Fact #150110
When:
Short story:
In Studio One, Abbey Road, London, England, UK, Europe, The Beatles oversee recording of the orchestral middle and end sections of A Day In The Life.
Full article:
Ken Townshend (engineer, Abbey Road) : George (producer George Martin) asked me only a few hours before if there was a way we could link two four-track machines together. I said, 'I think so.'
Paul McCartney [The Beatles] : I said, let's take fifteen bars, count fifteen bars, and we'll do one of these avant-garde ideas. We'll say to all the musicians, You've got to start at the lowest note on your instrument, which is like a physical limitation, and go to your highest note.
Normally it's all written down in orchestration. So that was the plan, and you've got to do it over 15 bars. But the avant-garde thing was that you can go at any speed you want. It's like a Brian Eno type – like a little set of instructions. So it was written on the score. I had to go round and explain it to them all actually. They were fairly puzzled by this. Once they heard the noise it made and once I verified that this was the game, they were all right.
Ken Townshend : Anarchy. Absolute anarchy. You had your own bit to do, but no-one knew what on earth would happen.
Paul McCartney : And it was funny really, because the string players stayed together – they're all like a herd of sheep, the string players. If you notice, they all go up together.
And then we just recorded it three or four times and made this almighty sound, someone called it a musical icon. It's like something you never heard before.
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Paul McCartney [The Beatles] : I said, let's take fifteen bars, count fifteen bars, and we'll do one of these avant-garde ideas. We'll say to all the musicians, You've got to start at the lowest note on your instrument, which is like a physical limitation, and go to your highest note.
Normally it's all written down in orchestration. So that was the plan, and you've got to do it over 15 bars. But the avant-garde thing was that you can go at any speed you want. It's like a Brian Eno type – like a little set of instructions. So it was written on the score. I had to go round and explain it to them all actually. They were fairly puzzled by this. Once they heard the noise it made and once I verified that this was the game, they were all right.
Ken Townshend : Anarchy. Absolute anarchy. You had your own bit to do, but no-one knew what on earth would happen.
Paul McCartney : And it was funny really, because the string players stayed together – they're all like a herd of sheep, the string players. If you notice, they all go up together.
And then we just recorded it three or four times and made this almighty sound, someone called it a musical icon. It's like something you never heard before.