How Film Music Comes to Life: Inside Abbey Road

It’s the record­ing stu­dio favoured by the likes of com­posers John Williams, Jer­ry Gold­smith, Howard Shore and Alexan­dre Desplat, amongst count­less leg­endary musi­cians from around the world. Home to the scores of Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Lord of the Rings tril­o­gy and the Star Wars fran­chise, Abbey Road is like­ly one of the first names that comes to mind when any­one talks about record­ing music for film. 

Take a glance at the pho­tos of myr­i­ad artists that line the walls, includ­ing The Bea­t­les, Pink Floyd, Amy Wine­house, Kate Bush and Frank Ocean, and it’s dif­fi­cult not to feel a sense of awe. This is a space quite unlike any­where else in the world, but as well as being a site of immense cul­tur­al impor­tance, Abbey Road is also renowned for its pio­neer­ing research in the field of sound recording. 

In 1934, then known as EMI Stu­dios, the space in London’s St. John’s Wood became the birth­place of mod­ern stereo­phon­ic record­ing, thanks to the pio­neer­ing research of engi­neer Alan Blum­lein. Today, Abbey Road remains on the cut­ting edge of audio research, with the intro­duc­tion of 7.1.4 sur­round sound mon­i­tor­ing and con­tin­ued invest­ment in the ever-evolv­ing field of spa­tial audio.

“It is kind of crazy that one loca­tion has con­tributed so much to the devel­op­ment of an entire field,” com­pos­er and Abbey Road reg­u­lar Stephen Bar­ton mus­es. ​“I don’t know that there is any­where quite the same as that in any field, oth­er than maybe sci­ences or some­thing, that has con­tributed so much to a very spe­cif­ic part of a field that touch­es so many people.”

When Abbey Road’s flag­ship Stu­dio One reopened in April this year, fol­low­ing a mul­ti-mil­lion point six month refur­bish­ment, it marked the com­ple­tion of the first major ren­o­va­tion since it first opened its doors in 1931. One of the largest pur­pose-built stu­dios in the world, Stu­dio One’s vast rever­ber­ant space was orig­i­nal­ly designed with clas­si­cal music very much in mind, yet its first film score wasn’t record­ed there until 1981. 

It could have all been so dif­fer­ent. By the mid-1970s, pub­lic inter­est in record­ed clas­si­cal music was start­ing to wane and pop acts were increas­ing­ly begin­ning to favour small­er stu­dio spaces with a tighter, less expan­sive sound. As a result, Stu­dio One was grad­u­al­ly becom­ing lit­tle more than a space for bands like Pink Floyd to kick around a foot­ball between sessions.

“It got to the stage where there were so few record­ings going on that they marked out a ten­nis court,” Senior Record­ing Engi­neer Andrew Dud­man explains. ​“They drew up plans to put floors in, divide it up into small­er pro­duc­tion rooms and have a car park on the ground floor.”

A part­ner­ship with audio post – pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny Anvil Film ensured Abbey Road’s sur­vival when they were forced to relo­cate from the ill-fat­ed Den­ham Stu­dios in the late 1970s. As a result, com­pos­er Mik­los Rozsa’s score for Eye of the Nee­dle was the first to be record­ed in Stu­dio One in 1981, lay­ing the foun­da­tions for it to become one of the world’s most high­ly sought after record­ing spaces for film scoring. 

Imbued with a new lease of life, Abbey Road’s first major Hol­ly­wood client came call­ing lat­er that year when John Williams record­ed the score for Raiders of the Lost Ark. While there was lit­tle ques­tion that the space sound­ed amaz­ing, the ses­sions were less than ide­al due to the side-ori­en­ta­tion of Stu­dio One’s con­trol room, which made scor­ing to pic­ture difficult.

“It was cen­tral from the old clas­si­cal days – a tiny lit­tle room that was side-on to make it fit,” Dud­man elab­o­rates. ​“We had a pro­jec­tion room above, pro­ject­ing onto the screen at the back of the room, but every­one in the con­trol room was fac­ing sideways.”

In the mid-80s, the deci­sion was made to build a new con­trol room, relo­cat­ing the sound desks and mix­ing con­soles to pro­vide a broad­er view of the live room. A refit at the turn of the mil­len­ni­um added in a large glass win­dow, enabling those inside to see the same visu­als as the orches­tra unim­ped­ed. Com­posers also had the flex­i­bil­i­ty to con­fig­ure play­ers in either ​‘land­scape’ or ​’por­trait’ lay­out, impact­ing both the sound of the room and the num­ber of play­ers in it at any one time.

“There is a slight­ly longer tail if you do por­trait mode, just because you haven’t got walls as close to your main mic,” Dud­man notes. ​“It takes longer for the sound to hit the back wall and reflect back into the room. When you’ve got the big films with mas­sive string sec­tions – you’re talk­ing 16 first vio­lins or more in some cas­es – fit­ting them in is real­ly tricky. With the amount of per­cus­sion that you now have in a film ses­sion, if you’ve got a full orches­tra when you’re in por­trait mode, if the per­cus­sion is at the back of the room, you have to oblit­er­ate the orches­tra to get all the per­cus­sion in.”

While Hol­ly­wood bud­gets can accom­mo­date record­ing ses­sions in a way that small­er pro­duc­tions can’t, the turn­around required is enor­mous­ly tight. Abbey Road’s sto­ried rep­u­ta­tion means that its stu­dio spaces are often booked by film stu­dios years in advance, mean­ing that there is lit­tle room for last minute ses­sions or pick ups.

“The clos­est thing you could com­pare it to is an air­port,” Bar­ton mus­es. ​“You obvi­ous­ly get long stand­ing things, but in film you nev­er know where we’re going to be thrown a curveball.”

The con­fig­u­ra­tion of the live room also dic­tates the way in which ref­er­ence footage is exhib­it­ed. The ​‘por­trait’ lay­out, now used infre­quent­ly, makes use of the old pro­jec­tion room, while ​‘land­scape’ requires the use of addi­tion­al screens. 

“For any­thing with John Williams, we always hired a mas­sive video pro­jec­tor,” Dud­man recalls. ​“He’s always worked in the por­trait mode, which is a bit more of a clas­si­cal lay­out. You’ve got more space behind the con­duc­tor, sure, but it’s very tight with big orchestras.”

As a visu­al medi­um, it’s per­haps unsur­pris­ing that the vast major­i­ty of – if not all – film scores are record­ed to pic­ture, be it a ref­er­ence image or a rough cut. Scor­ing to locked cuts, how­ev­er, is rare.

“Work­ing with Mar­vel, there are times where they won’t even allow us to put a pic­ture up because of this mas­sive spoil­er that might be revealed,” adds Bar­ton. ​“I had a project recent­ly where in the edit there’s just a place­hold­er for this one par­tic­u­lar char­ac­ter, because they’re so wor­ried about the character’s name even show­ing up on any paper­work, that some­one could go, ​‘Oh, that could be revealed.’” 

Stu­dio One’s recent ren­o­va­tions have added major tech­ni­cal inno­va­tions in the con­trol room. A 20-year old 72-chan­nel Neve record­ing con­sole has been replaced with an 84-chan­nel upgrade. With each of the play­ers or instru­ments miked indi­vid­u­al­ly, engi­neers are grant­ed even greater flex­i­bil­i­ty dur­ing the final mix­ing process. Hav­ing access to stems of each instru­ment gives the cre­ative team flex­i­bil­i­ty to edit dif­fer­ent cuts of score much more eas­i­ly if a scene is trimmed or extend­ed in the final cut.

“The more stuff we do sep­a­rate­ly now – record­ing strings sep­a­rate­ly from brass, per­cus­sion – that helps in the edit­ing process, because you can make edits work,” Dud­man explains. ​“You can steal stuff from oth­er cues to make the edit work.” 

Stu­dio One is capa­ble of hold­ing a 100-piece orches­tra or choir at any one time, and the increase in record­ing chan­nels avail­able now means that, more often than not, each play­er is indi­vid­u­al­ly miked. 

“One of the nice things about the stu­dio is that you can do things sep­a­rate­ly, put them back togeth­er and no one would know,” enthus­es Bar­ton. ​“That’s often such a crit­i­cal fac­tor in what we do. In the dub, if the brass is inter­fer­ing with the dia­logue for some rea­son and you can’t under­stand a line because there’s some French horn thing over it, rather than pull down the whole music fad­er and get rid of it all, you can just take out the offend­ing piece, as it were, or duck it down.”

“There are times where you know in advance that stuff’s going to change,” Dud­man adds. ​“The com­pos­er has writ­ten to one ver­sion of the pic­ture. They’re already four ver­sions down, but there’s no time to re-score it.” As a result, whole sec­tions of music may be record­ed to include what’s known as an arti­fi­cial stop halfway through a musi­cal cue, fol­lowed by an arti­fi­cial start . ​“That gives you a clean out and clean in,” he con­tin­ues. ​“Then you might just do a patch sec­tion that will work for the lat­er cut and the music edi­tor will join them all togeth­er. That’s a much more time effi­cient way of doing things.”

While Stu­dio One’s con­trol room has seen sig­nif­i­cant changes, very lit­tle has been altered in the live room itself. In order to pre­serve its sig­na­ture 2.3 sec­ond reverb and rich sound favoured by com­posers and direc­tors alike, the 4,844 ft room has seen its Art Deco walls remain large­ly untouched, save for being washed. Unwill­ing to risk impact­ing the acoustics, its floor has been sand­ed and re-oiled as var­nish­ing it would have altered the sound too much.

“I’ve always thought of the acoustics and sci­ence of record­ing as sort of part sci­ence, part voodoo,” Bar­ton adds. ​“What we did­n’t want them to change was the voodoo, which is work­ing very nicely.”

As well as retain­ing the son­ic qual­i­ties that have made the space so desir­able, Abbey Road also acts as a tech­no­log­i­cal time cap­sule of sorts. Mod­ern mix­ing desks and equip­ment are opti­mised to utilise old micro­phones and equip­ment, some of which are as old as the build­ing itself.

“We nev­er throw any­thing away,” Dud­man states. ​“The Neu­mann U87s, we’ve got maybe 30 of those and they’re all from the 80s… Then you’ve got all the clas­sic valve micro­phones, which are 70 years old – the U47s that were used on Bea­t­les vocals. We now use those on brass and solo vocals. The rest of the chain has improved so much that when those were first invent­ed, you did­n’t hear how good they were… We’ve also got the old mix­ing con­soles, so depend­ing on what kind of vibe you’re after, you can move the desk into Stu­dio One and stick 16 mics through it if you want. Noth­ing’s fixed in that respect.”

The use of old­er record­ing equip­ment can some­times be neces­si­tat­ed by the time peri­od in which a par­tic­u­lar project is set, as was the case dur­ing Barton’s work on an episode of the 12 Mon­keys tele­vi­sion series set in 1944 that required source music that sound­ed ​“authen­ti­cal­ly old”. The pri­or­i­ty first and fore­most, how­ev­er, is always qual­i­ty above all else.

“Ulti­mate­ly, we’re always just try­ing to make stuff sound good,” Bar­ton con­cedes. ​“It’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly about sound­ing real­is­tic. It’s often hyper­re­al. Some of the old micro­phones have this real­ly inter­est­ing thing where their high fre­quen­cies aren’t as pro­nounced. We often use words that don’t real­ly mean very much, but they mean some­thing to most engi­neers. We often say audio sounds ​‘warm’ – because of the way that the ear­ly tech was designed, it tends to have those pleas­ing things that are part of the sound of what we like.”

There is, of course, an unde­ni­ably myth­ic qual­i­ty to the hal­lowed stu­dio spaces that remains per­haps Abbey Road’s biggest draw – even to those who might not be aware of it.

“That’s one of the things peo­ple say, they walk in and it does do some­thing,” Bar­ton enthus­es. ​“Yes, it’s the old equip­ment and the com­bi­na­tion of the cut­ting edge as well, but the walls do a thing. There’s a thing there, and you can’t quite put your fin­ger on it. We had a fas­ci­nat­ing ses­sion a few years ago with a chil­dren’s choir in Stu­dio One… The moment they start­ed singing, their direc­tor was like, ​‘I haven’t heard them sing this well’. I think it just has that effect. You walk in and you have to bring your a‑game. Peo­ple just do so instinctively.”