contributions in music history. His relationship with the band started early, in 1962 he heard one of their demo tapes and arranged a meeting with the band. Though he thought they were ‘rather unpromising’, Martin took a flyer with the band. After signing them martin actually convinced the band mates to fire Pete Best in favor of Ringo Starr, making him directly responsible for one of the most iconic line-ups in music history. His close connection with the Beatles made him an internationally recognized producer, but his numerous skills were a result of his own making. Martin had previous experience producing many different kinds of music when he started working with the Beatles, but he wouldn’t have been anyone’s first choice as a pop producer. This ended up serving the Beatles well, as Martin had an ear for experimentation that helped to bring some of the bands more ambitious ideas to life. Along the way, a handful of specific production techniques not only became Martin signatures, but they appeared on record among the first times ever, proving that the Fifth Beatle’s technical, critical and professional skills were a necessity in aiding the creation of the Beatle’s finest works.

While Martin's production and arrangement aided in the Beatles success of their early works reach soaring heights, his influence became more pronounced in 1965, when the Beatles released ‘Yesterday’, a song that Paul McCartney had been workshopping for several years. While McCartney did the heavy lifting on the song, it was Martin who pushed McCartney to include a string quartet much too his protest, resulting in the songs elevation to an iconic status thanks to his professional skills as a producer and set the precedent for the Beatles to explore the use of strings further, which they did again just a year later in ‘Eleanor Rigby’ with another string quartet piece scored by Martin. The score inspired by Bernard Herrmann's ‘Psycho’ film score, quickly joined yesterday as one of the most famous uses of strings in rock and pop. But what was also striking is the way the string octet was recorded: on eight different microphones, rather than a single one, each put up close to the instruments. “So close”, Emerick later said. “The musicians hated it, because you could see them sort of keep slipping back on their chairs to get away from the mic in case they made any errors” (Emerick). In their next album, ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, the final climactic finish would be lacking without Martin’s contributions as well. Originally a day in the life was two different half completed songs. The band was only able to smash them together with the help of Martin’s studio experimentation and orchestration he created the surreal swells that bridge the song from Lennon’s section to McCartney’s then back again. As the Beatles experimentation got more extreme, Martin became more and more pronounced, as he later created the psychedelic soundscapes on ‘I Am the Walrus’ the year after. Though Martin wasn’t particularly in the song it says to spend weeks creating the stunning orchestral accompaniment that was featured in the final version of the song. When the Beatles began to fight more during the creation of ‘White Album’, Martin took a step back in studio contributions, but return triumphantly on the Abbey Road album. He had a large collection of contributions on the album, but one of the clearest is his orchestration and arrangement of ‘The Medley’. Alongside McCartney, Martin took half a dozen small songs and smashed them together seamlessly into some of the greatest moments ever recorded.

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Multi-track recording technology, that permits multiple sound sources to be recorded individually and at separate times, was still in its infancy once Martin started working with the Beatles. Martin as a producer was a pioneer in his area, going further than the limited number of tracks available by 'bouncing down' combining multiple tracks into one, clearing up a previously occupied track for a fresh recording. On 1963's ‘Please Please Me’, he was working with two tracks, and even on ‘Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band’, EMI’s Abbey Road Studios used only four-track technology, instead of the eight-track recorders then available to the world. In 'Tomorrow Never Knows', the LSD-influenced, drone filled finale from the album Revolver in 1966, is notable for many production techniques, not to mention the use of Paul McCartney's tape loops that brought the French originated musique concrete into the world of pop. It was in this piece that Martin implemented a large mix of effects to Lennon's vocal, including sending it through a Leslie speaker as Lennon wanted to sound, “as though I am the Dalai Lama singing from the highest mountain top” (Lennon). A creative use of production skills to achieve John’s vision to say the least. Altogether, 'Tomorrow Never Knows' is a noteworthy example for the way Martin’s critical listening and technical skills assisted the Beatles combine numerous experimental techniques with separate recordings into a sonically stunning result. By ‘The White Album’ in 1968, the Beatles then recorded their songs onto the larger eight-track machines.

Though Martin was very much a technical and professional worker by the nature of his role, he had a few notable moments actually playing on Beatles songs, for example, his honky-tonk piano solo in ‘Lovely Rita’. His most notable appearance was the Bach-like piano part on the ‘In My Life’ bridge. Initially, Lennon wasn’t sure what to put there, but putting his musical background to use, Martin constructed his own piano line that sounded baroque. He recorded the piano part at half speed, which meant that it sounded twice as fast and an octave higher (and just with a generally shifted tonal quality) on playback. Being the product of Martin’s experimentation with tape speeds, many people have mistaken it for a harpsichord over the years. Another critical example of Martin’s experimentation with tape vari-speed was in the B – side to ‘Paperback Writer’ titled ‘Rain’. To create a slow and smoky effect, Martin recorded on to the instrumental track faster than the intended speed, then slowing it back down for playback; Lennon’s vocals were recorded slower as well. This however, being the Beatles and Martin’s experimentation, makes the modulated speed only the start of the list of techniques featured in on the song, further experimenting with tape effects, though Martin and Lennon argued about who’s idea it was to playback the vocals in reverse during the recording sessions of ‘Rain’, the ending verse at the end of the song marked one of the first recorded examples of such a technique. After that moment they became obsessed with doing everything backwards: “They wanted guitars backwards and drums backwards, and everything backwards, and it became a bore” (George Martin). Soon enough, the Beatles used the reverse tape effect through to the end of their career, most times with vocals at the finale of songs, similar to ‘Rain’. For the long-term, the reverse tape effect applied to the band’s instruments, as opposed to vocals, proved to be more stimulating to the band and Martin. Harrison recorded a complex two-part guitar part on Revolver’s ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, that he envisioned taking on a dreamy quality when played backwards and in ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, Ringo’s cymbals were played backwards, adding another layer of confusion to the song’s foggy trip down memory lane. In the song Lennon wanted the producer to combine two different takes, though they weren't in the same tempo or even the same key. Martin and go-to Beatle engineer Geoff Emerick made it happen, blending the two versions and changing their speeds to bring them into a matching tempo. As Ian MacDonald noted in his book ‘Revolution in the Head’, “Only a slight background change at the fifty-nine-second mark gives away their editing efforts”. ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ also gained a lot from its fifty-five hours of time recording and editing in the studio, which speaks to Martin's forward-thinking approach to the recording studio as a lab for experimenting, rather than for just recording.

To conclude, it is evident through the discography of the Beatles works that George Martin played a large part in both the band's musical success and technological experimentation as a result of his excellent skills as a producer providing a precedent of creativity that can be achieved through pushing through boundaries using already existing production tools creatively like tape machines, multi-track recording and orchestration as a result of Martin's technical, critical listening and professional skills.