Savoy Truffle

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Overview

Background

Pattern analysis

Recording

Mix variants & recording techniques

Mix variants

• 1968 UK mono LP The Beatles (“White Album”) (22 November 1968, Apple [Parlophone] PMC 7068, side D track 4) — Released mono master, mono remix 1 from take 1 at EMI Studio Two on Monday 14 October 1968 per Lewisohn p. 162 session sheet. P: George Martin. E: Ken Scott. 2E: John Smith. The 14 October session built mono remixes 1–6 from take 1 (Lewisohn p. 162); remix 1 became the released mono master. Distinctive 1968 mono characteristics: the K/R p. 486 ADT brass treatment sums to centre (no hard-L/R panning audible in the mono), so the “two separately overdubbed parts” illusion that K/R p. 297 cites as the canonical illustration is collapsed to one. The RS61-pair-distorted brass remains audibly distorted in both mixes; the mono just plants it dead centre with the drums and bass.
• 1968 UK stereo LP The Beatles (“White Album”) (22 November 1968, Apple [Parlophone] PCS 7068, side D track 4) — Released stereo master, stereo remix 1 from take 1 at EMI Studio Two on 14 October 1968 per Lewisohn p. 162. P: George Martin. E: Ken Scott. 2E: John Smith. The K/R p. 486 + p. 297 hard-L/R ADT panning treatment of the brass is the single most audible mono/stereo difference on the released masters — the brass overdub is split hard L/R, the original signal panned hard to one side and the delayed ADT signal panned hard to the other (the K/R p. 297 example: “with the original signal panned to one side and the delayed signal panned to the other, the illusion of two separately overdubbed parts was remarkable”). Per Ken Scott via K/R p. 494 verbatim, the 14 October mix went for an extreme top-end treble setting at George Harrison’s insistence: “The classic story is when we were mixing ‘Savoy Truffle’. This was right towards the end, and I was doing it with George Harrison. We were halfway through the mix when George Martin came in, and he said, ‘Wow, now isn’t that too trebly?’ And George [Harrison] turned around and said to him, ‘Yeah, I like it like that.’” The release-master high-frequency content is therefore a documented Harrison-vs-Martin disagreement preserved in the LP cut.
• 1968 US Apple LP The Beatles (“White Album”) (25 November 1968, Apple SWBO 101, side D track 4) — US Capitol-pressed stereo LP from the same 1968 stereo master, but with a Capitol mastering-chain rather than the EMI cutting chain. Per K/R p. 494, George Harrison personally objected to what Capitol’s mastering had done to the LP (over-compression flattening the dynamics on Harrison-noted tracks including “Long, Long, Long”) and took the tape back from Capitol to rework the master himself before pressing. Per K/R p. 494 verbatim Mal Evans recall: “If George had not heard it in time, taken the tape away to work on it himself, and returned it the way it should be, the American LP records might have been a bit of a mess! It was a lot of work for George but worthwhile.” A limited number of pre-correction Capitol pressings reached pressing plants before Harrison’s recall — per K/R p. 494, “these pressings rank amongst the rarest of Beatles albums”. The differences between the pre-correction and post-correction Capitol versions are subtle but documented.
• 2009 Stereo Remasters — The Beatles (Stereo Box) (9 September 2009, Apple/EMI 5099969 9447 2) — Allan Rouse / Guy Massey / Steve Rooke 24-bit flat transfer of the 1968 stereo master, with the original K/R p. 486 + p. 297 hard-L/R ADT panning of the brass preserved unchanged. The 2009 Mono Masters companion (released same day) carries the 1968 mono master with the same centred-brass treatment of the 1968 mono LP.
• 2018 White Album 50th Anniversary Super Deluxe (Giles Martin / Sam Okell stereo remix) (9 November 2018, Apple/Capitol 0602567572015, disc 1 track 19) — New stereo remix prepared from the original 3 + 5 October Trident eight-track tape rather than from the 1968 stereo master. The Giles Martin / Sam Okell remix preserves the RS61-pair distortion of the brass (the distortion is on the eight-track at the recording stage, not at the 14 October mix) but restructures the stereo image: the hard-L/R ADT panning of the 1968 stereo brass is replaced with a less polarised distribution that surfaces the underlying parts of the saxophone arrangement (the K/R p. 297 “two separately overdubbed parts” illusion is shifted toward audibility of the actual six-piece arrangement). The 50th Anniversary Super Deluxe also includes the Esher demo bundle (May 1968, Kinfauns) — Savoy Truffle is one of the songs that does have an Esher demo, recorded by George Harrison solo at Kinfauns ahead of the May 1968 group sessions.

Recording techniques

• 3 October 1968 (Thu) — basic track at Trident Studios (Lewisohn p. 158) — Trident Studios, Trident House, St Anne’s Court, Wardour Street, London W1, time unknown. Recording: Savoy Truffle (take 1). P: George Martin. E: Barry Sheffield. 2E: unknown. Lewisohn p. 158 verbatim: “a basic track of drums, bass and lead guitars was recorded. The eight-track tape does not reveal any role for John Lennon on ‘Savoy Truffle’ at any stage in its recording.” The basic track went to take 1 only — Trident’s eight-track Ampex 440 made the reduction-mix chain of EMI’s J37 four-track unnecessary, so the entire Savoy Truffle recording lives across overdubs onto take 1 over the next eleven days. Lewisohn p. 158 records the song’s composition: “Much of its lyric — indeed its title — came out of Mackintosh’s Good News chocolates. George has since revealed that it was Eric Clapton’s virtual chocolate addiction which led him to reach out for the Good News with one hand and the guitar with the other!”
• 5 October 1968 (Sat) — ADT’d lead vocal overdub at Trident (Lewisohn p. 159) — Trident, 6.00pm–1.00am. Recording: SI onto take 1. P: George Martin. E: Barry Sheffield. 2E: unknown. Lewisohn p. 159 verbatim: “Overdubbing of an ADT’d George Harrison lead vocal onto ‘Savoy Truffle’.” This 5 October vocal overdub is the Harrison lead vocal that survives on the released master; the ADT here is a separate application from the 14 October brass ADT (the vocal ADT is recorded into the eight-track at the overdub stage; the brass ADT is applied at the 14 October stereo mix). The same 5 October session also covered overdubs onto Martha My Dear (Paul wiping the existing vocal track and replacing it with ADT applied at the new vocal recording stage per Lewisohn p. 159) and the Trident mono and stereo mixes of Honey Pie + Martha My Dear + the Trident mono mix of Dear Prudence that would later be superseded by the 13 October EMI remix per Lewisohn p. 161.
• 11 October 1968 (Fri) — brass overdub session at EMI Studio Two with deliberate RS61-pair distortion (Lewisohn p. 161 + K/R pp. 275–276) — EMI Studio Two, 3.00–6.00pm. Recording: SI onto take 1 (brass overdub). P: George Martin. E: Ken Scott. 2E: John Smith. Per Lewisohn p. 161 verbatim, Chris Thomas wrote the brass arrangement at George Martin’s direction: “George Martin suggested that I score ‘Savoy Truffle’ for saxophones,” says Chris Thomas. “I must say that I found it a real chore.” Six session saxophonists performed the overdub — two baritone players (Ronald Ross + Bernard George) and four tenor players (Art Ellefson + Danny Moss + Harry Klein + Derek Collins) per Lewisohn p. 161. Brian Gibson via Lewisohn p. 161 verbatim: “The session men were playing really well — there’s nothing like a good brass section letting rip — and it sounded fantastic. But having got this really nice sound George turned to Ken Scott and said ‘Right, I want to distort it’.” The Brian Gibson + K/R p. 275 verbatim quote on the EMI side: “If they wanted some really dirty distortion, we used to put two [RS61s] in series. You could really overdrive something and get some nice distortion going.” K/R p. 275–276 verbatim: “The best example of such use occurred in the fall of 1968, during sessions for ‘Savoy Truffle’... The brass signal had been sent to Room 47, patched through two RS61s in the Echo Racks, distorted, and returned to the desk, before being recorded to the eight-track tape.” The deliberate RS61-pair overdrive is the canonical 1968 example of EMI engineers repurposing a 1952 clean booster module as an overdrive stage — decades before Marshall or Mesa Boogie productised the concept as a guitar amp effect.
• 14 October 1968 (Mon) — closing overdubs + mono mixing + stereo mixing at EMI Studio Two (Lewisohn p. 162) — EMI Studio Two, 7.00pm–7.30am. Recording: SI onto take 1 (second electric guitar + organ + tambourine + bongos). Mono mixing: Savoy Truffle (remixes 1–6, from take 1). Stereo mixing: Savoy Truffle (remixes 1 and 2, from take 1). P: George Martin. E: Ken Scott. 2E: John Smith. Per Lewisohn p. 162 verbatim: “The final recording for The Beatles took place during this session, with overdubs for ‘Savoy Truffle’: a second electric guitar, an organ, tambourine and bongos. These recorded, the song joined the remixing queue, with several songs still requiring stereo mixes.” Six mono mix passes were made (only remix 1 was used as the LP master); two stereo mix passes were made (only remix 1 was used). This session was the closing recording session for the entire White Album.
• K/R p. 486 ADT hard-L/R panning treatment on the 1968 stereo brass — Per K/R p. 486 verbatim: “the same approach was taken with the brass on ‘Savoy Truffle’. When spread across the stereo picture this way, the double-tracking effect was incredibly convincing. Part of this can be attributed to the fact that the delayed signal was not an exact duplicate of the original signal… There were slight, but noticeable, EQ differences between the two signals which added to the effect.” The K/R p. 296 ADT examples table independently lists Savoy Truffle as “brass” on The Beatles (“White Album”). The K/R p. 297 chapter narrative singles out Savoy Truffle: “A listen to the brass in ‘Savoy Truffle’ illustrates this nicely; with the original signal panned to one side and the delayed signal panned to the other, the illusion of two separately overdubbed parts was remarkable.” This makes Savoy Truffle the K/R-canonical illustration of the 1968 hard-L/R ADT technique — the example K/R reach for when illustrating the effect for an unfamiliar reader.
• RS61 in series as the brass overdrive stage (K/R pp. 275–276 + Brian Gibson verbatim) — The EMI RS61 module was a clean, low-gain booster amplifier from EMI’s 1952 console era, originally designed to make up for the gain loss in the Echo Rack signal chain. Per K/R p. 275–276 + Brian Gibson verbatim, two RS61s were patched in series in Room 47, with the brass signal sent out from the desk through the cascaded pair, deliberately overdriven, and returned to the desk for recording. The K/R p. 275 + p. 276 narrative names Savoy Truffle as the canonical 1968 example: “The best example of such use occurred in the fall of 1968, during sessions for ‘Savoy Truffle’.” The RS61-pair distortion is preserved at the recording stage on the eight-track tape, so the distortion survives identically across the 1968 mono and stereo masters, the 2009 Mono Masters / Stereo Remasters reissues, and the 2018 Giles Martin / Sam Okell remix — the distortion is not a mix-stage effect but a recorded-signal characteristic.
• K/R p. 494 extreme-EQ release-master treble setting (Ken Scott verbatim) — Per Ken Scott via K/R p. 494 verbatim: “The classic story is when we were mixing ‘Savoy Truffle’. This was right towards the end, and I was doing it with George Harrison. We were halfway through the mix when George Martin came in, and he said, ‘Wow, now isn’t that too trebly?’ And George [Harrison] turned around and said to him, ‘Yeah, I like it like that,’ and just immediately turned [it back up].” The 14 October stereo remix 1 thus carries an EQ profile that George Martin had flagged as excessive on the mixing-desk monitors but that George Harrison overrode. The full-treble + full-bass approach Ken Scott describes elsewhere on K/R p. 494 (“Towards the end of the White Album, we’d go for a mix and it would just be instantaneous full-Treble, full-Bass on every channel — all eight of them!”) sat within the relatively gentle EMI desk EQ range, but Harrison’s push past Martin’s caution is preserved in the LP cut.
• K/R p. 335 final-mix cross-studio routing (verbatim) — Per K/R p. 335 verbatim: “Four tracks from ‘The White Album’ were recorded there [at Trident], and three of the four were actually mixed there. Final mixes of ‘Dear Prudence’ and ‘Savoy Truffle’ would eventually be carried out at Abbey Road, but the Trident stereo and mono mixes of ‘Martha My Dear’ and ‘Honey Pie’ actually made it onto the album.” The motivating concern was the Tannoy/Altec brightness discrepancy that had bit Hey Jude — per K/R p. 335 verbatim, “the Tannoy ‘Red’ speakers used by Trident had significantly more High Frequency response than the Altec monitors used by Abbey Road. They tended to ‘flatter’ sound more.” By mixing Savoy Truffle back at EMI, the band ensured the released master was calibrated to the Altec monitoring environment that the LP-cutting room used. (This is the same motivation behind the 13 October EMI re-mix of Dear Prudence superseding the 5 October Trident mono per Lewisohn p. 161 bracketed note. Hey Jude avoided the issue by way of Ken Scott’s UTC Curve Bender high-end restoration at EMI.)
• NAB/CCIR tape-EQ standard conversion at the banding stage (K/R p. 335) — Per K/R p. 335 verbatim: “Trident used American machines, any mixes recorded on them used the American NAB EQ standard, rather than the European CCIR standard.” The 5 October Trident mono and stereo mixes of Savoy Truffle overdubs were on NAB-standard tape; by the time the eight-track moved back to EMI for the 11 + 14 October overdubs and mixing, the final 14 October mixes were cut to CCIR-standard tape ready for the LP-master compilation. The Lewisohn p. 159 bracketed note (anticipating the 13 October EMI re-mix) records the related issue on Dear Prudence: “[the stereo] too would be changed back at Abbey Road and copied from the NAB equalisation system of recording preferred at Trident to the CCIR method favoured at EMI.” Savoy Truffle’s 14 October mono and stereo mixes were direct EMI/CCIR products, avoiding the NAB-to-CCIR tape-copy step.
• Three-Beatle session arc — no Lennon participation (Lewisohn p. 158 verbatim) — Per Lewisohn p. 158 verbatim: “The eight-track tape does not reveal any role for John Lennon on ‘Savoy Truffle’ at any stage in its recording.” This is unusually direct framing for Lewisohn — ordinarily session sheets are reported without absent-personnel commentary — and reflects the late-1968 trajectory of Lennon increasingly absenting himself from Harrison-led sessions (also seen on Long, Long, Long session 7 October per Lewisohn). The three-Beatle nature of the session sits inside the broader White Album fragmentation pattern: Ringo’s 22 August walk-out (rejoined 4 September per Lewisohn p. 153 bracketed note) and Lennon’s drift away from Harrison’s and McCartney’s individual sessions are part of the same late-1968 shift toward what the K/R p. 503 1968 Overview characterised as “in many ways, the members simply filled the role of ‘backing band’ for whomever composed the song” (K/R p. 503 verbatim).
• Ken Scott engineering credit (K/R p. 500) — K/R p. 500 lists Savoy Truffle among the “Tracks Recorded by Ken Scott” for 1968 — though this references the 11 + 14 October EMI sessions only, since the 3 + 5 October Trident basic-track and lead-vocal sessions were engineered by Barry Sheffield (Trident house engineer) per Lewisohn p. 158 + p. 159. The cross-studio engineering hand-off is therefore a real characteristic of the song: the basic track, lead guitar, and lead vocal were captured under Barry Sheffield at Trident on the Ampex AG-440 eight-track + Sound Techniques 20/8 desk + Trident’s Lockwood/Tannoy Red monitoring (K/R p. 334), while the brass + closing overdubs + final mixes were captured and mixed under Ken Scott at EMI on the 3M M23 eight-track + REDD.51 desk + Altec monitoring (K/R pp. 334–335 + p. 500).
• K/R p. 490 Frequency Control / Varispeed context — absent for Savoy Truffle — Per K/R p. 490 verbatim: “one of the biggest reasons for the lack of varispeed recording was the fact that the 3M eight-track machine had no varispeed capability... varispeed simply wasn’t an option.” The 3 + 5 October Trident basic-and-vocal sessions on the Ampex AG-440 did retain varispeed capability via Trident’s Mains-varispeed amplifier installed after Hey Jude (K/R p. 335 verbatim: “we later installed a very elaborate high-powered amplifier that drove the motor via an oscillator in order to supply the motor with 50Hz”), but K/R p. 490 does not document any varispeed application on Savoy Truffle. The 11 + 14 October EMI overdubs on the 3M M23 carry no varispeed treatment per K/R p. 490 verbatim. The released master is therefore at-tape-speed throughout.

Legacy & release history

Mono & stereo

• Both mono and stereo mixes were prepared; the UK mono White Album (PMC 7067/8) has many distinct edits, mixes and effects vs. the stereo (PCS 7067/8) — collectors prize the mono.

Documented alternate versions

• Mono Masters (2009 box) — Allan Rouse / Guy Massey remaster
• White Album 50th Anniversary (2018) — Giles Martin stereo remix

Released on

• The Beatles (White Album) — LP, 22 November 1968

Cross-references

Other songs sharing themes (clapton-chocolate, brass, george-original, confectionery)

Other songs led by the same vocalist

Other songs from this era

clapton-chocolatebrassgeorge-originalconfectionery

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