Recording, mixing: The End, Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight, Something, Here Comes The Sun

Studio Two, EMI Studios, Abbey Road
Producer: George Martin
Engineers: Geoff Emerick, Phil McDonald

George Harrison’s two Abbey Road songs were completed on this day, and mixing and crossfading took place on three others.

The 2pm-4am session began with three stereo mixes of ‘The End’. These were numbered 1-3, despite six mixes having been created on the previous day. It was then edited to the end of ‘Golden Slumbers’/‘Carry That Weight’ to create a final master version.

‘Something’ had previously been mixed on 11 July 1969, although subsequent overdubs had rendered them superfluous. This day’s mixes were numbered 1-10, and omitted the instrumental jam that was previously a coda to the song.

‘Here Comes The Sun’ was given its finishing touches during this session. Harrison added Moog synthesiser in several places, recorded onto track four of the tape. This partly erased the woodwind parts recorded on 15 August.

I first heard about the Moog synthesiser in America. I had to have mine made specially, because Mr Moog had only just invented it. It was enormous, with hundreds of jackplugs and two keyboards.

But it was one thing having one, and another trying to make it work. There wasn’t an instruction manual, and even if there had been it would probably have been a couple of thousand pages long. I don’t think even Mr Moog knew how to get music out of it; it was more of a technical thing. When you listen to the sounds on songs like ‘Here Comes The Sun’, it does do some good things, but they’re all very kind of infant sounds.

Some time after midnight the song was mixed in stereo. This was done in just one attempt, with the tape running slightly faster – at 51 cycles per second rather than the usual 50 – reducing slightly the length of the song.

Onto the tape box from this night was written the handwritten instruction: “Don’t use guitars for solo from 6 + 7”. This referred to an unused guitar solo, which was unheard by the general public until 2011.

One of the bonus items on the DVD/Blu-ray release of Martin Scorsese’s 2011 documentary George Harrison: Living In The Material World was a studio scene featuring Dhani Harrison, George Martin and Giles Martin listening to the ‘Here Comes The Sun’ multi-track tapes. The tapes revealed the guitar solo, which was likely to have been recorded by Harrison on 6 August 1969.