a, you know, a stick to keep going up and down at four in the bar; he couldn't do much else." Paul McCartney stated that Best was "good, but a bit limited." McCartney remembered: McCartney later suggested Ringo's drumming was a significant improvement over Best's. George Harrison, too, recalled preferring Ringo's drumming. He said, "Ringo kept sitting in with the band. And every time Ringo sat in with the band, it just seemed like, this was it." Starr, for his part, said, "I felt I was a much better drummer than [Best] was." Critic Richie Unterberger described Best's drumming at the Decca audition as "thinly textured and rather unimaginative", adding that Best "pushes the beat a little too fast for comfort". Unterberger thought Starr to be "more talented". Mike Savage, the session engineer, said, "I thought Pete Best was very average and didn't keep good time. You could pick up a better drummer in any pub in London. If you've got a quarter of the group being very average, that isn't good. The drummer should be the rock. If the rock isn't good, you start thinking, no. If Decca was going to sign the Beatles, we wouldn't have used Pete Best on the record." Beatles' historian Ian MacDonald, recounting the Decca audition, said that "Best's limitations as a drummer are nakedly apparent". MacDonald notes, of the EMI recording session on 6 June that "this audition version [of "Love Me Do"] shows one of the reasons why Best was sacked: in moving to the ride cymbal for the first middle eight, he slows down and the group falters." Beatles' critic Alan W. Pollack compared the Best, Starr, and Andy White versions of "Love Me Do", and concluded that Best was "an incredibly unsteady and tasteless drummer" on his version. Tony Sheridan, a rock and roll singer who had previously used the Beatles as a backing band, said, "The producer [Bert Kaempfert] didn't think Pete's drumming was good enough for recording. Kaempfert suggested Pete not play his bass drum because he used to get too fast; the tempo was a problem ... Pete was a crap drummer. You can take my word for it. He was just not competent. There were discrepancies between his feet and his hands." After the Beatles signed a contract, EMI producer Ron Richards said, "Pete Best wasn't very good. It was me who said to [producer] George