Magic Alex redesigns Apple - January 20, 1969
From BeatlesWiki
| Event | |
| Date | January 20, 1969 |
| Short description | Work on Get Back pauses as Magic Alex redesigns Apple. |
| Location | Apple Studios, 3 Savile Row, London |
After The Beatles had gotten George back in the band, they decided to leave Twickenham Studios and go to Apple to record the rest of the album. Work had to pause for a few days, as Alexis Mardas (Better Known as Magic Alex) finished redesigning Apple studios, a project he had been workin on since June 1968. He had promised a 72-track tape machine and several other luxuries, but when The Beatles saw all the electronics he had been working on, they realized it was all junk. He hadn't even set up speakers between the booth and studio. George Martin later wrote in his book, All You Need Is Ears, "He was one of a group of sycophants who were forever making mischief, telling the boys they weren’t getting the best treatment, telling them they deserved better than the rotten old equipment that everyone else was using. I didn’t need that. I knew better than anyone that we lacked certain facilities which were available in independent American studios. I knew that eight-track was already common in America, and that sixteen-track was just around the corner. It annoyed me as much as it did the boys. But I could do without Magic Alex turning up one day and announcing in a supercilious voice: ‘Well, of course, I’m designing a seventy-two-track machine.’" George Harrison recalled, "Alex’s recording studio was the biggest disaster of all time. He was walking around with a white coat on like some sort of chemist, but he didn’t have a clue what he was doing. He had sixteen tiny little speakers all around the walls, and you only need two speakers for stereo sound." Magic Alex's problem was that he bragged about great machines, but could not actually build anything useful. George Martin remembers, "I suppose his prize idea was the sonic screen. I was informed of this work of inventive genius by the boys one day. ‘Why do you have to put Ringo behind all these terrible screens?’ they asked. ‘We can’t see him. We know it makes a good drum sound, and it cuts out all the spill on to our guitars and things, but damn it, with those bloody great screens locking him in, it makes him feel claustrophobic!’ I waited silently, knowing that the problem would have been solved by a flash of Greek inspiration. And so it had. ‘Alex has got a brilliant idea!’ they said. ‘He’s come up with a sonic screen! He’s going to place these ultra-high-frequency beams around Ringo, and when they’re switched on he won’t be able to hear anything because the beams will form a wall of silence!’" George Peckham said, "He had some good ideas in principle, but they didn’t work. All down one side he had these big stainless steel panels that inside were like sponge, so you had this reflection and absorption… which is how modern studios are built today. But what let it down was that he didn’t float the floor, so it was solid and you got reverberation everywhere. He also kept the old fireplace that was down in the basement, so the sound would reverberate up and down the chimney… He also kept a set of lovely oak doors, but he neglected to soundproof the other side of them, so the sound would hit the doors and the passageway behind the doors would become this kind of sound box and you’d get all these rumbling sounds that you would pick up on the mics. He also made what we called the white elephant desk… it was a big old white leather thing with bloody big knobs on it. We called it the white elephant desk because if somebody switched it on it wouldn’t function. It would just make some nasty sounds and switch itself off!" The stuff was sold off to an electronics shop, and George Martin brought in the equipment from Abbey Road Studios.
