I Am the Walrus

Story

Recording

Equipment

Recording Timeline

• 5 September 1967 — first session, 16 takes (only 5 complete) — Studio One, 7.00pm–1.00am. P: George Martin. E: Geoff Emerick. 2E: Ken Scott / Richard Lush. Recording: takes 1–16. The basic rhythm track comprised “bass guitar, lead guitar, an electric piano and drums, plus an overdub of a mellotron”. Kehew & Ryan describe the best take, take 16, as “Ringo’s drums, Paul’s tambourine, John’s Pianet, and George’s electric guitar” — identifying the electric piano as the Hohner Pianet specifically and not enumerating a Mellotron on take 16. Source conflict per §1: Lewisohn’s session log includes a Mellotron overdub; K/R’s per-take diagram does not. The page records both attributions and does not pick a side. The first three takes no longer exist — “the tape was wound back to its beginning and re-used during the session”.^1,2
• 6 September 1967 — reduction take 16 → take 17 + bass / drum / lead-vocal SI — Studio Two, 7.00pm–3.00am. P: George Martin. E: Geoff Emerick. 2E: Ken Scott. “Paul and Ringo then superimposed more bass guitar and drums and John recorded his memorable lead vocal”. During the take 16→17 reduction, “John’s Pianet was treated with fairly wide flanging/chorusing” — the reduction itself was a flanging-processing stage, not just a tape bounce. Four mono remixes were made for acetate cutting; only the complete fourth was marked “best”.^1,2
• 27 September 1967 (afternoon) — the orchestral session — Studio One, 2.30–5.30pm. P: George Martin. E: Ken Scott. 2E: Richard Lush. Recording: tape reduction take 17 into takes 18–24, with SI onto 18–24. Sixteen instrumentalists, all playing “notes around the bottom end of the scale”: eight violins (Sidney Sax leading), four cellos, one contra-bass clarinet (Gordon Lewin) and three horns. Rather than lump the orchestra onto one track, “the strings and horns simultaneously recorded their parts onto the other three tracks — violins on one track, cellos on another, and horns and contra bass clarinet on a third” while take 17 played back to be reduced to one track. Seven takes (18–24); Martin chose take 20, then bounced it to take 25 — “bouncing the violins and horns together in order to free up one extra track” for the Mike Sammes Singers due that evening.^1,2
• 27 September 1967 (evening) — the Mike Sammes Singers — Studio Two, 7.00pm–3.30am. P: George Martin. E: Ken Scott. 2E: Richard Lush. Recording: tape reduction take 20 into take 25, SI onto take 25. Sixteen voices — eight male, eight female — sang Martin’s “delightfully demented” arrangement: “Ho-ho-ho, hee-hee-hee, ha-ha-ha”, “Oompah, oompah, stick it up your jumper!”, “Got one, got one, everybody’s got one” and “a series of shrill whooping noises”. Source conflict per §1 — “first non-Beatle vocalists”: Kehew & Ryan call the Sammes Singers “the first non-Beatle vocalists to appear on one of the group’s records”, but Lewisohn documents non-Beatle backing vocals three months earlier on the 25 June 1967 All You Need Is Love broadcast (Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Keith Richard, Keith Moon, Eric Clapton and others on the chorus). The Sammes troupe were arguably the first professional non-Beatle vocal ensemble, but not the first non-Beatle voices overall; the page records both and does not pick a side.^1,2
• 28 September 1967 — manual sync of take 25 onto take 17 (flagged bounce-route conflict) — Studio Two, 4.00–5.30pm then 7.00pm–3.00am. P: George Martin. E: Ken Scott. 2E: Richard Lush. The orchestra-plus-Sammes tape (take 25) was merged with the Beatles’ instruments and vocal (take 17); track 2 of take 17 had been left free for the purpose. Source conflict per §1: Lewisohn reports take 25 “was originally a reduction of take 17” and was reduced again to one track before the bounce, making the master contain “in essence, the same rhythm track both with and without the later overdubbing”; K/R argue this may be a misreading of the paperwork, or a 1/4″ BTR2 mono intermediate bounce forced by other four-tracks being unavailable — “Regardless, the end result was the same: Take 25 was bounced down onto Take 17.” The page records both accounts.^1,2
• 29 September 1967 — final mono mix, 17 remixes + the King Lear radio feed — Studio Two, 7.00pm–5.00am. P: George Martin. E: Ken Scott. 2E: Graham Kirkby. Mono mixing: remixes 6–22 from take 17; editing of mono remixes 10 and 22 into remix mono 23. “Although 17 mono mixes of ‘I Am The Walrus’ were effected on this night, only two of those were complete. But they were enough, and the final master version was an edit of the two.” The first half came from remix mono 10 (no radio feed) up to “Sitting in an English garden”; the last half from remix mono 22 (with the live radio feed) — edited as remix mono 23.¹
• 6 November 1967 — stereo mix begun; mock-stereo splice for the King Lear feed — Studio Two. P: George Martin. E: Geoff Emerick (back at the desk after his Pepper-era exhaustion break). 2E: Ken Scott (stepping back to second engineer to assist with the track he had seen to completion). Emerick used the standard arrangement of Tracks 1 and 2 panned Left and Right and Tracks 3 and 4 to Centre. Because the King Lear feed existed only on the mono master, Emerick made six stereo mixes from take 17 and then a “mock stereo” (re-channelled) mix from mono remix 22 — “all the bass frequencies” on one side, “all the treble frequencies” on the other — and edited the true-stereo first half to the mock-stereo second half, switching at 2:00 into the song.²
• 17 November 1967 — stereo re-mix of the latter portion + the two-beat-intro discrepancy — Emerick returned to re-mix the latter portion “yet again, and while doing so, he failed to trim the two beats off the intro”. This is the central audible mono/stereo divergence: mono carries the four-beat Pianet intro (Ken Scott’s 29 September trim); stereo retains the original six-beat intro (Emerick’s oversight). “This difference in beats on the intro is one of the most noticeable differences between the mono and stereo mixes.”²

Studio Notes

• John’s blistering lead vocal — REDD.47 / REDD.51 overdrive — Geoff Emerick on the distinctive distorted edge of the 6 September vocal: “That was a bit of overload. Those mic amps were like their own fuzz pedals. It wasn’t a nasty distortion, it kind of helped the signal.” The overload was the REDD.47 microphone amplifiers in the REDD.51 console driven hot — not an outboard fuzz pedal or a console-bus distortion stage. Per Kehew & Ryan the sound “was the result of overdriving the REDD.47 amps in the REDD.51 console.”²
• The King Lear radio overlay — The 29 September live radio feed was tuned through “foreign stations” before coming to rest on the BBC Third Programme (renamed Radio 3 the very next day, 30 September 1967) broadcasting a 190-minute production of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Lear. The audible material is from Act IV Scene VI — opening with Gloucester’s “Now, good sir, what are you?” — and is “particularly evident at the end of the song, from Oswald’s ‘…take my purse’ through to Edgar’s ‘Sit you down, father; rest you’”. The actors were Mark Dignam (Gloucester), Philip Guard (Edgar) and John Bryning (Oswald).^1,2
• The two-beat intro edit (mono only) — After the RM10×RM22 splice was committed as remix mono 23, “Ken Scott — at the request of either George Martin or one of the Beatles — then edited out two beats of the six-beat electric piano intro” on the mono master. Ken Scott on the session: “I remember with ‘Walrus’ being very frustrated, because I was trying to edit whilst everyone was talking at the top of their voices in the Control Room, and I couldn’t hear a thing… I remember screaming in the end, and they all shut up.” The trimmed intro is the released mono; the stereo retains the original six-beat intro.²
• Final eight-element merge on take 17 — The released master sits on take 17 with all subsequent mixing done from that one tape. The merged elements: Ringo’s drums + Paul’s tambourine + John’s flanged Pianet + George’s electric guitar (take 16 bounce); Paul’s overdubbed bass + Ringo’s doubled snare-and-bass-drum overdub (6 September); John’s REDD-overdriven lead vocal (6 September); the orchestra bounced from take 20 (27 September afternoon); the Mike Sammes Singers chorale (27 September evening); and — in mono only — the live BBC King Lear radio feed (29 September remix 22).^1,2
• ADT — the standard Walrus-era vocal treatment — Ken Townsend’s ADT was invented on the Tomorrow Never Knows session of 6 April 1966 and was Beatles-era ubiquitous from 1966 forward. K/R’s per-song diagram does not specifically enumerate ADT on the Walrus master, but the lead-vocal layering and the Sammes Singers chorale both sit inside the 1967 Pepper–MMT “ADT on everything” window. Per §1 less-specific-when-uncertain, the page records ADT as Walrus-era plausible-by-default rather than as primary-source-documented for this specific track.^1,2

Releases

• 1967 UK mono double-EP Magical Mystery Tour (8 December 1967, Parlophone MMT-1) — Final mono master = remix mono 23, an edit of the first half of remix mono 10 (no radio feed) spliced at “Sitting in an English garden” to the last half of remix mono 22 (with the live BBC King Lear feed), made 29 September 1967 in Studio Two by P: George Martin, E: Ken Scott, 2E: Graham Kirkby. The mono carries the four-beat Pianet intro after Ken Scott edited two beats out of the six-beat original. Seventeen mono remixes (numbers 6–22) were attempted that night; only two were complete, and the final master is the RM10/RM22 edit.^1,2
• 1967 US stereo LP Magical Mystery Tour (27 November 1967, Capitol SMAL 2835) and 1971 UK stereo LP Magical Mystery Tour (19 November 1971, Apple PCTC 255) — Stereo mix begun 6 November 1967 by E: Geoff Emerick, 2E: Ken Scott. The true-stereo first half (from take 17) is edited to a mock-stereo second half (re-channelled from mono remix 22), switching at 2:00 to keep the King Lear feed. The stereo retains the original six-beat Pianet intro because Emerick failed to trim the two beats on the 17 November 1967 stereo re-mix — the mono carries the four-beat trimmed intro.²
• Anthology 2 (18 March 1996, Apple) — Post-Lewisohn release. Per §1 less-specific-when-uncertain (Lewisohn’s 1988 text predates Anthology 2 by eight years), this entry flags the variant’s existence without making claims beyond what the compilation’s own liner notes establish.
• The Beatles Anthology DVD true-stereo remix (31 March 2003, Apple) — Post-Lewisohn. For the DVD, EMI engineers synced the original four-tracks from takes 16, 17, 20 and 25, panning the elements separately (cellos Right; violins and brass Left; Mike Sammes Singers Centre; Ringo’s drums Centre with Paul’s bass; George’s electric guitar Right). “For an encore, they managed to find an actual clean recording of the BBC broadcast of King Lear and flew it into the mix, recreating the radio static and tuning noises as well.”²
• 2009 Stereo Remasters (9 September 2009, Apple) and 2017 Sgt. Pepper’s 50th-Anniversary box (26 May 2017, Apple) — Post-Lewisohn variants. The 2017 release is part of the Pepper anniversary editions rather than a dedicated MMT remix; documented in album liner notes rather than in the primary-source canon; flagged here for completeness.