Four tracks and a lot of ingenuity
The Beatles’ 1967 records were made at EMI Studios in Abbey Road, London (the building took its present name only after the 1969 album that carried it), with producer George Martin and engineers such as Geoff Emerick. The equipment was modest by later standards. Sgt. Pepper was recorded mainly on four-track tape machines, and a mono mix was treated as the main version in Britain, with stereo prepared more quickly and with less attention.
Four tracks meant constant planning. A typical solution was bouncing, also called reduction mixing: several recorded parts were mixed down onto a single track of a second machine, freeing the other tracks for new overdubs. Each bounce added a little tape hiss and lost a little clarity, so the engineers had to decide carefully what to combine. Much of the layered sound of the period came from this method.
Artificial double tracking
Singers often double-track their voices, singing a part twice to thicken it. John Lennon disliked the repeated effort. In 1966, during the Revolver sessions, EMI technician Ken Townsend devised a way of producing the effect from a single performance by using two tape machines and a slightly varying delay. It was known as artificial double tracking, and sometimes as automatic double tracking, and it became routine at Abbey Road. Many 1967 vocals, including much of Lennon’s, use it, which is one of the reasons his voice sounds so full on the records.
Tape loops and splicing
Short lengths of tape joined into a loop repeat the same sound endlessly. The technique was used for the 1966 song “Tomorrow Never Knows”, but 1967 offered further examples of tape manipulation. For “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”, Martin and Emerick recorded fairground organ and calliope sounds, cut the tape into pieces, threw them in the air and joined them back together at random to produce a swirling, circus-like texture. The result was meant to evoke the old circus poster that had inspired Lennon’s lyric.
The Sgt. Pepper album has other small tape effects too, and the end of “Good Morning Good Morning” turns into a series of animal noises. According to later accounts, Lennon asked for the sequence to follow a rule: each animal should be able to frighten or devour the one before. These were assembled from sound-effects recordings.
Varispeed and joined takes
Varispeed means running the tape machine at a different speed than normal, either while recording or while playing back. If a part is recorded slowly and then replayed at normal speed, it sounds higher and quicker, and the reverse is also possible. It also lets a producer change the pitch and tone of a voice or an instrument.
“Strawberry Fields Forever” is a well-known example of it. Two quite different versions of the song had been recorded, in different tempos and keys. Martin and Emerick joined them, with some speed adjustment so that they matched, and the edit is often said to fall around the one-minute mark. Few listeners notice the join, though a thicker, heavier texture takes over afterwards.
Orchestral and Indian instruments
The Beatles also used players who could do things the four of them could not. For “A Day in the Life”, about forty orchestral musicians were asked to play from the lowest note of their instrument to the highest, climbing at their own pace, in a session in February 1967. The effect is the rising wave of sound in the song’s two big crescendos. Two four-track machines were reportedly linked for this song with a synchronising tone, which was a sophisticated procedure for its time.
“She’s Leaving Home” featured harp and strings arranged by Mike Leander after Martin was unavailable, and “Penny Lane” included a piccolo trumpet solo, played by David Mason. The Mellotron, a keyboard that plays back tape recordings of real instruments, produced the flute-like sounds at the start of “Strawberry Fields Forever”.
George Harrison’s “Within You Without You” used a group of London-based Indian musicians who played instruments such as the dilruba and the tabla, with Harrison on sitar. None of the other Beatles took part in that recording, which makes it a rare case of a Beatles track on which they were not heard as a band. The raga influence belongs to a wider mid-1960s interest, associated in particular with Ravi Shankar, among rock musicians.
Studio habits that carried over
Several lessons ran through all this work. The group was willing to spend many hours on a part if it improved a song, bass lines were often recorded later and with greater care, and instruments were placed and recorded close to the microphones to give them presence. The producer’s role was changing too, from supervising a performance to helping to build something that could not be played live. In the language of the period, these psychedelic recording techniques were less a style in themselves than a way of making an imagined sound real.
Taken together, these methods explain why the 1967 records were so hard to copy on stage, and why studio innovation became a selling point in its own right for bands that followed.