I'd agree with this. The thing that blows my mind with Pepper in particular is that it came out sounding so beautiful. The Beatles recording situation 1966-67 is fascinating to me. First, let's just cover this: four track tape. Four track fucking tape. Eleanor Rigby, Tomorrow Never Knows, Strawberry Fields, Within You Without You, A Day in the Life, Lucy in the Sky....four track tape.**Dr. Van Nostrand wrote:I just love the feel of the album as a whole, id probably rank a lot of the songs a little lower then others(kinda like with rubber soul for me) but the overall album works for meNancyBabich wrote:Of the great albums Sgt Peppers is easily the weakest.
It kinda blows my mind every time I think about it.
It just shouldn't even be possible, really. Constantly mixing instruments down to a single track to make room (thus eliminating the ability to manipulate that instrument further later on), the absence of click tracks for consistency or precision as they layer instrument over instrument over surrealist sound effect. A bunch of stoned motherfuckers, an open minded producer, and one of the best engineers ever to set foot in a studio. A giant room full of toys and a closet that doubles as a sound effect library for comedy albums.
The idea of guys in lab coats standing around in hallways holding pencils with Paul's effect loops wrapped around them for hours while the band screws around with faders on Tomorrow Never Knows, of Georges one and two spending untold hours bridging Indian and Western musical scales to get just the right backing track, of Paul laying down a series of keyboards that are both bouncy and mechanically exact in timing as the basis of Penny Lane, or of the collected lot of them building A Day in the Life in impossibly incremental fashion....all without ever ending up having to sacrifice the sound of part A for the sake of fitting part B into the mix, or having to start over because the new idea screws up the way the drums went into the chorus or something. Hell, even Mal setting off the alarm clock as a gag during the Day in the Life sessions ends up being an unexpected bonus, when they come up with a bridge section later on.
**Now, they sort of cheated by syncing up two four tracks to "mimic" eight track recording, but this is a deceiving statement because one of the four tracks had to be limited to reductions only, and by the time it was all said and done they still had to have the entire track mixed down to a single four track tape in order to master it.
