The studio becomes an instrument
Much of what made 1967 sound different was technical rather than stylistic. Bands had spent the early 1960s recording quickly, mostly playing live together. By 1967 the leading groups were treating the recording studio as a creative tool, building a song from layers over weeks. The change depended on multitrack tape and on engineers willing to bend the rules.
Multitrack tape and the four-track limit
Early pop recordings were often made on one or two tracks. Four-track recorders, common in major studios by the mid-1960s, let a producer record instruments separately and balance them later. Larger machines with eight tracks were beginning to appear in some American studios in 1967, though they were not yet universal.
Four tracks were still a tight limit. A typical solution was “bouncing”, or reduction mixing: several tracks were mixed together and recorded onto a single track of a second machine, freeing up space for new parts. The price was quality, because every bounce added some tape hiss and removed the chance to adjust the earlier balance.
Sgt. Pepper at Abbey Road
The Beatles recorded the Sgt. Pepper album at EMI’s Abbey Road studios between late 1966 and April 1967, with George Martin as producer and Geoff Emerick as engineer, using four-track machines. The album became the best-known example of studio craft in the period.
Some well-documented techniques:
- Tape speed was changed during recording, so that voices and instruments sounded different when played back at normal speed.
- A system known as automatic double tracking, developed by EMI staff in 1966, created a doubled vocal without needing the singer to repeat the line.
- Two tape machines were run together and parts were bounced between them, which allowed a large orchestral build-up to be added to a basic band recording on the closing track.
- Tape loops and sound effects were assembled, including animal noises and crowd sounds, and cut together by hand.
The recording was long for its time, a source of the album’s reputation as an artifact of studio patience. The influence of the techniques spread to other acts, and the contribution of the Beatles to psychedelic recording techniques is discussed more fully elsewhere. A single track, A Day in the Life, is often used as a demonstration of how the pieces fitted together.
The sitar and Indian music
George Harrison had played a sitar on a Beatles track in 1965 and studied with Ravi Shankar. In 1967 his song “Within You Without You” on the Pepper album used Indian instruments and musicians, with no other Beatle playing on it. Shankar himself appeared at the Monterey festival in June 1967. The sitar sound spread quickly into pop, sometimes as a fashionable effect and sometimes as a sign of real interest in Indian music.
The Mellotron
The Mellotron was a keyboard that played back lengths of recorded tape, one for each key, so a player could produce flutes, strings or choirs without an orchestra. It was made in Britain. Its eerie, slightly unstable sound is heard on the Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever, recorded at the end of 1966 and released in February 1967, where it supplies the opening flute-like phrase. The Moody Blues built a lot of their sound around it later in 1967, notably on their album Days of Future Passed.
The Moog synthesizer
The Moog synthesizer was a modular electronic instrument built by Robert Moog in the United States. Moog had shown his prototypes in the mid-1960s, and by 1967 the first commercial systems were being sold to universities, studios and a few musicians. The instrument was large, expensive and cumbersome, built around patch cables and knobs, and could play only one note at a time.
Pop musicians started to use it in 1967, though cautiously. The Monkees television band, for example, is reported to have been among the first pop acts to buy one, and it is heard on their late-1967 album. The famous commercial breakthrough for the instrument came after 1967, so it is fair to describe the year as the start of the story, not the peak.
Feedback, effects and amplification
Not all innovation was in the studio. Guitarists such as Jimi Hendrix treated feedback, fuzz and distortion as musical colours, using louder amplification and new pedals. Hendrix’s debut album Are You Experienced made much of these sounds, and the Pink Floyd of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn used echo and effects as part of a looser, more experimental style.
Why it mattered
These tools changed what an album could be. A record no longer had to be a document of a performance; it could be something that could not be played live, which is one reason some groups stopped touring for periods. It also changed the economics of music, because studio time became a major expense, and the best-equipped studios and the most patient producers gained influence. Many of these ideas were not entirely new in 1967, but the year gathered them in a way that listeners noticed, and the industry took them as the new standard.