Recording Technology and Music, Part II: The British are coming!

I argued in Part I that it took 90 years for Thomas Edison’s phonograph to be fully utilized as a new artistic medium.  89 years to be exact.  The year: 1966.  The band:  The Beatles.  The song:  “Tomorrow Never Knows”.

First caveat.  Sound engineers like George Martin and Geoff Emerick were essential to utilizing the recording technology in The Beatles’ music.  Therefore, all references to “The Beatles” here on out also refer to them by association.

Second (and much longer) caveat.  The Beatles were not the first to use recording technology artistically.  Many other musicians had tampered with recorded sounds before they did.  The Beatles were simply very good at keeping their ears open to outside influences.  So you might want to think of The Beatles as more of a summation or crystallization of what many others were doing.  There was also a little luck involved.  The Beatles were the top band in the world when a slew of new recording technology came out (especially multi-track recording technology).  Of course the greatest band in the world is going to have access to a thing like this in their recording studio.  Of course no one at Abbey Road is going to question them when they start turning knobs and moving sliders on these machines in ways that you weren’t supposed to. 

My favorite story (via Geoff Emerick) is when they recorded the song “Yellow Submarine”, John Lennon wanted to sound like he was singing under water.  Out of ideas, a recording engineer at Abbey Road put a microphone in a milk jug filled with water and put a condom over the mic to protect it.  This did not work and, thankfully, no one was electrocuted.  Of course The Beatles got away with this.  They were The Beatles for christ sake.  Adding to the idea that The Beatles were in the right place and the right time, Brian Eno notes, “[recording technology] was a new medium that was being explored and suddenly everybody could relate to it in a new way.  It was very thrilling that it had broken open…much like cinema in the 40s and novels in end of the 19^th century.  When a new medium appears like that and everybody knows about it and everybody’s keeping up with it, it becomes a cultural center through which people can connect with each other.”  (Interview with Sound Opinions).

Not to say luck trumped their musicianship, though.  I think The Beatles used recording technology more diversely and more musically than anyone else had up until that point.  I’m just saying if you disagree with me, my point is you can’t argue the fact that The Beatles were the most visible musicians using this recording technology.  They became a megaphone for what all of the lesser know musicians were doing deep in the crevasses of 1960s musical subculture.  

So what did The Beatles exactly do?  Here is a factoid that has an imbedded hint: In 1963 they recorded their entire debut album “Please Please Me” in 10 hours.  In 1967 they reportedly spent 34 hours recording the single song “A Day in the Life”.  Brian Eno helps explain, “Music from about 1950s onwards with the birth of multitrack recording became something much closer to painting than to traditional performed music.  A piece of music doesn’t have to exist before we start making it in the studio.”  In other words, The Beatles used to invest time practicing their native instruments (voice, guitar, drums, piano) and then simply record a live take of it.  Now the opposite was true: they would start by recording individual brush strokes (snippets of sound) and then spend hours modulating it with new machinery.  The recording studio, once thought to be an invisible backdrop, became their new instrument.  Brian Eno butts in again, “If you think back to the 18^th and 19^th century, the huge technological discovery then was the orchestra.  I think the great technology of the 20^th century in music has been not the orchestra, but the recording studio.”

And with this new instrument came a slew of wild sounds.  Although you can hear hints in The Beatles’ music as early as 1965 (listen to the guitar sound fade in and out in the beginning of “I Need You”, or the incredibly distorted-beyond-instrument-recognition bass line in “Think For Yourself”), “Tomorrow Never Knows” was the capstone in 1966.  Odd thing is, it has nothing to do with the fact that the song by a British boy band begins the first 2 seconds with a bizarre Indian instrument (sitar).  You don’t even have to talk about the backwards guitar sounds, the high pitched seagull noises, or the aural game of tennis between the left and right speakers.  Take a simpler example.  The sound engineer Geoff Emerick notes, “The other thing I was going for was this closer sound on Ringo’s drum kit.  We moved the bass drum mic to get that.”  And with that simple gesture, the microphone was not just a passive receptacle anymore; it was a tool that helped sculpt the sound of the drums.  Recording technology jumped up to a new height of artistry.

The most astonishing thing for me is that the technology to make this song was so primitive.  They recorded it on a magnetic tape recorder that could support a maximum of 4 recording tracks at a time.  They had to “bounce” multiple recorded sounds onto one track in order to free up space on the other tracks.  Panning a sound from the left speaker to the right had to be done live as the sound was being played back.  Computer technology is ridiculous by comparison: nearly unlimited tracks that can all be tweaked (and untweaked) with unlimited effects.  Also, this 40+ year old song does not sound dated to my ears.  It sounds as lively, saturated, and just plain weird as it did to someone back then.  Isn’t it amazing 80s music sounds more dated than this?

The Beatles did many other things. John Wetton comments on how they were genre mashers: “I think were we’re lucky in Britain is that we stand between two continents: we have the sort of American R&B blues music influence and we have a couple of thousand years of classical music on the other side as well. And that’s where the Beatles came in- they just melted the two into one. They took American R&B, which is very plain and simple, and put European melodies and harmonies on tip of it.” Robert Fripp notes The Beatles’ perfect equilibrium between the visceral and the cerebral: “The Beatles,” said guitarist and producer Robert Fripp, “achieve probably better than anyone the ability to make you tap your foot first time round, dig the words sixth time round, and get into the guitar slowly panning the twentieth time.” Despite all of this, the greatest gift The Beatles gave to the musical world was the latter part of Fripp’s quote: the artistry of studio production.

It is impossible for this to be overrated.  When they say that the music of today wouldn’t sound the same without The Beatles, they literally mean it.  What would Eminem be without his signature vocal sound, which utilizes stacked vocal tracks?  How could Public Enemy, The Beastie Boys, and Kanye West think to extract, chop up, and loop samples from a song if The Beatles hadn’t made using tape loops popular to a mainstream audience (tape loops were only being used by weird modernist classical composers before that point)?  Does Skrillex use any other instrument beyond the recording studio?  Would T-Pain had thought to mangle his voice using auto tune if John Lennon had not done it first with a Leslie speaker cabinet on the 3rd verse of “Tomorrow Never Knows”?  And how exactly would Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry get their beats without effects such as EQ and compression? 

Of course the influence of The Beatles is not direct in all of these cases.  Their ideas are subtly filtered through generations of other musicians.  If The Beatles (and their sound engineers) never existed, would another combination of musicians back in the 1960s have had the same impact?  I doubt it.  The Beatles’ collaborative creativity involving the use of studio production was a direct testament to their deep well of musicianship.  Who else would think to make an underwater microphone condom?