When Martin turned up at EMI's Abbey Road Studios for the first time, he said during a recent lecture tour, recording devices were powered not by electric motors, which were too unstable to cut 78 rpm records, but by a slow-falling weight that descended from the studio's roof to its basement. Records were heavy things that shattered if you dropped them. When the Beatles came along in 1962, things hadn't improved much.

By 1965, "Rubber Soul" had gone far beyond the early live-performance albums. Rhythm, vocal and instrumental tracks were carefully layered over several weeks. The process, not to mention the music, altered the direction of rock. Martin was also bringing in more session players, changing the Beatles' sound to reflect their leap in craftsmanship. Inspired by American film composer Bernard Herrman's score for "Fahrenheit 451," he composed a beautifully understated string accompaniment for "Eleanor Rigby." (To hear just how understated, compare the song with Phil Spector's gaudy orchestration of "The Long and Winding Road" on "Let It Be," which horrified Martin and McCartney.)

But it was "Strawberry Fields Forever" that put Martin's ingenuity to its most crucial test. Written by Lennon while he was in Spain making a Richard Lester film called "How I Won the War," two versions of the song had emerged in the studio. One was a heavy amalgam of psychedelia inspired by the San Francisco music scene, the other softer and more traditionally Beatlesque, with trumpets and cellos. Lennon ended up liking the beginning of the first version and the ending of the second. Problem was, they were at different speeds and a semitone apart in key. Martin eventually solved this conundrum by speeding up one and slowing down the other, splicing the halves together into a seamless whole. With "Strawberry Fields," "George showed us once and for all that the recording studio itself was a musical instrument," producer Tony Visconti recently told Billboard. "This track was the dividing line of those who recorded more or less live and those who wanted to take recorded music to the extremes of creativity." The "Sgt. Pepper" sessions had begun.

Inspired by a circus poster he'd found in an antique shop, Lennon wrote "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite," telling Martin he wanted to smell the sawdust in the ring. The producer obliged him, procuring sounds of old Victorian steam organs. He put them all on one tape, had it cut into 15-inch sections, had the pieces thrown into the air and joined back together as one; some were backward and some were forward. The unusual sounds permeate the background. To get the song's wildly atmospheric whooshing effects, Martin next played chromatic runs on a Hammond organ at half-speed, the same trick employed for "In My Life." "I was quite pleased with that," Martin told Melody Maker. "It was a sound picture thing, and I was doing really what I'd been doing with Peter Sellers."

The real circus came in the form of one legendary session for "A Day in the Life." With 24 bars to fill between Lennon's verses ("I read the news today") and McCartney's middle eight ("Woke up, fell out of bed"), the duo suggested "a tremendous shriek, starting out quietly and finishing up with a tremendous noise." Martin booked a 41-piece orchestra and scored chaos for it to play. He began each instrument at its lowest note and, at the end of the 24 bars, had it hit its highest note related to an E chord. Martin told the musicians to do whatever it took to get from point A to point B. A gaggle of celebrities was on hand, including Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Donovan Leitch and Mike Nesmith. McCartney brought in funny hats and fake noses, "and I distributed them among the orchestra. I wore a Cyrano de Bergerac nose myself," Martin told Melody Maker. "Eric Gruneberg, who's a great fiddle player, selected a gorilla's paw for his bow hand, which was lovely. It was great fun."

"Pepper" was released in 1967. Four years had intervened between the Beatles' first, nine-and-three-quarters-hours album session for "Please Please Me" and "Sgt. Pepper," which clocked in at 700 hours. From that collaborative peak, the Beatles began slowly going their separate ways; though Martin's role didn't change fundamentally, everyone was having less fun. During the White Album ("The Beatles") sessions, Lennon and McCartney isolated themselves from each other; all four Beatles were rarely in the studio for recording together, a process much the reverse of their earliest days.

By the time the Beatles got around to "Get Back," a literal attempt to go back to their rock 'n' roll roots (later retitled "Let It Be"), they were a mess, as evidenced by the 1970 film of the sessions, whose lone highlight is the famous rooftop set. The sessions were shelved, to be later reproduced by Spector, who for all his wall-of-sound artistry couldn't do much to salvage the tracks. The band then decided to let Martin do some actual producing, and they were graced with a suitable finale in "Abbey Road."

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