Thank You Girl – Entire Recording Session

Recorded 5 & 13 March 1963

The song was recorded in thirteen takes, the same number of takes needed to perfect “From Me To You” on the same recording session.

John Lennon overdubbed the harmonica without the other Beatles eight days later. According to multiple sources, John came to the session directly from bed due to a severe cold. Engineer Geoff Emerick said it took John numerous takes to produce a satisfactory result because he was so unsteady.

The stereo mix of the song (included on the Capitol LP The Beatles’ Second Album) is noticeably different from the original single mono mix (re-released on CD in 1988 on the compilation Past Masters, Volume One) in the middle 8. In the stereo version, a couple of extra harmonica lines can be heard, as well as at the very end of the song. In addition, this stereo mix contained reverb added by Capitol. The unadulterated stereo mix was released for the first time on the 2009 remastered CD Past Masters.

This is the entire recording session for “Thank You Girl”; all 13 takes plus the overdub session on March 13, 1963. The first thing you will notice is that the tape this was sourced from is incredibly clean.  Unlike previous bootlegs of the session appearing on CONDOR and other “labels” when it first appeared, the tape sounded very much like a 2nd or 3rd generation  high quality stereo copy so, aside from some very minor noise reduction, there weren’t very many issues with regard to de-mixing the source, digitally. The stems were relatively meager… when you stop to consider that early Beatles material generally had drums/percussion, 2 guitars, bass, a vocal, often overdubbed, and, on some occasions, a piano. Up until “A Hard Day’s Night”, a stereo release was (generally) only mixed one way: Twin Track masters with vocals on one side, instruments on the other, with very few deviations. These are the ones I love to de-mix and remix the most… because I love to create stereo pictures that soften that harsh audio imaging. It’s especialy rewarding to remix an entire session and re-create the atmosphere of the artists at work in the studio.

Apart from very light de-noising, de-mixing and remixing… I re-equalized the session to restore some missing higher frequencies.

You can download the finished project below… in FLAC and hight quality MP3 formats.

MP3

FLAC