How the Beatles recorded "I'm Only Sleeping"

[T Boog]

Very cool deep dive video...

 

[Starship Krupa]

This will be an interesting watch, with the thumbnail implying that they used an advance prototype of a Tascam Portastudio.

Flip the cassette over, record the guitar solo, flip it back?

[Starship Krupa]

Wow, that IS truly amazing and inspiring.

Instead of taking the usual thought path of "oh we can do that all easily with the tools we have now" he tries to duplicate the methods as much as the performance.

To me, it suggests that chasing the sonic tools and techniques used by ones heroes is not as futile as many suggest with the "tone is all in the fingers, maaaan" mantra. Yeah, you DO have to have the chops to pull it off, but getting your gear as close as possible isn't as silly a pursuit as some suggest.

Yes, in subsequent decades Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr all sounded unmistakably like themselves no matter what gear they were playing or singing through or who was recording them, but they never sounded like they did on Revolver.

I might listen to "I'm Only Sleeping" and hear that they're using a primitive version of chorus/flanging on the vocals, but I would not have worked out that they did it with someone working the speed knob manually. That's a performance in and of itself.

Could it be done entirely in the box? When you manually adjust the playback speed of a tape deck, both pitch and speed are adjusted. For every move you make in one direction, you must make one in the other direction so that by the end of the song, they're not too far out of sync. He uses the natural imperfections of the cassette format to approximate it, but that's not the same as controlling it in real time. It's still random. You could try duplicating the vocal track, then putting RC-20 or Needlepoint or whatever on one track and not on the other using their approximation of wow and flutter, but that would only duplicate his process, not the realtime performance of the tape op turning the knob. Is there a way to set that up using a control surface? You'd need to have control over both pitch and speed and be mindful of having to nudge it in both directions.

It would be so much trouble to set up and execute that 99% of people would just say screw it and slap on something like Quadrovox and leave it at that. You want vocals that are thickened via pitch shift? You gottit. But that leaves out the effect of having them also become out of sync in the time domain....

[Glenn Stanton]

more importantly (for me) is how much preplanning the recording had. given the precision of the AR engineering, and setting pitches (via frequency driving the tape motors) and the band performing at multiple tunings and speeds, is pretty amazing. and to consider how many of their songs underwent this kind of process. this is a serious devotion to obtain results like noone else...

pretty sure not many bands were even aware of these techniques at the time, or even had bothered to try them...

and i think yeah, all this can be done in the box today. and i'd wager if the band had DAW tech back then, they'd have used it... and who know where they would have taken things. lol. maybe if we build a time machine and bring them a proper computer and Sonar, we could have flying cars today...