Take an intimate tour of Abbey Road Studios, with Google

Before heading to London a few years ago, I wrote the folks at Abbey Road Studios (perhaps the most famous recording studio in the world) to see how much it’d cost to reserve a few hours with an engineer to track an acoustic demo. It was basically just going to be an excuse to get inside and check it out.

Total pros, as you’d expect — they responded promptly.

As I’d feared though, the hourly rate they quoted, which I don’t think even included access to all their mics and instruments, it might’ve made sense if I was in Coldplay, but it wasn’t in the budget for me since really I just wanted a glorified tour of the place.

So instead, one afternoon when I had a few free hours to kill, I took the cliché tourist pilgrimage to Abbey Road, walked the crosswalk, stared at the graffiti on the walls, and got to watch some other musicians pull up in a Sprinter, unload their amps and guitars into the studio through the front entrance, and then shut the doors behind them.

Besides seeing videos and pictures of artists recording there, I figured that was the closest I’d ever get to Abbey Road. But now, thanks to Google’s new interactive virtual tour, you can “really explore the studio space” (to quote a moment from the most famous recording session ever — which sadly didn’t happen at Abbey Road.)

Inside Abbey Road is pretty great, including guided tours through all three studio rooms, a look at the mastering suite, an analysis of the mic collection, a bunch of videos of people recording there, and tons of trivia for your inner music history geek.

Google’s interactive virtual tour is the kind of tool (which one of my co-workers described as a combination of Google Street View, an encyclopedia, and a video game) that when applied across multiple areas of interest could change the way we think about education, travel, and exploration.

It’s exciting for that reason alone, but ya know, it’s also exciting to just poke around in the room where “I Am the Walrus” was made.

Check out Inside Abbey Road HERE.

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Source: Musician Resources