Hey Jude

"Hey Jude" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles that was released as a non-album single in August 1968. It was written by Paul McCartney and credited to the Lennon–McCartney partnership. The single was the Beatles' first release on their Apple record label and one of the "First Four" singles by Apple's roster of artists, marking the label's public launch. [Wikipedia]

Written by McCartney as a comfort to Julian Lennon, then five years old, during John's break-up with Cynthia. Originally 'Hey Jules', changed because 'Jude' was easier to sing. Lennon later assumed (or claimed to assume) the song was about him. Hey Jude represented Paul McCartney's most expansive composition, featuring an extended instrumental outro that would become one of the Beatles' most recognizable musical moments. Originally written as a comfort song for Cilla Black's son, the composition evolved into an seven-minute orchestral epic with audience sing-along potential. (Beatles - the double-disc set popularly known as the 'White Album' because of its blank Kozinn 1995, p.175)

Sessions began at EMI on 29–30 July 1968 (rehearsal/demos) and were completed at Trident Studios in Soho on 31 July and 1 August — the Beatles' first work on Trident's new 8-track Ampex AG-440 machine. A 36-piece orchestra was assembled for the four-minute coda; the players were paid double-scale on the condition that they stand and sing 'Na, na, na' on the run-out. (Half the orchestra refused, took the single fee, and went home.) The extended length and orchestral arrangement required careful session planning and overdubbing strategy. George Martin's orchestration built gradually from the intimate opening to the climactic final sections. The session captured multiple takes to achieve the desired build and emotional arc. (r very unhappy Beatles gathered around a flustered Ken Scott, who was tweaking the controls Emerick 2006, p.669)

Hey Jude is the Beatles’ first 8-track session and the longest single they ever released (7′ 11″). The recording moved from Abbey Road — still on 4-track in late July 1968 — to Trident Studios in Soho on 31 July, where the band had access to the first 8-track tape machine in London (Kehew & Ryan, Recording the Beatles, 2006, p. 236; Lewisohn (The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, 1988), p. 146). Three artefacts of that move shape the released record more than any single overdub: Trident’s eight-track tape format itself, the 36-piece orchestra layered over the long fade on 1 August, and the high-end Trident/Abbey Road monitoring discrepancy that nearly sank the mix.

Per Lewisohn (1988, pp. 145–147), Hey Jude was tracked across six dates. 29 July: Studio Two at Abbey Road, takes 1–6 — rehearsal takes with Ken Scott engineering, no producer credited. 31 July: Trident, re-make takes 1–4 with George Martin producing and Barry Sheffield engineering; the band started afresh with a basic rhythm track of piano (Paul), electric guitar (George), acoustic guitar (John), and drums (Ringo). 1 August: Trident, two distinct overdub passes — 5:00–8:00 pm Paul overdubbed bass guitar and lead vocal while the other three Beatles supplied backing vocals; 8:00–11:00 pm the 36-piece orchestra recorded the build-up under the long refrain (Lewisohn 1988, p. 146 names ten violins, three violas, three cellos, two flutes, contra-bassoon, bassoon, two clarinets, contra-bass clarinet, four trumpets, four trombones, two horns, percussion, and two string basses). The earlier bass-guitar overdub was wiped to free a track for the strings. 2 August: Trident, stereo remixes 1–3 from take 1, the third “best.” 6 August: Trident, mono remix 1 made from remix stereo 3 rather than from the eight-track — Lewisohn explicitly flags this as unusual practice. 7–8 August: back at Studio Two, the mono was re-cut “in the more conventional manner” as remixes 2–4 from take 1, with Ken Scott and George Martin spending an evening with the EMI UTC RS56 “Curve Bender” trying to restore high-frequency content that the Trident→Abbey Road monitor transition had erased (Kehew & Ryan, 2006, p. 151; Lewisohn 1988, p. 147).

and the canonical UK release record, the documented divergences across releases:

• 1968 UK mono single (Apple/Parlophone R 5722, 30 August 1968) — the reference release. The mono mix in the shops is one of the Studio Two remixes 2–4 made on 8 August at Abbey Road, with the Curve Bender high-frequency restoration; it is NOT the 6 August Trident mono-from-stereo fold (Lewisohn 1988, p. 147). Paul’s undeleted off-mic curse at 2′ 59″ is preserved — Lewisohn explicitly flags it as an “undeleted expletive” in the released record (1988, p. 146); Emerick (Here, There and Everywhere, 2006, p. 675) places it between the third-verse lines “the minute you let her under your skin” and “then you begin” and records Lennon as the Beatle who insisted it stay in “buried just low enough so that it can barely be heard.”
• 1968 US stereo single (Apple 2276, 26 August 1968) — based on the 2 August Trident stereo remix 3. The American single carried stereo from day one; the UK 7″ stayed mono.
• 1970 Hey Jude US compilation LP (Apple SW-385, 26 February 1970) — Emerick (2006, p. 800) recalls running off fresh stereo mixes of “Lady Madonna,” “Rain,” “Hey Jude,” and “Revolution” from the original multitrack tapes for this US Capitol release, rather than subjecting them to the pseudo-stereo processing applied to earlier mono-only singles. This is a separate stereo object from the 1968 Trident remix.
• 1973 1967–1970 (Blue Album, Apple PCSP 718) — uses the available stereo mix as of the early 1970s; treat as a compilation source distinct from the original single.
• 2009 stereo remaster (The Beatles Stereo Box, Allan Rouse / Guy Massey) — flat transfer of the closest available stereo master; preserves the 1968 Trident spatialisation.
• 2015 1+ Giles Martin remix — new stereo and 5.1 mixes from the eight-track tape for the expanded greatest-hits set; the orchestral build is rebalanced and the off-mic curse is at a different level relative to the lead vocal than on the 1968 mono.
• 2023 1962–1966 / 1967–1970 50th-anniversary edition (Giles Martin / Sam Okell) — stems-separation remix using Peter Jackson’s MAL technology; the orchestra, backing vocals, and the long-fade coda are isolatable as discrete objects.

The standing site editorial recommendation, per editorial standards, is the 1968 UK mono single first (the band-shipped reference, with the Curve Bender high-end restoration); the 2009 stereo remaster for the modern stereo reference; and the 2023 stems remix when the question is what the 36-piece orchestral build sounds like on its own.

The relevant techniques are anchored on the equipment hub:

• Trident’s Ampex 440 eight-track — not a Studer. The Sheffield brothers had auditioned American eight-track machines including 3M’s M23 (the model EMI Abbey Road would acquire in 1968) and chose the Ampex 440, then the most popular eight-track machine in America (Kehew & Ryan 2006, p. 333). This made Trident the first eight-track studio in London. Hey Jude is therefore the Beatles’ first eight-track session; until the Abbey Road 3M M23 was “liberated” from Francis Thompson’s office on 3 September 1968 (Lewisohn 1988, p. 153), every other Beatles track in production remained on the 4-track Studer J37.
• Trident’s Sound Techniques 20/8 console — the custom-made Sound Techniques desk installed in September 1967, with 20 input channels and eight output groups, designed by Geoff Frost (Kehew & Ryan 2006, p. 334). Linear EMT faders on the inputs; quadrant Painton faders on the eight group buses. This is not the “Sound Techniques 20/8 (Trident)” console of the early 1970s; the A-Range had not yet been designed when Hey Jude was tracked.
• Tannoy “Red” drivers in Lockwood cabinets — Trident’s control room ran two Lockwood cabinets per side, each housing Tannoy Red drivers, driven by 60-watt Radford amplifiers (Kehew & Ryan 2006, p. 334). The Tannoy Reds had significantly more high-frequency response than the Altec monitors at Abbey Road. Ken Scott’s account (Kehew & Ryan 2006, pp. 261–262; Lewisohn 1988, p. 147) and Emerick’s (2006, p. 669) both document the resulting calibration trap: the mix Scott heard at Trident sounded “amazing” / “phenomenal”; the same mix played back over Studio Two’s Altecs the next day had “absolutely no high end on it whatsoever.” Per Kehew & Ryan (2006, p. 335), the Trident monitoring “added a deceptive brightness to a truly muddy-sounding mix” — the high-frequency response gap between Trident’s Tannoy Reds and Abbey Road’s Altecs is what made the same tape sound brilliant at Trident and dull at Studio Two.
• UTC RS56 “Curve Bender” — the EMI Universal Tone Control valve EQ unit Scott used in Studio Two on 8 August to restore the missing high-frequency content for the released mono mix (Kehew & Ryan 2006, p. 151). This is the Curve Bender’s most famous use case in the Beatles catalogue.
• Trident’s Mains varispeed problem (latent on Hey Jude) — Trident’s American-made Ampex eight-track was designed for the 60 Hz US Mains current; UK Mains is 50 Hz. The Mains-varispeed amplifier that solved this had not yet been installed at the time of Hey Jude (Kehew & Ryan 2006, p. 335; House Engineer Malcolm Toft quoted). Played back at Trident on its own machine the tape sounded correct; played back on a 50 Hz machine elsewhere it would run significantly faster. Kehew & Ryan (2006, p. 335) cite this as the reason the released Hey Jude mono is “two generations removed from the multi-tracks” rather than mixed fresh from the eight-track — but Lewisohn’s 8 August session sheet (1988, p. 147) records the Studio Two mono remixes 2–4 as “from take 1” (the Trident multitrack take), so the two primary sources disagree on whether Scott physically remixed from the multitrack or from a tape copy of the 6 August Trident mono. The two accounts are presented here in parallel rather than reconciled.
• NAB vs CCIR tape EQ standard mismatch — Trident’s Ampex machines used the American NAB tape EQ standard; Abbey Road’s machines used the European CCIR standard (Kehew & Ryan 2006, p. 335). Abbey Road kept dedicated NAB-capable machines for handling US-sourced tapes, so the standards mismatch was not itself a playback problem. The constraint surfaced at the mastering stage: the LP master tape (“banded” across multiple songs) had to conform entirely to CCIR — a NAB/CCIR mixture was not acceptable for disc cutting. Trident-originated Hey Jude tapes therefore had to be converted from NAB to CCIR at Abbey Road as part of the master-banding process. Note this is a separate technical issue from the Tannoy/Altec monitoring discrepancy above, which is the cross-studio brightness effect Scott actually heard.
• Microphones — Trident’s Hey Jude microphone selection was not written down, but the studio’s typical favourites (Kehew & Ryan 2006, p. 334) were Neumann U67 (vocals and piano), AKG D12 (kick), Neumann KM56 and KM54 (snare and toms), AKG D202 (bass, with a parallel direct-input feed), and U67 or AKG C451 as overheads. Lewisohn does not enumerate the Hey Jude mics individually.
• Trident’s 1898 Bechstein grand piano — the house piano McCartney played on the rhythm track, hired from Jacques Samuels (Kehew & Ryan 2006, p. 334). Distinct in colour from Abbey Road’s Steinway and the EMI tack piano.
• The 36-piece orchestra and the long fade — tracked between 8:00 and 11:00 pm on 1 August (Lewisohn 1988, p. 146); the bass guitar from the earlier 5:00–8:00 pm overdub was wiped to free a track. Lewisohn notes the players were also asked to clap and sing the “Na, na, na” chorus along with the fade. The orchestra rides the four-minute coda from 3:09 (where the chorus first lands) to the fade-out at 7:11.
• The undeleted expletive — at 2′ 59″ (Lewisohn 1988, p. 146); Emerick (2006, p. 675) attributes the curse to McCartney (off-mic, in response to a piano clunker) and Lennon as the Beatle who insisted on leaving it audible-but-buried. Emerick's account is first-person memoir (see bibliography) and is treated here as anecdotal rather than archival.

Cross-reference: Hey Jude is the hinge between the 4-track Beatles and the 8-track Beatles. The Trident sessions (31 July – 1 August 1968) pre-date by five weeks the “liberation” of Abbey Road’s 3M M23 eight-track from Francis Thompson’s office on 3 September 1968 (Lewisohn 1988, p. 153). All four subsequent White Album tracks recorded at Trident — Dear Prudence, Honey Pie, Martha My Dear, and Savoy Truffle — carry the same Trident technology stack as Hey Jude (Ampex 440 eight-track, Sound Techniques 20/8 desk, Tannoy/Altec calibration trap, Ampex-Mains speed offset, NAB/CCIR EQ mismatch). The Ken Scott Curve Bender story repeats on those records; Kehew & Ryan (2006, pp. 261–262, 335) document the same chain of artefacts at the same studio under the same engineering team.

Released 30 August 1968 as the first single on the Apple label. The first 7-minute-plus pop single ever to top the UK and US charts. Nine weeks at US number one — the band's longest-ever streak. The 'Na, na, na' coda became a pop singalong template — paraphrased by Wilson Pickett, Phish, Glee, and many others. Paul McCartney lead vocals appear in 65 canon songs (13 in White era). The track became one of the Beatles' most commercially successful and culturally resonant compositions.

• Ivor Novello: Award for "A-Side With the Highest Sales"

Recognition mentions extracted from the Wikipedia article. Verify against the linked source before quoting.

Other recordings sharing era, vocalist, writer, key, studio, or producer with this one. Higher scores indicate stronger overlap on documented attributes.

• I Will (score 13)
• Back in the U.S.S.R. (score 11)
• Blackbird (score 11)
• Helter Skelter (score 11)
• Honey Pie (score 11)
• Lady Madonna (score 11)
• Martha My Dear (score 11)
• Mother Nature's Son (score 11)