I Saw Her Standing There (BDJ Remix)

A brand new - true stereo - remix of this classic Beatles song. During the remixing of I Saw Her Standing There, I made a major discovery, which I will describe below.

I Saw Her Standing There was recorded at EMI Studios on 11 February 1963, as part of the marathon recording session (10 hours) that produced 10 of the 14 songs on Please Please Me. In December 1963, Capitol Records released the song in the United States as the B-side on the label's first single by The Beatles, "I Want to Hold Your Hand". Not only Paul's first 'great rocker' song, but also the first 'Lennonism' in the lyrics: "Seventeen, You know what I mean...". Not to forget the first recorded "Wooah....!", just picture Paul shaking his head......

The recording sessions reveal that the Beatles and George Martin still had to get used to each other. During these early Beatles recording sessions they played their songs as if in concert, and it was "get it right or do it again". George Martin was already a seasoned record producer and was used to working on recordings (e.g using multiple takes, drop-ins etc.).

I Saw Her Standing There was the second song they recorded that day. The LP version - in stereo - is in the usual Beatles stereo mode: vocals on one side, instruments on the other. However, the first two Beatles albums, Please Please Me and With The Beatles, were recorded on two track machines (EMI-made "British Tape Recorders"); because only 2 tracks were available, some instruments were on the same track as the vocals. The songs needed to be recorded by playing all instruments and getting the vocals right at the same time. Some repair was possible using 'punch ins', segments of the song that were played again, and then spliced into the original recording. A rather crude process, that is audible if you listen closely (e.g. listen to She Loves You). Also the punch-in needed to be contain all instruments and vocals.....

This is also the reason that the Rock Band isolations of this song (and others of that period) are disappointing: there just aren't any 4 track recordings of the song, so isolations can only be made with clever software (which can't deliver good results on these heavily crowded tracks).

In the first run (Take 1) the Beatles gave it their all (being a 'Live' band) and laid down an excellent perfomance. No wonder, they had performed this composition repeatedly in their stage act for many months (including a mouth organ intro by John). Martin added an extra dose of reverb to George’s guitar solo.

It is my theory that George Martin and his engineer expected to tape several takes, getting better takes as they went along. I discovered (I don't think this has been noted before) that the way the instruments are assigned to the 2 available tracks in Take 1 is odd: Paul's vocals are on the same track as John's guitar, while the other track sounds rather empty, except when George plays his solo.

This distribution is changed in all subsequent takes, where Paul's vocals share a track with George's guitar, and John's guitar is on the other track.

Take 2 sounded Ok overall, but John and Paul screwed up the words in a few places; furthemore, George bungled his solo. For reasons I don't understand (...) Martin must have thought that Take 2 was best, and started to fix it with punch-ins: takes 3-6 are attempts to correct the words and 2 new attempts at George's solo, which he all bungled. Then Martin must have decided that enough is enough (they had one day to record 10 songs...) and abandoned to use take 2. Instead, they made a last attempt at a complete runthrough. Take 6-8 break down, but they completed Take 9. This was another good version, now released on the 'Free as a Bird' album, but then it remained unused (except for the count-in).

So, after 9 takes, Martin accepted that Take 1 was best after all. All that was needed now, was to edit in the count-in of take 9, and enthusiastic hand-claps during all of the song. I'm not entirely sure how they added the handclaps: their 2 tracks were already full.... Perhaps they recorded them on a separate tape machine ?

Anyway, they reverted to Take 1, with the oddity of having the rythm guitar and vocals on the same track. This enabled me to produce this new stereo mix: using the instrumental tracks of Take 1 (George's guitar) and Take 9 (John's guitar), combined with the vocals of Take 1 at the centre. I added the handclaps form the Rockband isoation.

Here we go, "One Two Three Fah "!