Abbey Road Studios, is a recording studio at 3 Abbey Road, St John’s Wood, City of Westminster, London, England. It was established in November 1931 by the Gramophone Company, a predecessor of British music company EMI, which owned it until Universal Music took control of part of EMI in 2013.
Abbey Road Studios is most notable as being the 1960s’ venue for innovative recording techniques adopted by the Beatles, Pink Floyd, the Hollies, among others. One of its earliest world-famous-artist clients was Paul Robeson, who recorded there in December 1931 and went on to record many of his best-known songs there.
Originally a nine-bedroom Georgian townhouse built in 1831 on the footpath leading to Kilburn Abbey, the building was later converted to flats where the best-known resident was Maundy Gregory.
In 1929, the Gramophone Company acquired the premises and converted it into studios. The property benefited from a large garden behind the townhouse, which permitted a much larger building to be constructed to the rear; thus, the Georgian façade belies the true dimension of the building. Pathé filmed the opening of the studios in November 1931 when Edward Elgar conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in recording sessions of his music.[5][6] In 1934, the inventor of stereo sound, Alan Blumlein, recorded Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony which was conducted by Thomas Beecham at the studios.
The neighboring house is also owned by the studio and used to accommodate musicians. During the mid-20th century, the studio was extensively used by British conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent, whose house was located near the studio building.
The Gramophone Company merged with Columbia Graphophone Company to form Electric and Musical Industries (EMI) in 1931, and the studios later became known as EMI Recording Studios. In 1936 cellist Pablo Casals became the first to record Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suites No. 1 & 2 at the command of EMI head Fred Gaisberg. The recordings went on to spur a revolution among Bach aficionados and cellists alike. “Fats” Waller played the Compton organ there.
In 1958, Studio Two at Abbey Road became a centre for rock and roll music when Cliff Richard and the Drifters (later Cliff Richard and the Shadows) recorded “Move It” there, and later pop music material.
Abbey Road Studios is closely associated with the Beatles, who recorded almost all of their albums and hits there between 1962 and 1970 using the four-track REDD mixing console designed by Peter K. Burkowitz. The Beatles named their 1969 album Abbey Road, after the street where the studio is located.
The studio was renamed Abbey Road Studios in 1970 after the Beatles album had made it famous. Iain Macmillan took the album’s cover photograph outside the studios, with the result that the nearby zebra crossing has become a place of pilgrimage for Beatles fans. It has been a tradition for visitors to pay homage to the band by writing on the wall in front of the building even though it is painted over every three months.
Pink Floyd recorded most of their late 1960s to mid-1970s albums here, returning only in 1988 for mixing and overdubbing subsequent albums.
Notable producers and sound engineers who have worked at Abbey Road include George Martin, Geoff Emerick, Norman “Hurricane” Smith, Ken Scott, Mike Stone, Alan Parsons, Peter Vince, Malcolm Addey, Peter Brown, Richard Langham, Phil McDonald, John Kurlander, Richard Lush and Ken Townsend, who invented the groundbreaking studio effect known as automatic double tracking (ADT). The chief mastering engineer at Abbey Road was Chris “Vinyl” Blair, who started his career as a tape deck operator.
In 1979, EMI commissioned the British jazz fusion band Morrissey-Mullen to record Britain’s first digitally recorded single record at Abbey Road Studios.
From 18 July to 11 September 1983, the public had a rare opportunity to see inside the legendary Studio Two where the Beatles made most of their records. While a new mixing console was being installed in the control room, the studio was used to host a video presentation called The Beatles at Abbey Road. The soundtrack to the video had a number of recordings that were not made commercially available until the release of The Beatles Anthology project over a decade later.