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Video: 'Can't Buy Me Love (2023 Mix)'

(Tuesday, March 10, 1964, 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m. GMT) — While members of The Beatles completed their recording contributions to the band’s next single, “Can’t Buy Me Love” on Feb. 25, 1964, the stereo version of the track was actually not completed until today when their engineer recorded a brief overdub.

A mixing session was booked for today in the control room of Studio Two, EMI Studios in London, attended by producer George Martin and engineer Norman Smith, to create the stereo mix of “Can’t Buy Me Love.”

But the production team discovered the tape had a ripple in it, resulting in the intermittent loss of treble on Ringo Starr’s hi-hat cymbal.

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Video: 'The Beatles - Can't Buy Me Love (2009 Mono Remaster)'

There was tremendous time pressure to get the track mixed and delivered to the pressing plant, and due to filming commitments for A Hard Day’s Night, The Beatles themselves were unavailable, so George and Norman took it upon themselves to make a “little artistic adjustment.”

As the then-tape operator Geoff Emerick later wrote, “Norman (Smith) headed down into the studio to overdub a hastily set-up hi-hat onto a few bars of the song while I recorded him, simultaneously doing a two-track to two-track dub. Thanks to Norman’s considerable skills as a drummer, the repair was made quickly and seamlessly, and I doubt if even The Beatles themselves ever realized that their performance had been surreptitiously augmented.”

The mono mix of “Can’t Buy Me Love” did not have this problem and was released without Smith’s overdub.