McCartney realized early on that the recording studio was The Beatles’ ultimate artistic, musical frontier, believing:

“Records were the main objective” and “the currency of music.”

Lewisohn, Recording Sessions, 6

This privilege of the recorded medium by McCartney supports how he intrinsically understood fans would require new material to keep their interest alive. To sustain The Beatles’ level of fame, it required creativity that pushed the boundaries of engineering, thus providing new material to maintain continuing fan interest.

The Beatles’ self-aligned masculinity, reflected in traits and behaviors of social leadership, empowerment, strong assertiveness, self-sufficiency and personal satisfaction, can be seen in these same efforts toward expanding their advancing musical creativity in recorded music. These traits and behaviors were foundational to the nature of self-alignment’s need for expansion. It inspired the group to create many innovative audio techniques and compositional styles which resulted in the ability to sustain and increase their fan base, considered commensurate with the self-awareness of their masculine identity. That is, how the group appeared to grow publicly in their recordings through self-aware, self-aligned personal satisfaction, which needed to match the perceptions of themselves in their self-aligned manhood identity as leaders in popular music culture. Male fans, therefore, became aware of The Beatles’ desire to experiment further in their recorded efforts, and their interest in the group was maintained.

Lennon and His Voice

Lennon did not like his voice and wanted to change its sound whenever possible. Why would Lennon feel that way? He wanted to keep up with his own expanding self-image and how he saw himself as a self-aware man who needed to experiment with whatever was possible. Lennon continued in his quest for new vocal alterations in almost every one of his songs. His constant demands for different vocal sounds were his most personalized attempts at self-awareness and growth toward expanding self-aligned expressions. Expansion was the conduit for more.

George Martin recalled:

John never liked his voice. I don’t know why. He always wanted to distort his vocal, asking me to do things to it: double-track it or artificially double-track it or whatever. ‘Don’t give me that thing again, George, give me another one.’ He was always wanting something different

Abby Road Studios.com, “Inside Abby Road: Artificial Double Tracking,” April 2020, https://www.abbeyroad.com/news/inside-abbey-road-artificial-double-tracking-2530.8uj.

Ken Townsend documented that he invented ADT, or Artificial Double Tracking because of Lennon’s tedious, overdubbing vocal work on “Tomorrow Never Knows” from Revolver.

I’d been working on a Beatles session one evening, one night, I think about four o’clock in the morning I was driving home and thinking we’d been spending the last three or four hours overdubbing double-tracking voices. Lennon kept saying, “I want to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a hilltop.” It’s not an easy task to double-track your own voice, the timing has to be perfect. I thought there must be an easier way to do it.

Waves Audio, “The ADT Story with Abbey Road Studios’ Ken Townsend,” March 10, 2014, video, 7:20, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgnSVdjfSwk&t=130s.

Townsend contributed his expertise and became involved in the mutually gainful, self-aligned event that ultimately benefited his resume. Also, junior engineer Geoff Emerick devised a way to help. He broke into the Hammond organ console and manipulated the rotating speaker housed within the console. The vocal track was modified using the control knob, producing an intermittent vibrato effect. Emerick recalled:

It meant actually breaking into the circuitry. I remember the surprise on our faces when the voice came out of the speaker. It was just one of sheer amazement.

The Beatles. Anthology, 211.

In “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” Martin was clear about Lennon’s compositional demands and new recording strategies for the song:

John was the least articulate. He would deal in moods, colors, and he would never be specific about instruments. ‘It’s a fairground sequence. I want to be in that circus atmosphere. I want to smell the sawdust when I hear that song.’

Ibid., 247.

And:

He’d make whooshing noises and try to describe what only he could hear in his head, saying he wanted the song ‘to sound like an orange.’

Lewisohn, Recording Sessions, 99.

Different instrumentation, noises and composing with indeterminacy for the first time were used to meet Lennon’s expectations. Martin could not find a calliope for an authentic circus atmosphere sound to fulfill Lennon’s orders, so he used calliope effect tapes of Sousa marches, hurdy-gurdy noises and people shouting. Lennon’s insistence for the audio representation of a circus stage motivated Emerick as well. His idea also included indeterminacy, cutting foot-long sound effects tape of steam organs played at carousels, throwing the bits of recording tape up in the air and putting them back together, nineteen pieces in all. This method made the results sound too much like the originals, so he fed the tape backwards into the machine.

In “Good Morning Good Morning,” Lennon thought:

Good Morning” is mine. It’s a throwaway, a piece of garbage, I always thought. Most Beatles fans think differently, however.”

Rybaczewski, “Good Morning Good Morning,” Beatles Music History, http://www.beatlesebooks.com/good-morning.

That’s for sure. The one real effort to change his vocal was accomplished when the ADT device was used to perfectly align multiple layers of his vocal to sing the title five times at the opening of the song, producing the strongest audio of Lennon’s voice thus far. Lennon employed the psychedelic-nostalgia element in the text as he recalled walking through the old neighborhood in Liverpool, describing the post War, desolate area:

Everybody knows there’s nothin’ doin’

Everything is closed it’s like a ruin,

Everyone you see is half asleep,

And you’re on your own you’re in the street

Lennon also expanded his self-aligned compositional focus to create a strong and unpredictable meter for this song, altering time signatures almost indiscriminately. Shifting meters included three measures of 5/4, one each of 3/4, 4/4, 5/4, one of 4/4, two of 3/4, and two of 4/4 totaling an odd-numbered, eleven-measure section, demonstrating there would be unhampered access to any musical ideas.

But the song appears to show Lennon’s self-aligned creative leadership trait when considering his options for the brass sound. Instead of using session musicians, Lennon hired his old Liverpool friends, a jazz group called Sounds Incorporated, to perform on the recording dates. This is seen as a gainful event for himself and the community. Emerick noted:

For nearly a month, John had been ruminating about what kind of instrumentation he wanted. He finally decided to add brass, but he was adamant that it mustn’t sound ‘ordinary,’ and he insisted that George Martin hire a horn section comprised of old Liverpool mates instead of the top-flight session musicians we had been using.

Geoff Emerick, Here There Everywhere, 177.

Emerick placed microphones inside the bells of the instruments, recorded them on their own track with all signals heavily compressed. Second engineer Richard Lush stated how Lennon was very strong about the sound of the brass:

He exerted his authority in a very insistent way. They spent three hours doing the overdub but Lennon thought it sounded too straight. So we ended up flanging, limiting and compressing it, anything to make it sound unlike brass playing.

Rybaczewski, “Good Morning Good Morning.

The brass sound still did not please Lennon. Emerick recalled:

John kept complaining and demanded that I take a different sonic approach – he had a real bee in his bonnet about that one. I shoved the mics right down the bells of the saxes and screwed the sound up with limiters and a healthy dose of effects like flanging and ADT; we pretty much used every piece of equipment at hand

Ibid.

McCartney and His Bass

Although McCartney was a strong vocalist for The Beatles, his signature sound came from the bass. There were occasions when he wanted his lead guitar to have extra audio attention (see In the Recording Studio), but for the most part, his masculine identity was reflected off of how strong the sound of his bass was in a recording. Since “Paperback Writer,” efforts were beginning to work their way forward to create more bass emphasis.

Senior balance engineer Phil McDonald’s statement at the time of “A Day in the Life” recording sessions reflects how The Beatles’ had a continuing influence with EMI engineers.

There’s one thing they always used to say. ‘There’s no such word as can’t. What do you mean can’t? The word just wasn’t in their vocabulary. There was always a way around any problem. If they had an idea – any idea – they thought it must be possible to do it. That’s how Sgt. Pepper was recorded.

Lewisohn, Recording Sessions, 114.

to be continued