Paul McCartney, early-to-mid 1980s:
One thing I’ll never forget at EMI was the “pop”/ “classical” switch on the right-hand-side of the console! And the control knobs were great big RAF things, that was the state of the technology then. We used to like them though, and actually they were much better than the fiddly little things these days because then if you put treble on you actually heard treble come on. Now you put treble on and it’s nothing. I really do think those valve machines were more fun to work with. A lot of people think that, I know Geoff Emerick does, and I still keep some valve equipment myself because it gives you a record-y type sound. That’s why a lot of people won’t go to digital. Analogue is warmer, and you can defeat the machine. For example, one trick of our’s — ‘Ob-la-Di’ is one of the songs I did this on — was to over-record an acoustic guitar, so you’d swing the needle into the red and it’d be there, hard, every time you’d played it. The engineer would say “No, no, no, this is not allowed, we have to keep it just before the red or a little into the red!” and we’d be firm and say “No”. And the acoustic would come back like an electric, it wouldn’t distort too much, it would just mess around with that original sound. It’d make it hot. You’d defeated the machine, you’d actually screwed it up a bit. They’re harder than ever to defeat now. They’ve thought of all that. If you’re going to work in the red now there’s a little computer that comes in and says “Limit!”, stops it and brings it back. They’re all so clever these days and you can’t actually screw up.