Some time ago I listened to Working Class Hero of John Lennon. I noticed that on 1 minute and 25 seconds suddenly the acoustic guitar sound is changed. It’s an obvious punched in. And at 1 minute and 45 seconds there’s another cut which is not perfect because in introduces a double chord. The cool thing is: I have heard that track many times before I noticed those anomalies.

Those are anomalies you should love. Because they are so musical.

The site What Goes On is one big archive of these kind of anomalies. It covers all Beatles recordings. No solo albums of the members of The Beatles are covered here. It contains a complete list of these lovely and musical anomalies as sound analysis. For any Beatles fan, engineer or musician this is great stuff to read. And although I’m some sort of a Beatles expert myself – I’ve read the The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions and The Beatles Anthology books and am 100% familiar with their complete repertoire – most of what I’m reading I’ve never noticed myself.

I also like the explanation they gave for the why so many anomalies can be found on Beatles records:

Comparing the work of The Beatles to modern music is unfair: The Beatles were innovating, experimenting, and working beyond the limits of the equipment. Equipment that at the time was the best available, but now looks very dated and clumsy. Modern recording technology allows the tiniest anomalous sound to be erased flawlessly, and performances to be reconstructed by engineers and producers after-the-fact. So modern music doesn’t suffer from these anomalies. It’s too carefully polished.

That last sentence “It’s too carefully polished” is spot on. Music should not be so carefully polished in my opinion. So stop using quantisation. Don’t fix those timing errors. Leave some soul in the music. Let it breath. Make more mistakes.