Way beyond compare

Number 3, Abbey Road, St John's Wood was originally a 16-room Georgian townhouse; EMI bought it in 1929 and spent two years turning it into a recording studio. By the time George Martin arrived in 1950, doing mostly comedy records for EMI's Parlophone label, it was already well established. But the Beatles, with Martin at the helm, made it a household word, enough to spur EMI to change the name of the facility officially to Abbey Road Studios.

If, like me, you bought everything the Beatles put out and wondered just how the hell they did it, bits and pieces of the story have been coming out for years, and some of the unreleased tapes surfaced on Anthology. But what I wanted was a frighteningly-detailed look at the band's modus operandi and how it intersected with Martin's own ideas on record production.

And now I'll get it. Recording the Beatles: The Studio Equipment and Techniques Used to Create Their Classic Albums, by Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew, is out now, and it promises "a detailed look at every piece of studio gear used, full explanations of effects and recording processes, and an inside look at how specific songs were recorded." For someone like me who suspects that the Beatles would never have become icons of an age were it not for whatever alchemy was going on at Number 3, this book promises to be somewhere between guidebook and grimoire. At $100, it's pricey, but the best reference works always are, and as Paul used to say, money can't buy me love. (And yes, I know: the basic tracks for "Can't Buy Me Love" were laid down, not at Number 3, but at EMI's Pathé Marconi facility in Paris.)