Often it starts simply—someone falls for a song or an artist in a way that makes him or her want to play an instrument or write their own song. In most earnest cases, the music of the inspired bears little resemblance to the music of the inspiration. As long as you’re honest, it isn’t easy or natural to sound like anyone else, no matter who you listen to, no matter what songs you learn. Your childhood, your experiences, your pain, your longing, and your failures are uniquely yours, and they somehow end up in that beautiful Bm7 you just played, or the riffs you pull, or in the way you sing the word love (or hate). Your joy, successes, consummations, and realizations hold sway over the muse as well, but for me it’s harder to write a great song using positive emotions as the filter.

The mechanical part of being a musician is picked up by learning songs already written. The internet is full of free sites offering thousands of transcribed songs in tablature and chord charts, and nearly all seem to have gotten the music wrong at some point. Since this music was transcribed by ear, it’s understandable why it can be so spectacularly inaccurate. Published music books notating entire albums or catalogs are more accurate than the free stuff, but they can get it wrong too. So, in a book or a tab site, you can almost get the ‘three chords,’ but what about ‘the truth’ that accompanies them? Unless you’re in a cover band (no diss implied), how and why it’s played are almost as important as what is played. For the artists you’ve immersed yourself in, that can potentially come across subliminally when you play along to their records. But unless you’re born with a golden ear, learning by ear is tedious and, again, nearly impossible to get exactly right.

So what’s the solution? Learning music from the ones who made it, I suppose. ‘Tis a powerful concept—imagine learning to play a song at the feet of the artist who wrote, played, or produced it. iVideosongs.com is a website offering exactly that, 30 minutes at a time, 10 bucks a lesson. These are the early days for the company and so the roster may be a little light, but it includes Graham Nash, Alex Lifeson of Rush, and a good chunk of the Beatles catalog.

When I was a young punk, I foolishly dismissed the Beatles as a pop-ditty haircut band. It wasn’t until I tried learning one of their songs that I began to seriously respect them. One of the magical things about the Beatles (beginning with Rubber Soul) is that hidden within their ‘simple pop songs’ are subtly complicated arrangements, non-standard guitar and vocal harmonies, and truly astounding production techniques. There is a reason so much of the Beatles catalog still works today, and it’s not the haircuts. While no doubt the LSD, Eastern mysticism, and Hamburg strippers didn’t hurt, it’s what went on at Abbey Road, and of course the songwriting, that makes the Beatles the phenomenon they continue to be. The Beatles portion of what iVideosongs offers is presented by Giles Martin, son of Beatles producer George Martin. As the Grammy award-winning producer and engineer for the Beatles’ Love soundtrack (from the Cirque de Soleil show of the same name), Giles has become the reigning expert and chief historian of the band’s great sonic experiment. The Love soundtrack features 5.1 surround mixes of restored Beatles material. It also includes some incredibly well done mash-ups—layering and mixing elements from different Beatles songs together. The following is my interview with Giles and iVideosongs co-founder Tim Huffman about the band, the mix, the lessons, and Love. 

Crawdaddy!: First off, congratulations, Giles, on your two Grammys for the Love surround mix albums! You beat out the Beatles music from Across the Universe, as well.

Giles Martin: Thank you very much. Yeah, our interpretation of Beatles music beat out their interpretation of Beatles music! But then I had the team on my side. I had the trump card.

Crawdaddy!: The Beatles’ Love show has been hugely successful, and looks to keep selling out for years to come. I think a huge part of that success stems from the work you did on re-mixing the Beatles music in 5.1. What was your initial approach to such an enormous project?

Martin: When the concept came about, I told Apple [Corps] that what we should do is create a live show that never happened. Because it became apparent we didn’t want to go the route of anyone singing on stage. And I just decided to join the Beatles’ music together to create a rock show that they would have played now.  

Once I got the green light to do it, I took all the Beatles’ masters and I copied them into Pro Tools. Then I listened to every single Beatles track, and I made note of the tempo and keys and such. In fact, Paul McCartney said to me recently, “My god, you know more about our material than anyone else does simply because your work has been more recent.”

Crawdaddy!: How long did it take to pour over the Beatles catalog?

Martin: It took over six months.

Crawdaddy!: Given their vast catalog, I guess that’s not surprising.

Martin: Yeah, and you actually have to be quite diligent with these things. I basically did it very methodically because I wanted to leave a legacy of all the Beatles’ music being backed up properly. To be honest, I thought they would fire me for chopping up their music, and I thought, well, I’ll do one thing right—back up the catalog.

Crawdaddy!: You were well-established as a producer and mixer before you worked on the Beatles music. Did hearing and “seeing” your father’s Beatle recordings effect how you produce or engineer?

Martin: It made me realize that the most important thing about making any music is economy, and what I mean by that is, they [the Beatles under George Martin] never had anything on their record that didn’t make sense, or that was there just for the sake of being there. And also my dad’s work just sounds fantastic. I mean, incredibly, I won a Grammy for making a great sounding record, but let’s face it, they made it sound great 40 years ago. I’d have to be pretty bad to destroy that. [Laughs]

Crawdaddy!: With today’s technology overkill, it may not be that hard to do.

Martin: [Laughs] Yeah, that’s true.

Crawdaddy!: Both your two-channel and 5.1 mixes show that you can have good dynamics in a rock ‘n’ roll record and you don’t need to compress the snot out of it.