Millions of dollars worth of Beatles memorabilia changes hands every year, so the owners of a mixing console used to create Abbey Road hoped they might reap a £1.4m bonanza when they auctioned it last year.
But bids didn’t meet their reserve price, so now they have taken a different tack: instead of targeting fans, they are appealing to musicians who might actually use it.
Although there is no Beatlemania index showing fluctuations in the value of John Lennon’s handwritten lyrics or Paul McCartney’s collarless jackets, markets for vintage wines, rare whiskies, classic cars and fine art have seen a downturn in the past year, as people who view these luxuries as investment vehicles have turned elsewhere for profit.
Musical instruments and equipment are different: both objects of desire and inspirations of creativity. Musicians can spend years lusting after a microphone or synthesiser they believe will allow them to create a particular sound.
“Music gear is meant to be played,” said Antoine Bourgougnon, vintage electronics expert at Reverb, an online marketplace for musical instruments. “That’s what’s so special about the Abbey Road console – of course, it’s a piece of history, but it’s also been restored to be in perfect working condition, so that it can go on to make even more music for years to come.”
The EMI TG12345 Mk1 desk will be available to buy on Tuesday from Reverb, where Noel Gallagher, Green Day and Evanescence have all sold equipment in the past. The 24-input console was used at Abbey Road studios in 1969 by producer George Martin to record the fab four’s celebrated album, as well as later solo projects by Lennon, McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.
It was a prototype, based on transistor technology. When it was replaced by snazzier gear it was dumped, and then rescued by Mike Hedges, a sound engineer who worked at Abbey Road and loved its sound (Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick was not at first a fan – the console sounded “smoother and mellower” than the EMI Redd console used on previous albums).
Hedges collaborated with Malcolm Jackson and his team at MJQ studios to restore the console, and demonstrated its musicality by hosting a recording session earlier this year.
Who would buy it? The most likely candidates are the wealthiest of pop stars, museums or music schools, or speculators hoping for a hefty return, according to Peter Forrest, the owner of Spheremusic in Devon. He has been running auctions for nearly 30 years, working with some of the biggest names in music.
“It would be a hell of a good sales pitch for a studio – come and record with this iconic mixer,” Forrest said.
Studio owners build their business around specific pieces of gear: for example, Toe Rag studios in east London uses only analogue equipment and records on to tape, rather than digitally.
“Famous vocalists will book a studio because they wanted to use a microphone from the 40s or 50s, because they’d been told by some producer it would sound good on their voice,” said Chris Barker, co-host of the My Forever Studio podcast, which has asked artists such as Gary Barlow and Deadmau5 to choose six pieces of equipment for their dream studio.
Nicolas Cage, the Hollywood star, once rang Barker to ask for help finding a Neumann U 47 microphone, popular with Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, as a Christmas present for his son Weston, a heavy metal vocalist.
“I said ‘you do understand, Nick, that this is a very rare and expensive microphone’. And he said ‘That’s exactly why I want it, Chris’. We hunted round and found a lot of people who had one, but almost no one was willing to sell it.”
Some artists bought vintage gear partly because they knew the price would appreciate, but also because they hoped it would inspire them, Barker said. “I’ve met artists that have rooms full of synthesisers and don’t use them on the records, which sounds mad. They use computers but the synths are an inspirational tool. The console could have that impact – it’s going to put you in a Beatles frame of mind and make you want to make great music.”
Losing gear can be disastrous. Brian Eno once contacted Forrest to sell various pieces of gear, including a small and cheap Mackie mixer. “He’d made improvements but he sold it. Then he got in touch and said ‘can you persuade the buyer to let me have it back?’” Forrest said. Eno offered to swap the mixer for a pair of speakers that were worth six times as much.
“People like particular sounds,” Forrest said, adding that Eno also owned an EMS Synthi, a modular synthesiser launched in 1972. “When he sent it for servicing, he’d say ‘don’t change this and this – I know they’re wrong, but I like them’.
Some secondhand equipment has risen in price by more than 500% since 2016, according to Reverb, and some innocuous items can jump dramatically in value if fans see them being used by particular artists.
“My two or three best customers are high-end musicians, but they’ve got a collector mentality as well,” Forrest said. “So they tend to home in on something, buy two or three of them, then find the best one. And then they’re quite happy sometimes to part with the other two.”
It can work in favour of the manufacturers. Aphex Twin used an auction to sell some of his three Korg PS3300s, rare synthesisers produced for a few years in the late 70s.
Forrest said he had sold two of the synths, then Korg had borrowed the other. “They wanted to reproduce it, so they came and checked his out to make sure their new version was sufficiently accurate.”
