There aren't many people in today's music world that you could call a living legend, but Sir George Martin is definitely one of them. If you're not familiar with the Grammy award winning and Oscar nominated Martin, he's the creative force that produced, co-produced, and arranged the music on all of The Beatles' original recordings, which includes every Beatles hit you've heard over the years. As well, Martin creatively helped to turn three James Bond themes into mainstream hits with his contributions and work on From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, and Live and Let Die. In addition to founding Associated Independent Recording (AIR), Martin has also worked with several of the music world's top artists and most recently remixed all of The Beatles songs used in the live show Love, which runs in Las Vegas.

At last week's TCA press tour in Los Angeles, Sir George Martin sat down at the PBS panel to talk with the press about his latest project, On Record: The Soundtrack of Our Lives, a story about ... how the most universal mass medium of the 20th century marked the emergence of pop culture worldwide; how the competition between the urban middle class and the rural working class came to define popular music and in so doing, made possible the breakthrough of minority cultures into mainstream consciousness. Hosted by Martin and narrated by Kevin Spacey, On Record: The Soundtrack of Our Live traces several of music's most influential moments featuring interviews with a variety of notable names in music. Although The Soundtrack of Our Lives doesn't debut on PBS until 2010, Sir George Martin was more than happy to talk about the upcoming series, his legacy with The Beatles, and the bands that impress him in today's music world.

Sir George Martin on the birth of the record:

"I’m very delighted to be a part of this project. I think it’s such an important one. On Record: The Soundtrack of Our Lives, it’s really the soundtrack on my life. You see recording has been with us for rather more than a hundred years, but the first fifty years were pretty primitive stuff because when Berliner designed his gramophone record and patented it in 1898 and started the gramophone company that was the beginning of the world on record. And if he hadn’t done that can you imagine what we’d be like without recorded sound? It’s impossible to think of. Forget your iPods, they don’t exist. Forget your records, they don’t exist. The only way you can hear music is to hear music when it’s performed live, and for most people that meant very rarely. So way back in Beethoven’s time the amount of people that listened to his music, you could fit into this room. There weren’t many people at all. So he changed everything. The guy who invented the recording and his design of records, which was a disc which could be pressed out in vast quantities stayed with us for fifty years in unaltered form. Except that half way through, around about the time I was born, they did introduce electricity and microphones. Up to that time it was purely physical stuff."

Martin on the second phase and working with PBS:

"When I went into Abby Road in 1950 for the first time, we were still working on old fashioned wax discs. We didn’t use tape, it was too noisy. And most of my records at that time - classical records, really - were made in this way. So I’ve kind of lived through the second half of the development of the record, and it’s been a fascinating experience because everything changed quickly throughout that time. I’m particularly delighted that PBS is involved in this project because it’s the ideal company who are going to put our program out in a way I think is right. Because it’s not only instructional and educational, it’s not going to be boring, it’s going to be entertaining. It’s going to be fun and PBS is like that. PBS does such good programs. I’ve been a fan of PBS long before I thought of this, [and] got involved in this particular series. And I really don’t like American television very much - sorry to tell you this - but I love what PBS does and I watch it all of the time. So I think I’m so pleased about this, that we’re involved with them."

On Record: The Soundtrack of Our Lives, and working on "Love":

This project is obviously very important to me personally. I don’t like losing, I really don’t. I like winning. And everything that I do, I strive to make sure that it does work. I try to do things in a slightly unusual way. Recently, I mean five years ago, I started a project which ended up two years ago with the opening of the Love show in Las Vegas. And that was a massive task because when I was called in in 2003 the brief was - you can have anything you like from the archives of EMI to make up a soundtrack lasting an hour and a half, seamless soundtrack. But it must be new rather than old, not a question or combination of tracks. That’s too easy. So with my son we worked - actually it took three years to do and we evolved a soundtrack, which was different from anything anybody had heard. And in surround sound you get immersed in the music. [It is] A great project and thankfully it did actually come up extremely well. The show is selling to knockout audiences even after two years and the album won two Grammys. So that’s the thing I like doing. If that had failed I would’ve kicked myself and I would’ve kicked my son as well. This series is not going to fail. This series is going to be enormously entertaining, and working with PBS is going to be a thrill that I do know."

Even though you said you don’t like American television that much, there were rumors for two years that you were going to be the mentor on American Idol. Were you seriously considering it or what happened with that?

SIR GEORGE MARTIN: [laughs] You know, I know it’s enormously popular, American Idol, but it’s not my cup of tea. I would never dream of being on it. In spite of the money being made, my God, you know that guy’s walking around like rich as creases, but I’d much rather be poor.

What was it about the blend of you, Lennon, and McCartney, that combination that worked so well personality wise?

SIR GEORGE MARTIN: Well, we did like each other for a start and that does help. We respected each other. We worked as a team and working with The Beatles was a large part of my life, but not the entire part of my life. And certainly there are features in this PBS series, but they’re not the dominant thing. Music and record is the most dominant thing. Working with John and Paul and Ringo and George was challenging because they were four such strong individual characters and we had a wonderful time.

Because of your close association with The Beatles over the years and your knowledge of popular music, do you think that we will ever experience the world wide phenomenon that was Beatle Mania again?

SIR GEORGE MARTIN: We will not see the Beatles again. We will probably see something different, which will be maybe not as quite as successful, because The Beatles are like George Gershwin or Cole Porter, they go on forever and you’ll be hearing Beatle music in 2050. Most of the groups coming along today don’t get the chance to build up that longevity. I mean there will be great acts of course, but nothing quite like Beatle Mania.

What’s the last album you heard that impressed you?

SIR GEORGE MARTIN: [laughs] Well, I don’t know. I listen to quite a few records. I’m not terribly happy with the current pop music. I like Coldplay, I think they’re pretty good. I like Radiohead, so I’m pretty provincial and English in my taste I guess.

What is it about those two bands that impressed you?

SIR GEORGE MARTIN: Well, I think they’re different from the run-of-the-mill, and I think that Thom Yorke is very good. Chris Martin is excellent, you know. He has to be with a name like that.

What’s your favorite Beatles song?

SIR GEORGE MARTIN: My favorite Beatles is "In My Life".

In a general sense, do you think that musical genius is born and then nurtured, or do you think musical genius is nurtured and then born?

SIR GEORGE MARTIN: Well, musical genius - I think you’ve got to have it in you to start with, somewhere. But an awful lot of kids do have great talent and a lot of them don’t get the chance. This is why I hope this series will in fact nurture a desire and help for young people who are going through all of those traumas. I remember when I was a kid, I ran a dance band when I was young and I wrote songs when I was 15 and 16, but I remember how difficult it was to be accepted by my peers, old fuddy-duddies like 80-year-old producers for example. I really think that musical genius has to be nurtured as well - I think you’ve got to have it within you and then I think you’ve got to develop it. The guys that I know, I’m thinking of people like Elton John and of course The Beatles, Burt Bacharach, and Neil Sedaka even, they came through the mill and they learned their trade. I’ve seen Elton at work and he’s got a genius because he can conjure up a great melody out of nowhere in a very short space of time, and that’s a gift. But it’s also nurtured by the fact that he’s worked with so many people and learned how to do the right things and so on. So it’s a combination of the two.

Would you give us an example of a great recording technique, a moment when what happened in the studio, something that was done by the producer, by yourself or whomever that really made the difference to make a great record happen?

SIR GEORGE MARTIN: Well, there are various things that I personally experienced and I think the most bizarre one great moment was in making Tomorrow Never Knows. We had this iconic drum track, which Ringo produced and this weird song from John, and when we did it I had to devise a new way of recording. I don’t want to go on too long because it would bore the pants off of you. But really, working with just four tracks, what we wanted to do was to build up a series of weird sounds. So the boys all brought me little loops they had made on their Grundig recorders, which I listened to and played at different speeds, forwards and backwards, and decided which ones to use. I selected sixteen of these loops, and what I wanted to do was make them available so when we mixed we could bring in any one of these loops if we wished to. So at any one time we had eight playback machines playing these loops and they were all over at Abby Road studios. There were fellas in white coats holding the tape onto the head with a pencil and running all of the time fed to our machine, our console, so that we could lift the fader and hear [musical sounds]. So you had them available like an organ. And when we did the mix, we played around with those all hands on deck - John and Paul, I, Jeff Emerich, engineer - we were all messing around until we got what we wanted. Half way through, we changed all of the loops and put another eight on and do the same thing again. That was a moment where we were doing something really weird and sticks in my mind.