Stu­dio One’s recent ren­o­va­tions have added major tech­ni­cal inno­va­tions in the con­trol room. A 20-year old 72-chan­nel Neve record­ing con­sole has been replaced with an 84-chan­nel upgrade. With each of the play­ers or instru­ments miked indi­vid­u­al­ly, engi­neers are grant­ed even greater flex­i­bil­i­ty dur­ing the final mix­ing process. Hav­ing access to stems of each instru­ment gives the cre­ative team flex­i­bil­i­ty to edit dif­fer­ent cuts of score much more eas­i­ly if a scene is trimmed or extend­ed in the final cut.

“The more stuff we do sep­a­rate­ly now – record­ing strings sep­a­rate­ly from brass, per­cus­sion – that helps in the edit­ing process, because you can make edits work,” Dud­man explains. ​“You can steal stuff from oth­er cues to make the edit work.” 

Stu­dio One is capa­ble of hold­ing a 100-piece orches­tra or choir at any one time, and the increase in record­ing chan­nels avail­able now means that, more often than not, each play­er is indi­vid­u­al­ly miked. 

“One of the nice things about the stu­dio is that you can do things sep­a­rate­ly, put them back togeth­er and no one would know,” enthus­es Bar­ton. ​“That’s often such a crit­i­cal fac­tor in what we do. In the dub, if the brass is inter­fer­ing with the dia­logue for some rea­son and you can’t under­stand a line because there’s some French horn thing over it, rather than pull down the whole music fad­er and get rid of it all, you can just take out the offend­ing piece, as it were, or duck it down.”

“There are times where you know in advance that stuff’s going to change,” Dud­man adds. ​“The com­pos­er has writ­ten to one ver­sion of the pic­ture. They’re already four ver­sions down, but there’s no time to re-score it.” As a result, whole sec­tions of music may be record­ed to include what’s known as an arti­fi­cial stop halfway through a musi­cal cue, fol­lowed by an arti­fi­cial start . ​“That gives you a clean out and clean in,” he con­tin­ues. ​“Then you might just do a patch sec­tion that will work for the lat­er cut and the music edi­tor will join them all togeth­er. That’s a much more time effi­cient way of doing things.”

While Stu­dio One’s con­trol room has seen sig­nif­i­cant changes, very lit­tle has been altered in the live room itself. In order to pre­serve its sig­na­ture 2.3 sec­ond reverb and rich sound favoured by com­posers and direc­tors alike, the 4,844 ft room has seen its Art Deco walls remain large­ly untouched, save for being washed. Unwill­ing to risk impact­ing the acoustics, its floor has been sand­ed and re-oiled as var­nish­ing it would have altered the sound too much.

“I’ve always thought of the acoustics and sci­ence of record­ing as sort of part sci­ence, part voodoo,” Bar­ton adds. ​“What we did­n’t want them to change was the voodoo, which is work­ing very nicely.”

As well as retain­ing the son­ic qual­i­ties that have made the space so desir­able, Abbey Road also acts as a tech­no­log­i­cal time cap­sule of sorts. Mod­ern mix­ing desks and equip­ment are opti­mised to utilise old micro­phones and equip­ment, some of which are as old as the build­ing itself.

“We nev­er throw any­thing away,” Dud­man states. ​“The Neu­mann U87s, we’ve got maybe 30 of those and they’re all from the 80s… Then you’ve got all the clas­sic valve micro­phones, which are 70 years old – the U47s that were used on Bea­t­les vocals. We now use those on brass and solo vocals. The rest of the chain has improved so much that when those were first invent­ed, you did­n’t hear how good they were… We’ve also got the old mix­ing con­soles, so depend­ing on what kind of vibe you’re after, you can move the desk into Stu­dio One and stick 16 mics through it if you want. Noth­ing’s fixed in that respect.”

The use of old­er record­ing equip­ment can some­times be neces­si­tat­ed by the time peri­od in which a par­tic­u­lar project is set, as was the case dur­ing Barton’s work on an episode of the 12 Mon­keys tele­vi­sion series set in 1944 that required source music that sound­ed ​“authen­ti­cal­ly old”. The pri­or­i­ty first and fore­most, how­ev­er, is always qual­i­ty above all else.

“Ulti­mate­ly, we’re always just try­ing to make stuff sound good,” Bar­ton con­cedes. ​“It’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly about sound­ing real­is­tic. It’s often hyper­re­al. Some of the old micro­phones have this real­ly inter­est­ing thing where their high fre­quen­cies aren’t as pro­nounced. We often use words that don’t real­ly mean very much, but they mean some­thing to most engi­neers. We often say audio sounds ​‘warm’ – because of the way that the ear­ly tech was designed, it tends to have those pleas­ing things that are part of the sound of what we like.”

There is, of course, an unde­ni­ably myth­ic qual­i­ty to the hal­lowed stu­dio spaces that remains per­haps Abbey Road’s biggest draw – even to those who might not be aware of it.

“That’s one of the things peo­ple say, they walk in and it does do some­thing,” Bar­ton enthus­es. ​“Yes, it’s the old equip­ment and the com­bi­na­tion of the cut­ting edge as well, but the walls do a thing. There’s a thing there, and you can’t quite put your fin­ger on it. We had a fas­ci­nat­ing ses­sion a few years ago with a chil­dren’s choir in Stu­dio One… The moment they start­ed singing, their direc­tor was like, ​‘I haven’t heard them sing this well’. I think it just has that effect. You walk in and you have to bring your a‑game. Peo­ple just do so instinctively.”