Abbey Road: The Inside Story of the World's Most Famous Recording Studio

Everything was great 👍

Abbey Road is the most celebrated recording studio in the world. And you'd expect a book to deliver with history (it does) as well as thorough documentation of the studio itself (it doesn't). Instead, it covers several recording acts and their experiences in the studio, and understandably does not focus on the Beatles (as there are many, MANY books that chronicle their activities in Abbey Road) but I was really hoping this would be more authoritative about the design of the studio, and document more of the gear that was used to create these legendary recordings. The studio has a great history. This book tells you plenty about the building and those who ran it, but misses what was the main reason I bought it... I want to learn about the studio itself, the layouts of the rooms, the gear used... I want to experience what a recording engineer would experience, not an artist talking about the canteen and the pretty girls at the front desk. As a result, this book really misses the mark for me at least. The worst judgement I can levy on a book is whether it finds itself on the pile of Goodwill donations. This is definitely in the purgatory between my bookshelf and the donation pile...

A well researched history of Abbey Road recording studio. The author does an exceptional job of balancing the technological advances the studio made during its 90+ year history with an overview of the key artists artists who used the studio, and ensuing changes in the recording and mastering processes. Non-fiction books are rarely page turners but I found this book fascinating and it kept my interest throughout. I was appreciative of the playlist at the end of the book that provided key recordings made at a Abbey Road. I was able to listen to several of these cuts via YouTube. Highly recommended

I just purchased this book in paperback and I want to remind reviewer Todd and others to remember this: "George Bernard Shaw was quoted in 1942 as saying, "England and America are two countries separated by the same language." To write such a negative review based on the British writer's use of British terminology only diminishes the reviewer. I find the history of Abbey Road Studios very interesting and if some of the terms used don't "flow" correctly to my American English ears, I can at least look up the terms to see what the equivalent American term might be. I hope that other reviewers would do the same. I found the negative reviews to be VERY UNHELPFUL and wish there was an option to mark them so.

This biography is expansive in that it tries to cover everything in the history of recording technology and music related to Abbey Road, but it does none of it especially well. Disappointing.

Mr. Hepworth has written an interesting book about Abbey Road's history. The Beatles are the most famous who used it but there were many others before them and after them. The descriptions and explanations of the technology used over the decades are themselves useful music information.

I read an online article about the technical aspects of file restoration at the famous studio, which interests me greatly, and got me interested in the book. But I downloaded the first chapters as a sample, and the actually dug in and read the article with it's excerpts. For me the writing is bad. Really bad. I won't be able to read this book. It occurs as though unedited. Full of malapropism and weird expressions. With each reading of any part, it comes to seem to comprise pure run-on sentence structure, and very awkward style. Here's the sentence that caused me to grind to a halt: 'This was the appliance of science to the suck-it-and-see world of record production.' I am not normally pedantic. I like the Arctic Monkeys, and appreciate the reference to their album title. Even sort of like that it's crude. But writing 'Appliance' when you just mean application... The application of science to x or y... It bothered me. And the more I looked - at the books early chapters on recording technology, for example, the more there was to be bothered by. To me this writing is uneven, badly spliced, wandering and uninformative. It even seems apocryphal. To a point where I start wanting to fact check. I can not read it. Maybe others who are already fans of this writer will. Maybe those who love the Beatles so much that they want to touch the objects which link them to that history - maybe you; maybe you won't mind. Certainly none of the professional reviewers did. But not for me. Glad I sampled, and did not buy.