Course:Phys341 2020/Music Concrete (Tomorrow Never Knows)

Song "Tomorrow Never Knows"
Song by the Beatles
Album: Revolver Released: 5 August 1966 Recorded: 6, 7 and 22 April 1966 Studio: EMI Studios, London (Now known as Abbey Road Studios) Genre: Psychedelic Rock Length: 2:58 Label: Parlophone Songwriters: Lennon-McCartney Vocals: John Lennon Producer: George Martin Sound Engineer: Geoff Emerick

"Tomorrow Never Knows" is a song by the English rock band, the Beatles. The song was part of their Seventh album, Revolver. The song is a noted departure from their earlier, more conventional sound, as the band was starting to experiment with what could be done in the studio. In the recording of "Tomorrow Never Knows" the Beatles not only used every technique they had picked up to that point, but also invented a few new techniques that would become ubiquitous in pop music.

Background

The Beatles pre-Revolver

The Beatles were a rock band that originated from Liverpool, UK and were active from 1960-1970. The band was comprised of George Harrison (guitar and vocals), John Lennon (guitar and vocals), Paul McCartney (guitar, bass guitar, and vocals), and Ringo Starr (drums and vocals). The Beatles got their start by playing in clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg before becoming a professional act in 1962. The band quickly rose to fame as "Beatlemania" took the world by storm. In the mid sixties, the Beatles moved from the simple love songs that made them famous, to songs that experimented with structure, subject matter, and recording technique. The band and their producer, George Martin, used the studio to create music that could not be reproduced live, something that was very uncommon at that time. The Beatles not only experimented technically, but also stylistically, incorporating influence from a variety of genres: from classical to Eastern, while expanding the subject matter of their songs. The album Revolver features songs such "Eleanor Rigby" that dealt with themes of loneliness and depression, contrary to the the conventions of pop music at the time. "Tomorrow Never Knows" was the clearest indication of the new direction the band was going.

Conception

The lyrics of the song were inspired by the 1964 book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, written by Timothy Leary, who was a former Harvard psychologist and psychedelic substance advocate. Both the lyrics and the music structure combine Eastern and psychedelic influence. The song was the first recorded during the Revolver sessions, and marked a conceited effort to use the studio as instrument and create sounds that could not be made using conventional methods.

Geoff Emerick was the sound engineer on the album, having just been promoted to replace the Beatles' old sound engineer, Norman "Normal" Smith, who was known as on as a more "old school" guy, who was not interested in psychedelia. Emerick's young age (he was only 20 at the time) and relative inexperience, proved to be an asset since he was more willing to try new and experimental techniques and he was more on board with the Beatles's new direction.

Recording

(Figure 1) This spectral analysis of the song. The Y axis is time, the X axis is the frequency (Hz) and the colour is loudness (dB), white represents louder, while black is quiet. The arrows indicate frequency of the organ that is constant though out the song. (Own work)

(Figure 2) This is a wave form analysis of just the drum track. The big spikes are the beat of the drum while the wave that is constant throughout is the cymbal. We can see how stuffing drum with a sweater "deadens" the sound, as each drum beat appears as a sudden spike that immediately disappears. The effect of compression is seen on the cymbal, which maintains a constant wave amplitude throughout the song. (Own work)

(Figure 3) The waveform of the "seagull" sound effect, in reality this was a distorted guitar mixed with other sound effects. (Own work)

(Figure 4) An actual seagulls call. (Own work)

(Figure 5) A sample of guitar from the song "I Want to Tell you." (Own work)

Instrumentals

Recording of the song began on April 6th, under the title "Mark I." The intial rhythm track featured drums, bass guitar, two guitar solos (one played backwards) and one note from an organ played continuously (Figure 1). The drums were physically altered to give the a distinct "hypnotic" quality. A large sweater was stuffed into the drums to deaden the sound (Figure 2), and the microphone was moved much close to the drums then it usually was. The drum track was then put through Fairchild 660 valve limiters and compressors, which compressed the dynamic range of the drums (Figure 2). Dynamic range compression works by lowering the difference between the loud and quiet parts of the audio. The end product was remarkable. Drums had never sounded like that before. The Beatles, the technicians at Abbey Road, and the producer George Martin had created a drum track with a hypnotic feel to it, perfect for the psychedelic sound that John Lennon had wanted.

After the rhythm tracks, the Beatles started to overdub with some new, experimental techniques. One the Beatles' favourite techniques was a tape-loop, this was done by removing the erase head on the tape, allowing the same tape to be recorded over and over. Paul McCartney was especially keen on this, spending his free time at home making tape loops for the band to use. We hear this effect being used at the opening of the song when we hear what sounds like seagull's call, when in reality, it a loop of distorted and a sped up guitars and a wine glass. Figure 3 is the Seagull effect on the song, just by looking at the erratic wave form, we can see that there were multiple sounds layered over. This made clearer when we compare the erratic wave form from sound effect to the comparatively simple wave from from an actual seagull's call in figure 4. Furthermore, we can tell that a guitar was used to create an effect because of the almost triangular, "jagged" wave form that is a characteristic of plucked string instrument as demonstrated in figure 5. Geoff Emerick had five of these tape loops playing on multitrack, fading each of them in and out to make the sound he wanted, almost like how one would play an instrument.

Vocals

The vocals were another technical ingenuity. Lennon had many ideas for how the vocals should sound, some sources say he wanted vocals that sounded like a chorus of Tibetan monks chanting from a mountain top,, while George Martin claims that Lennon said "I want to sound like the Dalai Lama singing from the highest mountain top. And yet I still want to hear the words I'm singing." Either, way the engineers at Abbey Road Studios were had quite the task ahead of them to recreate the sound that Lennon wanted. One such attempt to create this sound was an idea by Lennon to place a microphone in the middle the room, while Lennon, suspended upside-down by rope from the ceiling, was to sing while being swung around the microphone. This idea never came to fruition.

The first breakthrough was the the invention of "Automatic Double Tracking" by Abbey Road technician Ken Townsend. Double tracking is the act of layering a track with a second version of the same track delayed slightly to give it a "fuller" sound. The principle at play here is the comparable to the one that makes 3-D movies possible; 3-D movies work by projecting two almost identical, but slightly different frames together, then using 3-D glasses to combine the image. The two slightly different images combined together gives the image a fake "depth." Double tracking gives this same "depth" but for sound, giving a fuller sound as if two or more people were singing. Before the Beatles, all double tracking had to be done manually. If you wanted to double track vocals, you had to sing the same song twice identically. This was extremely difficult for the Beatles, especially John Lennon, who sound engineer Peter Vince called "a one or two take man.". After many long sessions manually double-tracking for the Beatles, technician Ken Townsend figured out a way to do it mechanically, and thus Artificial Double Tracking or ADT was born. This process was done by having a regular tape machine connected to a different tape machine one with a variable oscillator (a machine that could alter the speed of a recording), the second, altered recording was then layered over the first one. ADT was used on every track on the album, and quickly became a staple for almost all music until the rise of digital technology.

The next effect used to modify Lennon's voice can be heard starting at 1:27, by using something called a Leslie Speaker. A Leslie Speaker was a special amplifier invented for the Hammond Organ. It was invented by Donald Leslie, who was frustrated that his Hammond Organ did not sound as good as pipe organ in a small enclosed space. He realised that in a pipe organ each note comes from a different pipe which was in a different location, this gave the sound a "moving" quality that he aimed to recreate. The solution was a rotating speaker in a cabinet, to give it a slight oscillating and dynamic quality. This helped create the "rotating" sound that Lennon wanted with his swinging-from-the-ceiling idea. The Leslie speaker at Abbey Road had to be broken apart and re circuited to use it to modify Lennon's voice. After this the Beatles fell in love with the Leslie Speaker, and would experiment by putting other instruments through the Leslie Speaker.

Legacy

The Beatles expanded what could be done with rock music, and helped to create the genre of psychedelic rock. Many of the techniques that were invented to help the Beatles make Revolver became ubiquitous in music. ADT became standard practice for most musicians. The Leslie speaker was used by many musicians on many different instruments, most notably Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix.

The EMI Studio on Abbey Road became famous for it cutting edge recording techniques, and allowed a new generation of musicians experiment further. Early Pink Floyd promoter claims that the band would have never been able to record their first album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn had Revolver never happened.

The Beatles success at Abbey Road Certainly enabled 'the boys' [Pink Floyd] to make The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Following The Beatles' Revolver, the Studio's engineers had become used to phasing, multi-tracking, and all manner of what Jenner calls "weird shit."

- Mark Blake, Pigs Might Fly:The Inside Story of Pink Floyd

See Also

Isolated Tracks from the Demo