Cut ’n’ splice
In the days before digital cut ’n’ paste, the task involved literally cutting the magnetic tape with scissors, or a razor blade, at a marked editing point before rejoining the ends with glue or adhesive leader tape.
Cutting and splicing was used in a wide range of Beatles contexts, most famously on Strawberry Fields Forever, where John Lennon favoured the first part of Take 7 but the latter part of Take 26. The challenge for Martin and Emerick was to splice the two takes which, inconveniently, had been recorded at slightly different tempos and were also marginally out in pitch. As luck would have it, speeding up the slower track neatly aligned the keys at the perfect tempo.
Even a crude cut could be used to artistic effect, as with Lennon’s instruction to abort I Want You (She’s So Heavy) at an apparently random point in the instrumental coda, so as to abruptly close Side 1 of Abbey Road. On Side 2, Her Majesty originally sat between Mean Mr Mustard and Polythene Pam, as part of the extended medley. To create better continuity between the two Lennon songs in the same key, McCartney’s ditty was deftly removed and spliced at the end of the side, where it surfaces as an off-the-wall hidden track.
In a more quirky context, cutting and splicing was also integral to the looping concept, covered below.
Get Backwards
While the disorientating effect of playing tapes backwards pre-dates the Fab Four, the story of John Lennon accidentally discovering it when threading his reel-to-reel player the wrong way when high at home is all part of the legend. However, credit for its creative use in The Beatles’ catalogue should go to George Martin, whose 1966 experiment with John’s vocal on Rain so intrigued the Beatle that “from that moment he wanted everything backwards”, the producer reminisced.
The same Revolver sessions are a tour de force of tape reversing, including Tomorrow Never Knows where, along with a backwards sitar loop, George Harrison’s guitar solo – originally bluesy – takes on a mystical Eastern feel when heard in reverse (at 1:08). More intricate is his solo on I’m Only Sleeping (at 1:32) where, as the story goes, George learned and recorded the part backwards before reversing the tape.
Tape reversing was soon applied to other Beatles instruments, delivering a range of psychedelic textures, such as the eerie ‘whooping’ of backwards cymbals on Strawberry Fields Forever. This was one of the producer’s most captivating effects, which he revisited in various settings, including the Yellow Submarine film.
Nowadays, of course, the digital world is so sophisticated that reversing audio can be done at the click of a mouse, and pitch and tempo often come unlinked as standard for our convenience. But that doesn’t mean we can’t get the characteristics of real tape back into our DAWs to perform these vintage techniques ourselves.