Arrangements were designed to get as much music as possible onto each track before the track was bounced. Pepper’s, each track was meticulously planned out beforehand. In order to combat the trade-off between sound quality and the layered complexity of the songs on Sgt. These multiple bounces compromised the audio quality and also severely limited the panning options for the stereo mixes. When the band filled up four tracks during the recording, these would be bounced to a single track on a second machine, whereupon further tracks could be overdubbed, and so on. For amplification, the Beatles had at their disposal in 1967 a Fender Showman and a Bassman head with a 2×12 cabinet, a Selmer Thunderbird Twin 50 MkII, a Vox Conqueror and the Vox UL730, 71 bass amp. McCartney’s Rickenbacker 4001S was his main bass, and he used his Casino and Fender Esquire for rhythm and lead work. Pepper’s, Lennon and Harrison played their Epiphone Casinos, Sonic Blue Fender Strats and Gibson J-160E acoustic guitars Harrison also played his Gibson SG. Nothing was digital and all of the numerous variety of sounds heard on each song had to be present in those four tracks before they could be combined into the song’s final mix.On Sgt. The never-heard before sounds of the album, originally recorded using Studer J37 four-track tape machines were created with the help of Geoff Emerick, the lead engineer for Sgt. It showcases the The Beatles’ love/hate affair with the establishment as their own lives were suddenly shoved unceremoniously up against those of the chattering classes, encapsulated by She’s Leaving Home ’s blow at straight parenthood, Lovely Rita ’s suggestion of sexual deviancy, and A Day in the Life ’s oblique references to minds being blown on buses in rush hour traffic. Pepper’s was a significant release in the canon of concept albums, with its own alter-ego mythology and speaking to the concerns of that generation. A dazzling blend of rock and roll with vaudeville, big band, blues, jazz, Western and Indian classical music, music hall, chamber music, circus music, psychedelia and more, Sgt. Pepper’s were the first use of DI, extensive pitch control using varispeed, elaborate bouncing between four-track tapes, a process called ADT, aka artificial double-tracking, close-miking the drums, and more. Among the innovations that he oversaw during the making of Sgt. Producer George Martin, often called “the fifth Beatle”, called it a time of “almost continuous technological experimentation”. The album took 700 hours of studio time to complete at the famous Abbey Road Studio 2. All the songs in the album are loosely linked by the reprise of the title song near the end of the album, as well as by a number of imaginative studio effects. It was the first pop album in history to allow songs to transition smoothly into the next, using cross-fading to remove any momentary transition silences. It was conceived as a unified entity, lacking the traditional divisions between its 13 songs, because of which each song segues smoothly into the next. The reasons why Sgt Pepper’s is such an iconic album are many. The result: Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album that quickly went multi-platinum, spending 15 weeks at number one on the Billboard album charts, and remains one of the highest-selling records in history. The story goes that they came into the studio and announced that they were finished playing live concerts and wanted to make an album filled with sounds that no one had ever heard before. The Beatles had broken from the two-albums-per-year formula the previous year that till then had brought their record company, EMI, so much money. Many rock acts were devoting less time to live performances and more to mastering the rapidly developing studio technology with the aim of making increasingly sophisticated sound recordings.
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