2016 is the 50th anniversary of the release of The Beatles masterpiece 'Revolver'. To celebrate this, 21 leading Sheffield musicians combined their talents to do something The Beatles never did, and perform the album in full. The inaugural performance of the Sheffield Revolver Project was on 23/7/16 at the seventh annual Tramlines Festival, hopefully more may follow. 

I was tasked with fixing the strings and arranging parts. Assuming they would already be available on the internet I set out to look - but found nothing that I was happy with. I'm pretty sure George Martin's original arrangement is not what was published in the official book of Beatles scores, and the vast majority of attempted transcriptions I found on the web were either for the wrong forces (quartet instead of octet) or full of small but obvious inaccuracies.

Our goal in the project was to reproduce the exact sound of the album - and I'm already a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to arranging parts - so though a basic arrangement came quite quickly I was happy to spend many hours tinkering and refining until I felt I had got as close as possible. A lot of time was spent experimenting with the voicing of the chords - specific inversions, and where the sound came from in the octet, as well as finding where to double up parts or just have a single player. I listened a lot to the very helpful strings only recording on The Beatles Anthology 2 - if you have any suggestions after listening to it I'd be glad to hear from you!

It would be the height of hubris to claim that this is exactly what George Martin wrote - and sadly now, we'll never be able to ask him. But I am arrogant enough to reckon that I've got closer than any other version you'll find on the internet. When we played it live, it sounded like the record, and that was our goal. 

Anyway, having done all that work I'd like others to benefit, so I'm happy to make the parts available here for free. Click here to download them from a mediafire folder. Individual parts are available or you can get the whole lot as a zip. It's all free, but please do credit me if you use them and feel free to let me know about performances. 

NB... this is NOT a commercial enterprise, merely one musician helping out others as the original has never been published. Please do not use this arrangement for commercial gain.

2018 update: look in the comments for some very insightful potential updates that you may or may not wish to add to the score!
Also, the project did continue - check us out: https://www.facebook.com/thesheffieldbeatlesproject/?ref=br_rs