The Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows:" A Closer Look
It would wind up as the final track on the finished LP, but Tomorrow Never Knows was the FIRST song recorded specifically for the Revolver album and it still dazzles.
John and George recording tracks for Revolver, summer of 1966.
We draw again from "Recording the Beatles," by Brian Kehew and Kevin Ryan, Curvebender Press, 2008.
As the authors so presciently point out, the Beatles' sheer progression in artistic expression from "Girl," the last song the band recorded in 1965 to "Tomorrow Never Knows," on April 6, 1966 was unprecedented.
In just five months, there was a serious and dramatic shift in priorities, taste and expression within the band. None more so than in the mind of John Lennon. This song, originally labeled "Mark I" for lack of a better title, sprang from the then newly LSD (acid) soaked sensibilities of Lennon who, since the completion of Rubber Soul, had begun a heavy experimental phase in his life with nearly constant acid trips. Add to that, the then newly published book by Dr. Timothy Leary, the up and coming international guru on LSD, called The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, had become John's favorite book during the summer of 1966.
Indeed, some of the spaced out lyrics from Tomorrow Never Knows came directly out of Leary's book. As with the lyrics, the sound for this remarkable new song would require far more than the Beatles' basic set up of two guitars, bass and drums. This psychedelic master stroke would thus require every gimmick and trick the band and the engineers at Abbey Road could come up with.
Work thus began with the mind set among everyone in the studio that the soundscape for John's new compostion would simply have to be otherwordly in its application. As such, it would, by necessity, have to sound like nothing that had ever been done before. The authors suggest it might have been Paul McCartney who suggested that slowed down tape loops would make a good start for the song. Paul had been heavily influenced by Berio and Stockhausen at the time. (TRIVIA: Karlheinz Stockhausen appears as one of the faces on the cover of Sgt. Pepper). John was intrigued by Paul's inventiveness and began making his own tape loops at home, much like what Paul was doing.
Thus, it came to pass: the band recorded a performance consisting of electric guitar fed through a Leslie speaker, a second guitar processed through a fuzz pedal, and a steady tom-tom beat from Ringo. This rough track was played at a fast pace so that it could be slowed down later. *This basic track can be found on Anthology 2. Next, a suitable 2-bar section of the performance (which had been recorded straight to 1/4" tape at 30 ips) was then snipped from the tape, spliced into a loop and placed back onto one of the BTR2 Machines (basic EMI tape machines). The BTR was then set to playback at 15 ips, which reduced their performance to a more hypnotic half-speed.
EMI BTR2 tape machine.
The loop was then played back and while listening along, Ringo and Paul contributed their drums and electric bass tracks to the mix. A mix of Paul and Ringo's instruments and the slowed down tape loop was recorded onto TRACK 1 of the four track tape while Lennon simultaneously recorded a vocal on TRACK 4. As we can see, the Beatle's knack for "laying down tracks" came to the fore in these sessions. Like the guitar fed through the Leslie, John's voice underwent the same process. *We discussed this in the previous blog. Interestingly, the guitar was recorded with the Leslie set at the faster "vibrato" setting while John's voice was recorded with the Leslie set on the slower "choral" setting. This resulted in the slight chorusing effect we hear to this day. The sound of Ringo's drums in the studio bled into not only John's microphone (which resulted in some of the drums being sent through the Leslie treatment) but also the microphone used in front of the Leslie itself. Suffice it to say, yet another happy accident in Beatles folklore: this time, a cross-bleed of drums into other microphones only adding to the surrealism of this song. That all said, the sound was not what John was hearing in his head and thus, Tracks 1 and 4 were wiped clean and the Beatles started out fresh with a new Take 3.
At this point, the Beatles opted to start the entire song again from the ground up. The good news was that at this point, rock's greatest rhythm section; Paul on bass and Ringo on drums, had devised their brilliant and finished new patterns for the final song. The bass and drums, it was thought, should thunder along simultaneously. This was recorded onto Track 1. And these instruments were not recorded with any looping. John's lead vocal was re-recorded onto Track 4. As we now know, it was recorded fairly normally for the first half of the song and then had the Leslie treatment for the second half, after the bizarre "solos." The Beatles were essentially finished with recording that day but Paul went home to fiddle with tape loops all night and more so the next morning. He recorded brief loop phrases of guitar, sitar, vocals, and other sounds and came in with them the next day.
In the studio, with several engineers present, 5 final loop sounds were chosen to be included onto this song. Says Paul, "We ran the loops and then we ran the track of Tomorrow Never Knows and we played the faders, and just before you could tell it was a loop- before it began to repeat a lot, I'd pull in one of the other faders, and so, using the other people, 'You pull that in there, you pull that in," we did a half random, half orchestrated playing of the thing . . . "
George Martin remembers the scene well. Says George, "All of these loops came into our mixer and it was like an organ. By bringing up an one (of the faders) you could have any loop any time . . . We had everybody on the mixer: apart from the engineer, who was Geoff Emerick, we had Paul on a coupld of faders, and John on another . . . . We would all make a concerted mix and just do our own thing. When we felt like the seagull sound should appear, we'd put that fader up and so on . . . . ." The end result of all this 'fader fun' was that it was recorded onto Track 2. Since all the loop sounds were on an isolated track, the Beatles and their team could wipe it clean and start over again and again as many times as they liked, always wiping the predessor each time in favor of a new try. In short, the effect was mesmerizing.
The authors used a specially programed computer to isolate, slow down and sometimes reverse the five loops used on Tomorrow Never Knows. The true content of each loop can now be revealed, in order of their appearance:
1) A "laughing" male voice, played double-speed = "Seagull" sound.
2) A B-flat Major chord played by an entire orchestra = "funky orchestra sound" backwards.
3) A Sitar phrase, reveresed and played double-speed = ???
4) A phrase performed on what appears to be mandolin, played double-speed.
5) A scalar Sitar line, reversed and played double-speed = ???
The band set this song aside for about a week and resumed on April 22, 1966, this time in Studio 2, not Studio 3. John wiped his original vocal track on Track 4 and re-recorded it again, brand new, again through the Leslie for the second half of the song. Recorded simultaneously with John's new vocal was a Tamboura droning in the background.
Track 3 was filled with a group overdub; John double-tracked his voice during the first half, while the others contributed taborine, organ, and (at the very end of the song) a juanty piano performance. There was one final addition to make. It was felt that a backward guitar solo would fit the bill nicely at this point, the first EVER on a Beatles' record. Bear in mind that backwards recording had only been "discovered" by the Fabs the previous week for the vocal snippet in RAIN. *This was a backward guitar solo, not a vocal.
Beatles, 1966.
The solo was dropped into Track 3, wiping the tamborine and organ sounds completely. The authors speculate that the solo was almost certainly played by Paul. It's style and sound was indentical to the solo Paul himself played on Taxman the night before. *Remember, the Beatles put TNKs aside for a week and then came back to it. As for the high-pitched sound that occurs at precisely 1:28 of the song (*which incidentally happens at exactly the half way point of the entire tune), it is feedback from Paul's amp before the solo.
With the addition of the backwards guitar solo, recording for Tomorrow Never Knows was complete. All that was left at that point was final mixing. George Martin has explained to fans for years why the mix that we know to this day is the only mix that will ever be available. Says George, "It will be impossible to mix that again because the mix IS the actual performance."
Track Listing:
Track 1: Drums & Bass guitar.
Track 2: 5 Tape Loops
Track 3: 2nd Lennon Vocal, backwards guitar solo, organ, tamborine, piano.
Track 4: Lennon lead vocal, Tamboura.
Speaking of stereo and mono, there is a slight differance between the two, notably, Paul's backwards solo got a lot of ADT on the mono which it didn't get in stereo.
Your humble correspondant has posited before that the Beatles took pop music to the farthest reaches of the pop universe with this song and the general recording of Revolver. It was on TNKs that the studio innovations hit their zenith. The rest of the album featured fantastic music recorded more conventionally. So what does a band like the Beatles do when they have explored all available boundaries in the known pop universe??
Very simple; create a new Universe. This would actually happen with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
By John Haberstroh (Bassist for BeatleTracks) Find us at www.beatletracksband.com
John and George recording tracks for Revolver, summer of 1966.
We draw again from "Recording the Beatles," by Brian Kehew and Kevin Ryan, Curvebender Press, 2008.
As the authors so presciently point out, the Beatles' sheer progression in artistic expression from "Girl," the last song the band recorded in 1965 to "Tomorrow Never Knows," on April 6, 1966 was unprecedented.
In just five months, there was a serious and dramatic shift in priorities, taste and expression within the band. None more so than in the mind of John Lennon. This song, originally labeled "Mark I" for lack of a better title, sprang from the then newly LSD (acid) soaked sensibilities of Lennon who, since the completion of Rubber Soul, had begun a heavy experimental phase in his life with nearly constant acid trips. Add to that, the then newly published book by Dr. Timothy Leary, the up and coming international guru on LSD, called The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, had become John's favorite book during the summer of 1966.
Indeed, some of the spaced out lyrics from Tomorrow Never Knows came directly out of Leary's book. As with the lyrics, the sound for this remarkable new song would require far more than the Beatles' basic set up of two guitars, bass and drums. This psychedelic master stroke would thus require every gimmick and trick the band and the engineers at Abbey Road could come up with.
Work thus began with the mind set among everyone in the studio that the soundscape for John's new compostion would simply have to be otherwordly in its application. As such, it would, by necessity, have to sound like nothing that had ever been done before. The authors suggest it might have been Paul McCartney who suggested that slowed down tape loops would make a good start for the song. Paul had been heavily influenced by Berio and Stockhausen at the time. (TRIVIA: Karlheinz Stockhausen appears as one of the faces on the cover of Sgt. Pepper). John was intrigued by Paul's inventiveness and began making his own tape loops at home, much like what Paul was doing.
Thus, it came to pass: the band recorded a performance consisting of electric guitar fed through a Leslie speaker, a second guitar processed through a fuzz pedal, and a steady tom-tom beat from Ringo. This rough track was played at a fast pace so that it could be slowed down later. *This basic track can be found on Anthology 2. Next, a suitable 2-bar section of the performance (which had been recorded straight to 1/4" tape at 30 ips) was then snipped from the tape, spliced into a loop and placed back onto one of the BTR2 Machines (basic EMI tape machines). The BTR was then set to playback at 15 ips, which reduced their performance to a more hypnotic half-speed.
EMI BTR2 tape machine. The loop was then played back and while listening along, Ringo and Paul contributed their drums and electric bass tracks to the mix. A mix of Paul and Ringo's instruments and the slowed down tape loop was recorded onto TRACK 1 of the four track tape while Lennon simultaneously recorded a vocal on TRACK 4. As we can see, the Beatle's knack for "laying down tracks" came to the fore in these sessions. Like the guitar fed through the Leslie, John's voice underwent the same process. *We discussed this in the previous blog. Interestingly, the guitar was recorded with the Leslie set at the faster "vibrato" setting while John's voice was recorded with the Leslie set on the slower "choral" setting. This resulted in the slight chorusing effect we hear to this day. The sound of Ringo's drums in the studio bled into not only John's microphone (which resulted in some of the drums being sent through the Leslie treatment) but also the microphone used in front of the Leslie itself. Suffice it to say, yet another happy accident in Beatles folklore: this time, a cross-bleed of drums into other microphones only adding to the surrealism of this song. That all said, the sound was not what John was hearing in his head and thus, Tracks 1 and 4 were wiped clean and the Beatles started out fresh with a new Take 3.
At this point, the Beatles opted to start the entire song again from the ground up. The good news was that at this point, rock's greatest rhythm section; Paul on bass and Ringo on drums, had devised their brilliant and finished new patterns for the final song. The bass and drums, it was thought, should thunder along simultaneously. This was recorded onto Track 1. And these instruments were not recorded with any looping. John's lead vocal was re-recorded onto Track 4. As we now know, it was recorded fairly normally for the first half of the song and then had the Leslie treatment for the second half, after the bizarre "solos." The Beatles were essentially finished with recording that day but Paul went home to fiddle with tape loops all night and more so the next morning. He recorded brief loop phrases of guitar, sitar, vocals, and other sounds and came in with them the next day.
In the studio, with several engineers present, 5 final loop sounds were chosen to be included onto this song. Says Paul, "We ran the loops and then we ran the track of Tomorrow Never Knows and we played the faders, and just before you could tell it was a loop- before it began to repeat a lot, I'd pull in one of the other faders, and so, using the other people, 'You pull that in there, you pull that in," we did a half random, half orchestrated playing of the thing . . . "
George Martin remembers the scene well. Says George, "All of these loops came into our mixer and it was like an organ. By bringing up an one (of the faders) you could have any loop any time . . . We had everybody on the mixer: apart from the engineer, who was Geoff Emerick, we had Paul on a coupld of faders, and John on another . . . . We would all make a concerted mix and just do our own thing. When we felt like the seagull sound should appear, we'd put that fader up and so on . . . . ." The end result of all this 'fader fun' was that it was recorded onto Track 2. Since all the loop sounds were on an isolated track, the Beatles and their team could wipe it clean and start over again and again as many times as they liked, always wiping the predessor each time in favor of a new try. In short, the effect was mesmerizing.
The authors used a specially programed computer to isolate, slow down and sometimes reverse the five loops used on Tomorrow Never Knows. The true content of each loop can now be revealed, in order of their appearance:
1) A "laughing" male voice, played double-speed = "Seagull" sound.
2) A B-flat Major chord played by an entire orchestra = "funky orchestra sound" backwards.
3) A Sitar phrase, reveresed and played double-speed = ???
4) A phrase performed on what appears to be mandolin, played double-speed.
5) A scalar Sitar line, reversed and played double-speed = ???
The band set this song aside for about a week and resumed on April 22, 1966, this time in Studio 2, not Studio 3. John wiped his original vocal track on Track 4 and re-recorded it again, brand new, again through the Leslie for the second half of the song. Recorded simultaneously with John's new vocal was a Tamboura droning in the background.
Track 3 was filled with a group overdub; John double-tracked his voice during the first half, while the others contributed taborine, organ, and (at the very end of the song) a juanty piano performance. There was one final addition to make. It was felt that a backward guitar solo would fit the bill nicely at this point, the first EVER on a Beatles' record. Bear in mind that backwards recording had only been "discovered" by the Fabs the previous week for the vocal snippet in RAIN. *This was a backward guitar solo, not a vocal.
Beatles, 1966. The solo was dropped into Track 3, wiping the tamborine and organ sounds completely. The authors speculate that the solo was almost certainly played by Paul. It's style and sound was indentical to the solo Paul himself played on Taxman the night before. *Remember, the Beatles put TNKs aside for a week and then came back to it. As for the high-pitched sound that occurs at precisely 1:28 of the song (*which incidentally happens at exactly the half way point of the entire tune), it is feedback from Paul's amp before the solo.
With the addition of the backwards guitar solo, recording for Tomorrow Never Knows was complete. All that was left at that point was final mixing. George Martin has explained to fans for years why the mix that we know to this day is the only mix that will ever be available. Says George, "It will be impossible to mix that again because the mix IS the actual performance."
Track Listing:
Track 1: Drums & Bass guitar.
Track 2: 5 Tape Loops
Track 3: 2nd Lennon Vocal, backwards guitar solo, organ, tamborine, piano.
Track 4: Lennon lead vocal, Tamboura.
Speaking of stereo and mono, there is a slight differance between the two, notably, Paul's backwards solo got a lot of ADT on the mono which it didn't get in stereo.
Your humble correspondant has posited before that the Beatles took pop music to the farthest reaches of the pop universe with this song and the general recording of Revolver. It was on TNKs that the studio innovations hit their zenith. The rest of the album featured fantastic music recorded more conventionally. So what does a band like the Beatles do when they have explored all available boundaries in the known pop universe??
Very simple; create a new Universe. This would actually happen with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
By John Haberstroh (Bassist for BeatleTracks) Find us at www.beatletracksband.com
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