Yesterday (BDJ Stereo Remix)

BDJ's Cellar Full of Remixes

McCartney sang Yesterday accompanied by his Epiphone Texan guitar on the evening of 14th June. A score for string quartet — George Martin's first major arranging contribution to The Beatles - was over-dubbed three days later.
A string quartet, in the pop world of those days, was quite a step to take. It was with ‘Yesterday’ that George Martin started breaking out of the phase of using just four instruments and went into something more experimental.
Unfortunately, the recording was still very much focused on MONO. The STEREO mix of Yesterday has the guitar on the extreme left, and the string quartet in the extreme right. This makes for an awkward listening experience. Here, we present a more balanced stereo version of Yesterday, with the string quartet in stereo. Quite some work for the BDJ Spectral Demuxers, since there is no stereo recording of the string quartet available. We thought we would do credit to Tony Gilbert, Sidney Sax (violins), Kenneth Essex (viola) and Francisco Gabarro (cello) by rendering them in glorious stereo.
We can now hear the string quartet better; they had to play listening to the recoding of vocals + guitar of 3 days earlier, and at some points they are a bit out of sync. But the beautiful arrangement (score by George Martin) easily makes up for these imperfections.
The highlight of the arrangement is the little cello phrase in the middle eighty (1:25-l :27), and the violin's held high A in the final verse. And that must have been frustrating for poor George Martin; George Martin had asked McCartney to comment on Martin's score; and it was McCartney who added the cello in the middle eight and the violin's held note! Frustrating no doubt, since Martin had studied music at university, and was an accomplished arranger. McCartney couldn't read music and had never scored a string quartet before.......