I found this while searching the Mix Magazine website for Beatles stuff.
Its an interview of the Beatles' recording engineer Geoff Emerick:
For a while, you were monitoring in mono, even for stereo releases.Stereo was late being introduced in England; we were quite behind the times. Up until Abbey Road, everything was monitored in mono through one loudspeaker, which was hard, but it also helped, because it's easy to get distinctive sounds between guitars if you've got them left and right. But if they're coming from one sound speaker, they merge together and it's a fight to find a place and a tone and an echo for each guitar. And then, of course, when you got it and you switched to stereo, it was wonderful. It's still a good way of putting sounds together.
You have to work harder on it.
Yes, it would take, on the average, two-and-a-half to three hours to work on each sound. We had the luxury; we weren't holding up the session. Most of the tracks were started in the studio, and they would go on for many hours working on the basic rhythm track, which gave us time to work on the sounds.
Of course, we were recording and mixing at the same time because we were still 4-track. So, we were putting the real sounds on the instruments. They weren't going on separate tracks, they were all mixed on to one. That was the finished sound. It wasn't a question of doing it in the mix; that was it, and the rest of the track was built around that sound.
For the whole article, go to this link: