Do you think they sped up the tape while recording some of their tracks? If you listen to Lucy in the sky, during the verses it really sounds like the pitch of their voices was purposely raised, perhaps to give a certain effect. There's a few of their tracks where the voices sound too high in pitch to be normal. Does anyone have any idea as to whether they (or the producer(s)) did this while recording?
Its very possible, I read somewhere the orchestral part of 'A day in the life' implemented some studio technique of splicing two 4 tracks together or something. There was a lot of studio effects used for Sgt. Peppers. I know for a fact that the outro guitar part to Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix is sped up, that's going off on a tangent but may or may not be interesting to you.
Now that you mention it, I can hear it. There's a certain little pentatonic lick that Jimi plays at the end of the song that has always stood out to me. It's way too rigid for Jimi to have played it. If the tape was sped up it would make sense that the lick would become a little rigid. Some of the guitar throughout Are You Experienced was recorded then played backwards, as was the solo, yet Jimi would play it live the way it sounded on record. I know that when Pantera would record, for whatever reason (perhaps to give a loose sound) the tape would be slowed down. When Dimebag would play live they'd tune his guitar down, then down an extra 1/8 of a step to give the same sound he had on record.
I never noticed that before, but yeah it's much higher pitched. I guess they sped up the tape to make Lennon's voice sound more childlike. http://www.shmoop.com/lucy-in-the-sky/music.html
"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was the first song ever to employ an audio phase shifter. The sound was originally known as "flanging" because of the way it was first implemented, i.e. by laying your finger against the flange of a tape reel. It came about accidentally when engineer Geoff Emerick, while using the automatic double-tracking system (an electronic looping of one track over to another) didn't notice that a box was rubbing against a portion of the flange of the tape reel as it went around, thereby slowing the tape speed down slightly. When played back together with the original track, the audio signals were mixed slightly out-of-phase with each other producing a pitch shifting effect. The original effect was so slight that producer George Martin and the Beatles had to listen to the track several times before they heard it. Once they realized what was happening, Emerick and Martin found out how to make the effect more pronounced and it can be heard in the background when John starts singing "Newspaper taxies appear on the shore" as a rising pitch impressed on music. For those who are unfamiliar with phase-shifting, an easy way to hear it is to bend over at the waist when a jet plane if flying high overhead and listen to the pitch of the jet's engines rise as your head gets closer to the ground, then fall as you straighten up. The phase shift is occurring as you change the timing between when the engine noise reaches your ears directly and the reflections bouncing off the ground. Early songs of note with prominent phase shifters are Itchycoo Park by the Small Faces and the drum solo in In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida by Iron Butterfly. Jimi Hendrix was a big fan of the phase shifter and used one frequently on his guitar. (Thanks to MG) http://www.aboutthebeatles.com/discography_lp_sgtpepper.php Lots of info about the recording of Sgt. Peppers.
Possibly... I'm positive that other groups did it-- often out of necessity when lead vocalists lose their range due to vocal abuse... though I can't say that's why the Beatles would have done it.
Yea, good point. I'm pretty sure that's why Pantera did it. The singer screamed so much that after a few years his voice kind of shot. He lost his range a bit, then they started tuning down lower as well to accommodate.
Yeah- good example- I was thinking of Led Zeppelin actually- but I don't think that was the reason the Beatles would have sped up their recordings.
They did all kinds of things to get differnet effects. Their engineer for most of their more expirmental work,Geoff Emerick,said something like 'we did lot's of things but most of them were forgotten about after we'd done them we can't recreate them now'.
