Paul McCartney's engineer details the tape techniques behind “The Boys of Dungeon Lane”

Steve Orchard, Paul McCartney's longtime studio engineer, has described how tape machines were used on the album “The Boys of Dungeon Lane” in an interview with Reverb, according to MusicRadar. McCartney and producer Andrew Watt worked with the machines kept at McCartney's private studio, Hog Hill Mill.

Orchard, who joined McCartney's team in 2014, says most of the recording was done in Pro Tools, but tape still plays a part in the creative process, from changing tape speeds to recording parts in different octaves. The studio moved away from a tape-based workflow in the early 2000s but kept its machines, including a Studer J37 and two A827s.

The Studer J37, the four-track machine used on several Beatles albums in the mid-to-late 1960s, caught Watt's eye. It was used to record “We Two”, with Watt on guitar and McCartney on drums. When the take drifted slightly in tempo near the end, Orchard recorded a short pickup and spliced it into the original with a razor blade, an edit he admitted he had not done in more than 20 years.

Just before the cut, Watt's phone rang: it was Elton John on FaceTime. Orchard says he had Watt and Elton on one shoulder and McCartney on the other, and the edit worked out perfectly.

Paul McCartney, the English musician born in 1942, was a member of the Beatles. “The Boys of Dungeon Lane” came out on 29 May 2026, according to MusicBrainz, and in October mbuzz reported that he had released a digital special edition of the album with four additional songs.