Mixing: Imagine by John Lennon

Record Plant, New York City
Producers: John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Phil Spector
Engineers: Allan Steckler, Roy Cicala, Shelly Yakus, Jack Douglas

A final mixing session for John Lennon’s second solo album Imagine took place on 7 July 1971.

The album had been mastered the previous day, but new quadrophonic mixes were made of six songs on this day for a special edition. The ‘Quadrasonic Mixes’ were made by Allan Steckler at New York’s Record Plant.

John was initially reluctant to mix in quad, but immediately became enthusiastic about it after we played a ‘Guess Who’ recording for him.

When I was working at Decca, the gentlemen who ran the studio, Arthur Haddy, was a brilliant, brilliant, lovely man. Invariably, in the evenings after everyone had gone, a few of us would be hanging around and he would wander in, and we’d sit and talk about the future of where sound was going. We talked about things that are now contemporary and common today, like wireless speakers. They were Little League dreams then.

One of the things discussed was that, in the future, people would be listening to music in their homes through speakers with no wires, all around them on their walls. They would be able to recreate the sound of a band or an orchestra in that way.

As I have always been interested in those kinds of progressive things to do with sound reproduction, I wanted to create a mix where you could actually feel you were in the studio. The sound would be coming out pretty much like a U-shape – and you’d be sitting in the middle of the U, with some ambience behind you, but not a total surround. Nothing would be artificially ‘surrounded’. I didn’t like the idea of doing a surround sound where you’d be in the middle of the band. But you wanted to be in the studio, so the mix was around you.

The six songs were ‘Imagine’, ‘How Do You Sleep?’, ‘Jealous Guy’, ‘How?’, ‘It’s So Hard’, and ‘I Don’t Want To Be A Soldier’.

We tried to listen to John’s album through four speakers and ended up John, Yoko, engineers, about twenty of us, falling on top of each other in the middle of the room – madness!

The six new mixes were combined with the standard stereo mixes of the remaining four songs, for the quadrophonic release of Imagine. It was issued on 8-track tape in the US and UK, with vinyl versions available in the UK, Australia, and Japan. A reel-to-reel quad edition was also available in Japan.

The quadrophonic mixes were reissued in 2018 on the Blu-ray disc in the Ultimate Edition of Imagine.

We had started doing the Ultimate Mix of Imagine in 5.1 surround sound before I heard the original Quadrasonic Mixes. When I heard them, I was quite happy with what we had done, because they had been mixed in totally different ways, which complement each other really well. In the Quadrasonic Mixes, there are times when, literally, there is one thing equally coming out of all four speakers at once, which sounds like it’s coming out of all four speakers at once – there’s no focus at the centre. In the 5.1 Ultimate Mixes, we make more use of the centre and the space around that centre to create a very different feel.

There are a few fun differences in the Quadrasonic Mixes compared to the original stereo version. For example the feedback at the end of ‘I Don’t Wanna Be A Soldier Mama I Don’t Wanna Die’ sounds totally different. You’ll also notice on ‘How Do You Sleep?’ that the twelve seconds of studio atmosphere – with the string players chatting and tuning up before it starts – is not there.