PDA

View Full Version : How innovative were the Beatles ?



Panamark
04-30-2004, 03:50 AM
THE BEATLES AND THE DOUBLE VIBROCATED SPLOSHING FLANGE

By Bill Biersach


On April 6th, 1966, four months after the release of Rubber Soul, the Beatles invaded Abbey Road Studio to begin work on what was to become one of their most significant albums, Revolver. Not only was this to be a radical departure from their string of successful pop albums, but also an innovative journey into new and imaginative sonorities, a journey made possible by the technical wizards whose job it was to make their ideas into realities. Sometimes this took a leap in thinking bordering on genius.

John Lennon had a peculiar idea for the first song he wanted to record for the album. "I want to sound as though I'm the Dalai Lama," he told George Martin, referring to "Mark I" [the working title of "Tomorrow Never Knows"]. "And yet I still want to hear the words I'm singing." Sure thing... but how?

"They would relate what sounds they wanted and we then had to go away and come back with a solution," recalls Ken Townsend, who was one of the studio technicians at the time. "For example, they often liked to double-track their vocals, but it's quite a laborious process and they soon got fed up with it. So, after one particularly trying night-time session doing just that, I was driving home and suddenly had an idea."

Townsend's solution was called Artificial Double Tracking, or ADT. It was a process by which a recorded vocal track was re-recorded onto a separate machine which had been modified with a variable oscillator, causing the tape speed (and therefore the pitch) to fluctuate slightly up and down. This modulated signal was then fed back into the first machine to be combined with the original signal. The irregularities in the two signals imitated the natural variations in the human voice when overdubbed against itself. The resulting effect emulated a double-tracked vocal.



The moment Lennon heard it, he was overjoyed. Being a spontaneous musician, a "one-take man," he loathed the discipline of matching consonants and fricatives when double-tracking his own vocals. For him, ADT represented a new era of freedom. It involved processes about which he knew absolutely nothing. Nonetheless, he did ask Martin to explain it to him.

"I knew he'd never understand it," recalls Martin with amusement, "so I said, 'Now listen, it's very simple. We take the original image and split it through a double vibrocated sploshing flange with double negative feedback ...' He said, 'You're pulling my leg, aren't you?' I replied, 'Well, let's flange it again and see.' From that moment on, whenever he wanted ADT he would ask for his voice to be 'flanged,' or call out for 'Ken's flanger.' "

It's sobering to think that the Beatles' influence was so pervasive that the term "flanger" caught on and is still used by electric guitarists and equipment manufacturers to this day--even though the process is now done with digital delay circuits rather than analog tape.

But that was only the beginning of the innovations ignited during the recording of "Tomorrow Never Knows."

Over in Europe, composers such as Stockhausen and Xenakis had been experimenting with tape manipulation for years. They had created a new genre called "musique concrête." Paul McCartney, who was interested in the "serious musics" of the mainland, was intrigued by the manipulation of sounds via tape loops. He began coming into the studio with bags full of tiny reels upon which he had recorded his experimental loops at home.

The "seagull" effect heard throughout "Tomorrow Never Knows" is the result of McCartney's experiments with distorted guitar sounds. There were also loops of backward orchestras and even wine glasses.

"We did a live mix of all the loops," recalls Martin. "All over the studio we had people spooling them onto machines with pencils while Geoff [Emerick] did the balancing. There were many other hands controlling the panning."

Ironically, though it was McCartney who pioneered the concept of running continuous tape loops through the mixing console, turning the faders into a primitive "keyboard" of sampled sounds, it was Lennon who carried the concept to its conclusion three albums later during the production of "Revolution 9."

On Thursday, June 20th, 1968, Lennon "took over" the Abbey Road studio complex. Every available tape machine was used to play loops, and every available engineer and technician was utilized to keep the loops taut with pencils and screwdrivers. Included in Lennon's "loop pallet" were such sounds as an extract from the orchestra overdubs to "A Day in the Life" (February 10th, 1967), Lennon's own meandering at a mellotron played backwards, the chaotic ending to "Revolution 1" (May 30th, 1968) which was deleted from the final mix of that song, and the famous (but to this day, unidentified) professorial voice saying "number nine" which was extracted from an oral exam for the Royal Academy of Music. All these loops and more were fed into a mixing console at which Lennon sat, playing the faders like the keys of a bizarre pipe organ.

It is unlikely that "Revolution 9" is any Beatlemaniac's favorite song. Still, it is a glaring testimony to the innovative attitude of the Beatles and their staff. The perception of "the recording studio itself as a musical instrument"--a concept which, until the Beatles' involvement, had been pioneered only by serious intellectual composers in Europe--would have profound effects on the recording industry at large. Today, these kinds of effects are easily achieved with digital samplers. It is remarkable, considering the primitive technology at their disposal, that the Beatles were inserting a wedge into the door of the future. But there's more.

Sitting in the studio was a Hammond Organ, and like most Hammonds, it was accompanied by a Leslie Speaker. The Leslie Company had invented a speaker system decades before by which the sonic output of woofers and tweeters were directed through rotating horns which spun the sound into Doppler-shifted circles. This kind of effect is usually called "Rotating Speaker Emulation" on most digital effects devices today; it is accessed by a push of a button. Back then, the only way to spin the sound was to physically spin the speakers.

By rigging a transformer on the spot, Townsend was able to feed Lennon's microphone into the Leslie system. During the first 87 seconds of "Tomorrow Never Knows," Lennon's voice is treated with ADT. After that, and for the rest of the song, his voice is going through the Leslie.

This same effect would be added to guitar in "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" the following year when they were recording Sgt. Pepper. It would also be added to the vocals in George Harrison's haunting "Blue Jay Way" in Magical Mystery Tour. By the time they were recording the "White Album," the Leslie sound had become so much a Beatles' trademark that Eric Clapton would insist that his Les Paul solo in Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" be run through the Leslie to keep his participation in the recording secret.

"John was so impressed by the sound of a Leslie," recalls engineer Geoff Emerick, "that he hit upon the reverse idea. He suggested we suspend him from a rope in the middle of the studio ceiling, put a mike in the middle of the floor, give him a push and he'd sing as he went around and around. That was one idea that didn't come off although they were always said to be 'looking into it!' "

Emerick had been called in to replace the departing Norman Smith who had engineered all the previous Beatles' albums. (Smith received a promotion into EMI's A&R division, and ended up working with Pink Floyd--not a bad career move!) Emerick, young and unimpressed by standard industry procedures, introduced a number of ideas of his own, the most important of which was "close miking." The prevailing wisdom had always been to mike instruments at a distance of three to six feet to allow the sound to "blend with the environment." Emerick changed all that by placing microphones as close to the instruments as possible without interfering with the musician's ability to play.

Hence we have Ringo Starr's booming tom-toms in "Tomorrow Never Knows," as well as the grinding bows of the string octet in "Eleanor Rigby" and the spittle of the horns in "Got to Get You into My Life." The studio musicians who came in to do these sessions were horrified to find microphones placed within their "personal space." Close-miking techniques, which were originally explored by Emerick, have become standard procedure in recording studios throughout the word today. Close-miking is the best way to capture the intensity of most instruments onto tape.

Ah, and then there's McCartney's bass. Having started as a lead guitarist, switching to bass when Stu Sutcliffe left the band, McCartney played the bass like no other. (When once asked who was the best bassist in rock and roll, Jimi Hendrix responded without a moment's hesitation, "Paul McCartney.") Unfortunately, as McCartney had complained for several years, his bass was almost inaudible on most of their recordings so far. Part of the problem was the physical impossibility of picking up the enormous sound waves emanating from the woofer in McCartney's bass cabinet (many of the waves in excess of twenty feet in length) with the tiny pickup surface (less than the size of a quarter) in the average microphone.

Sometime during the Revolver sessions, Townsend got the bright idea of using a woofer to mike McCartney's woofer instead of a microphone. Students of electronics know that a speaker and a dynamic microphone are the exact same thing except for their relative size and where they are placed in a circuit. By placing a 15-inch woofer facing the same-sized woofer in McCartney's amplifier cabinet, much more of the sound waves generated by the bass guitar were picked up and fed through the mixing console to the record head on the multi-track tape machine.

Beginning with "Paperback Writer," which wasn't released as part of the Revolver album but as a single with "Rain" as the B-side, McCartney's bass guitar was recorded with this woofer-for-mike approach--and the results are wonderfully audible!



If the reader doubts this premise, try this experiment: Plug a dynamic microphone into the "headphone output" of your stereo and listen to the results. Music will indeed come out of the microphone. Likewise, if you plug a set of headphones into the "microphone input" jack, they will act as microphones.

If the reader is still doubtful, consider that when the 40-piece orchestra arrived at Abbey Road for the famous "Day in the Life" overdub session on February 10th, 1967, Emerick startled the string players by clamping headphones on their instruments in an admittedly extreme extension of his "close-miking" technique!

Back to McCartney's base sound. He was overjoyed with the sound achieved with the "woofer-as-mike" approach used in the Revolver sessions. Townsend took this idea a step further during the Sgt. Pepper sessions when he replaced both woofers with a single transformer, allowing the bass guitar's output the be "direct injected" into the mixing console. To this day, every studio owns "direct boxes" for this same purpose--to match various instruments to the inputs of a mixer.

Townsend recalls, "I think direct injection was probably used on Beatles sessions for the first time anywhere in the world. We built our own transformer boxes and plugged the guitars straight into the equipment."

Emerick recalls the day when Lennon, always on the lookout for new ways to change his vocal sound, came up with a modest, if bizarre, proposal. "John came up to the control room ... and asked if we could possibly inject his voice directly into the console. George [Martin] replied, 'Yes, if you go and have an operation. It means sticking a jack-plug into your neck!"

Though Lennon never took that particular idea any further, the group as a whole made startling use of direct-injection when they entered the studio on July 10, 1968 to record a "single version" of "Revolution" for release as a B-side to "Hey Jude." They wanted a particularly gritty sound on their guitars to offset the tamer "doo-wop" version of "Revolution 1" which had already been finalized for the "White Album." This they achieved in a most unusual way.

Today, if any guitarist wants to distort his sound, he can walk into a music store and buy one of a thousand distortion pedals. Back in the sixties, "fuzz boxes" were not so common or readily available. On a number of occasions (such as the "Think for Yourself" session of November 8th, 1965), Townsend had been called upon to build a distortion device from scratch. For the recording of "Revolution," however, the Beatles tried something different--a trick that few studio owners would ever allow, then or now.

"John wanted that sound," recalls Phil McDonald, the tape operator for the session. "A really distorted sound. The guitars were put through the recording console, which was technically not the thing to do. It completely overloaded the channel and produced the fuzz sound. Fortunately the technical people didn't find out. They didn't approve of 'abuse of equipment.' "

No, the "mixing-console-as-fuzz-device" is not an idea that caught on throughout the recording world, but it did give us one unique and blazing Beatles single!

Something else that has become standardized today is the synchronization of tape machines via SMPTE or MIDI. In this way any number of multitrack recorders can by linked together and any number of tracks can be utilized at the discretion of the producer. Back in the '60s, the synchronization of tape machines was far from reality. Nonetheless, the Beatles and George Martin managed to make inroads into unexplored territory.

The first such excursion came during the production of "Strawberry Fields Forever," which was arguably the first song recorded for Sgt. Pepper (even though it was not included on the album but released instead as a single). The Beatles had actually recorded two distinct versions of the song. One was a slow, thoughtful rendition. The other was a raucous locomotive version complete with close-miked brass and strings.

"John Lennon told me," recalls Martin, "that he liked both versions of 'Strawberry Fields Forever,' the original, lighter song and the intense, scored version. He said, 'Why don't you join the beginning of the first one to the end of the second one?' 'There are two things against it,' I replied. 'They are in different keys and different tempos. Apart from that, fine.' 'Well,' he said, 'you can fix it!' "

So on December 22nd, 1966, Martin and Emerick went into the studio to see what could be done. They realized that if they speeded up the soft version (known as "Take 7") and then slowed down the brash version ("Take 26") they came close to a match in pitch and tempo.

"We gradually decreased the pitch of the first version at the join to make them weld together," says Emerick, explaining the now-famous "crossfade" which occurs precisely 60 seconds into the final mix of the song. The careful listener will note that the instrumentation changes completely at that point, as does the texture of John's vocal.

Today, pitch-shifting and synchronization is a push-button away. Back then it had to be done by experimenting with two tape machines, starting them together by hand, and getting the timing right through pain-staking trial-and-error. The result, however, was a landmark recording of "Strawberry Fields Forever," the song which ignited the whole Sgt. Pepper project.

The iffy procedure of running two machines together without the benefit of time codes reached its height during the recording of the orchestral overdubs for "A Day in the Life" on February 10th, 1967. At the time, the number of tracks on the most advanced tape machine available to them was only four. The drums, guitars, vocals, and bass for the song had been reduced to three of the four available tracks. At this point, McCartney announced that he wanted to add a 90-piece orchestra! With only one track left, something had to be done--and that "something" proved to be quite a risky experiment.

Townsend remembers, "George Martin came up to me that morning and said to me, 'Oh Ken, I've got a poser for you. I want to run two four-track machines together this evening. I know it's never been done before, can you do it?' So I went away and came up with a method whereby we fed a 50 cycle tone from the track of one machine and then raised its voltage to drive the capstan motor of the second, thus running the two in sync. Like all these things, the idea either worked the first time or not at all... At the session we ran the Beatles' rhythm track on one machine, put an orchestral track on the second machine, ran it back and did it again, and again, and again until we had four orchestra recordings."

In this way, the first machine contained three tracks of the Beatles themselves plus a primitive "sync tone" on track four. The second machine contained four tracks of a 40-piece orchestra which gave McCartney a 160-piece ensemble instead of the 90-strong he had envisioned. But make no mistake: the two machines were not "locked" in the current sense. They had to be started by hand and coaxed along through various takes. As exciting as the orchestra parts are, they are not truly in sync with the band.

"The synchronization was rather a hit-and-miss affair," admits Martin, "and the orchestra is slightly out of time in places, but is doesn't matter."

"Hit-and-miss" would hardly be acceptable today, but at the time that was the best they could do, and the results are still heard on the airwaves to this day.

The Beatles, along with their producer Martin, were in the unique and enviable position of being able to get whatever they wanted in the studio. Many of these innovations, which were jury-rigged on the spur of the moment by geniuses like Townsend, have become standard gear in almost all recording studios throughout the world. No other recording artists have ever had this kind of influence and impact upon the entertainment industry. We would do well to remember this the next time we casually put on Revolver or Sgt. Pepper or the "White Album" for a spin.

May I suggest that readers interested in these details consult Mark Lewisohn's monumental book The Beatles Recording Sessions: The Official Abbey Road Studio Session Notes, 1962-1970.

Panamark
04-30-2004, 03:52 AM
I stumbled across this at:

http://www.audiorevolution.com/music/revs/beatles/

thought it was a great read. You look at some of the things that EVH did in terms of innovation, these guys were everybit as intense in this respect.

Mr Grimsdale
04-30-2004, 05:06 AM
Eddie didn't innovate a great deal, however he popularised a lot.

Tapping was around long before EVH, as where whammy dives and harmonics.

Panamark
04-30-2004, 05:22 AM
I was also thinking along the lines of what EVH did with equipment.

PHOENIX
05-02-2004, 11:08 AM
Thanks Panamark that was a very interesting read.

Wayne L.
05-02-2004, 12:29 PM
The Beatles changed the face of rock & roll during the 60's with their music, their haircuts & their attitude with important & influential classic rock albums like Revolver, Sgt. Pepper & Abbey Road which are timeless & unequalled!!!