In the studio
‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was a remarkable and innovative recording for a variety of reasons. Firstly there was Ringo Starr’s thunderous drum pattern. The tom toms skins on his kit were slackened, and the recording was heavily compressed and echoed to give perhaps the most remarkable drum sound on any Beatles song.
The drums are the main constant in ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, a perfect counterpoint to the musical anarchy that envelopes the rest of the song. Paul McCartney’s bass guitar closely matched Starr’s drums, enhancing the song’s hypnotic effect.
I moved the bass drum microphone much closer to the drum than had been done before. There’s an early picture of The Beatles wearing a woollen jumper with four necks. I stuffed that inside the drum to deaden the sound. Then we put the sound through Fairchild 660 valve limiters and compressors. It became the sound of Revolver and Pepper really. Drums had never been heard like that before.”
Then there were the tape loops. McCartney had discovered that by removing the erase head on his reel-to-reel tape machine, he could saturate a recording with sound.
People tend to credit John with the backwards recordings, the loops and the weird sound effects, but the tape loops were my thing. The only thing I ever used them on was ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. It was nice for this to leak into the Beatle stuff as it did.We ran the loops and then we ran the track of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and we played the faders, and just before you could tell it was a loop, before it began to repeat a lot, I’d pull in one of the other faders, and so, using the other people, ‘You pull that in there,’ ‘You pull that in,’ we did a half random, half orchestrated playing of the things and recorded that to a track on the actual master tape, so that if we got a good one, that would be the solo. We played it through a few times and changed some of the tapes till we got what we thought was a real good one.
I think it is a great solo. I always think of seagulls when I hear it. I used to get a lot of seagulls in my loops; a speeded-up shout, hah ha, goes squawk squawk. And I always get pictures of seasides, of Torquay, the Torbay Inn, fishing boats and puffins and deep purple mountains. Those were the slowed-down ones.
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles
There were six loops used on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’: a seagull noise, actually a distorted recording of McCartney laughing; an orchestra playing a B flat chord; notes played on a Mellotron’s flute setting; a second Mellotron on its violin setting; a finger rubbing the rim of a wine glass, heard midway through the song only in the stereo mix; and a distorted sitar which is most clearly heard in the instrumental break following the lines “It is being, it is being”.
I had my own little set-up to record them. As George says, we were ‘drinking a lot of tea’ in those days, and on all my tapes you can hear, ‘Oh, I hope I’ve switched it on.’ I’d get so deranged from strong tea. I’d sit there for hours making those noises.
Anthology
It has been claimed that The Beatles also used part of McCartney’s guitar solo for ‘Taxman’, reversed and slowed down a tone, in the instrumental break. However, the two parts are different and were likely recorded on different dates. Here is the section of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ reversed, to show how the guitar solo sounded as it was recorded:
The final remarkable innovation in ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was John Lennon’s voice. For the first half of the song it was manually double tracked (not, as has been reported elsewhere, treated with artificial double tracking or ADT).
For the second half, meanwhile, the Abbey Road engineers ran Lennon’s voice through a revolving Leslie speaker, more commonly found inside Hammond organs. It can be heard from the line ‘Love is all and love is everyone’.
For ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ he said to me he wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a hilltop, and I said, ‘It’s a bit expensive, going to Tibet. Can we make do with it here?’ I knew perfectly well that ordinary echo or reverb wouldn’t work, because it would just put a very distant voice on. We needed to have something a bit weird and metallic…A Leslie speaker is a rotating speaker, a Hammond console, and the speed at which it rotates can be varied according to a knob on the control. By putting his voice through that and then recoding it again, you got a kind of intermittent vibrato effect, which is what we hear on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. I don’t think anyone had done that before. It was quite a revolutionary track for Revolver.
Anthology
Geoff Emerick later explained the response among those in the studio:
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. After that they wanted everything shoved through the Leslie: pianos, guitars, drums, vocals, you name it!
The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, Mark Lewisohn
Despite the groundbreaking results, Lennon later claimed to have been dissatisfied with the recording.
Often the backing I think of early on never comes off. With ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ I’d imagined in my head that in the background you would hear thousands of monks chanting. That was impractical of course and we did something different. I should have tried to get near my original idea, the monks singing. I realise now that was what it needed
The Beatles, Hunter Davies
Recording began on 6 April 1966, the first session for Revolver. On that day The Beatles recorded just three takes of the rhythm track for ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, under the working title ‘Mark I’, along with one of John Lennon’s vocal takes.
Take one, which appeared on Anthology 2, still sounds utterly remarkable. The basis of the recording appears to be a single tape loop, featuring a repeated distorted guitar line, and heavily echoed and treated percussive sounds – giving a distinctly underwater effect. Onto this drums and bass were seemingly added, along with Lennon’s eerie vocals.
Take two was incomplete, but take three formed the basis of the released album version. Onto this they added the many effects and loops, during a five-hour session on 7 April.
We did a live mix of all the loops. All over the studios we had people spooling them onto machines with pencils while Geoff did the balancing. There were many other hands controlling the panning.It is the one track, of all the songs The Beatles did, that could never be reproduced: it would be impossible to go back now and mix exactly the same thing: the ‘happening’ of the tape loops, inserted as we all swung off the levers on the faders willy-nilly, was a random event.
‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was completed on 22 April, with a final overdub containing more vocals, organ, tambourine and piano, and the reversed guitar solo by Paul McCartney.
When I first got into the band, I used to play this game with myself, where I’d try to imagine what the song sounded like, just from knowing its name, as I figured out how to conjour up the money to buy an album. I was always way off beam, naturally. I didn’t know that the words “tomorrow never knows” didn’t appear as a phrase in the song until I actually heard it, so I always imagined the phrase across the same melody as “And nothing to get hung about” from Strawberry Fields Forever. The “Tomorrow” would shadow “And nothing,” the “Never” would shadow “to get” and the “Knows” would shadow “hung about,” but would be a 3-syllable pronunciation, “Know-ee-o’s.”
I was good at amusing myself, especially on long, boring journeys !
As an aside, I find it interesting and quite funny that John says that he used one of Ringo’s phrases as the title “to take the edge of the heavy philosophical lyrics.” As though “Tomorrow never knows” is a bog-standard, commonplace, everyday phrase among working class Scousers, or anyone else, for that matter ! It is way more heavy-edged philosophical than any part of the music or lyric, and that’s saying something, for this is one of the most heavy-edged philosophical songs that I’ve ever come across.
cold turkey 1987 said on 15 September 2014:
This is my second favorite closing track of any of album second only to a day in the life
As a closer, it is on a par with “I’ll Be Back” and “Run For Your Life.” Lagging just behind is “Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby.” I love “A Day in the Life” and it’s one fantabulous song, but although it’s the best closer of the ‘Pepper’ songs, I don’t think it’s a great album closer.
Go figure.
If we were including the original Magical Mystery Tour” EP, “I am the Walrus” would beat, as a closer, not only every other Beatles’ closer, but most LP closers, although Deep Purple’s “Hey Joe,” Larry Norman’s “Nightmare,” Pavlov’s Dog’s “Of Once and Future Kings” and the closers on the Indo-jazz fusions 1 {“Subject”} and 2 {“Mishra Blues”} by the Joe Harriott-John Mayer Double Quintet also take some beating.
Would love to hear it if john could get down the thousand monks chanting sound in proper fashion to record it to flow with the rest of the song
Even if he had lived beyond 1980, we’d never be in his head to hear what he envisaged or what role the monks would have played. But I think it would have sounded awful. I say that with total bias, of course, because I happen to love the song as is.
For about 4 years, I so wanted to hear the first take, after having read Mark Lewisohn’s description of it in his book on the Beatles’ recording sessions. It sounded so immense and wonderful and even influenced the way I did my own recordings, with his descriptions of “ocean-bed reverb” and the like, giving the impression of great deep sounds, slathered in gorgeous otherworldly reverb . Of course, I had no reference to measure his words by and ruined many a recording by putting way too much reverb on drums or bass or vocals and created an unlistenable mush. I learned the hard way that less, more often than not, is more !!
So yeah, between ’92 and ’96, I really wanted to hear the first take of Tomorrow Never Knows and when the Anthology II came out, I went all the way from London down to Brighton to snag a copy.
And what a disappointment. I think it’s an awful track, truly horrendous. It has the same ‘awful’ {clearly my word of the day !!} irritating, nerve-crawling, swirlingly itchy sound as the Kinks’ “Lazy Old Sun,” a song that would be a classic forever had they recorded it properly. TNK’s first take is one of the most overrated pieces of trash I’ve come across and I’m absolutely ever so glad that the Beatles didn’t like it and went away and thought some more about it, and gave us one of the great psychedelic numbers of the era.
Even if John wasn’t thrilled with the end result, Paul, George and George Martin clearly were, Geoff Emerick seemed to be and just by the way he played, Ringo seems bathed in the joys of lightning.
And not a monk in sight !
Certainly their most psychedelic song
I wouldn’t agree with that. For me, the bulk of their 1966-67 recordings {and I would add to those, “Across the Universe” and “The Inner Light” from ’68} were psychedelic in sound and even when not, in lyric or the worldview that underpinned, or gave rise to, the lyric. In fact, lyrically, the band were psychedelic right to the end {even Ringo in Octopus’ Garden”}, if one takes ‘psychedelic’ in its literal sense of “mind expanding.” With that in mind, the list is huge and no one song was ‘more’ psychedelic than another. Psychedelia had many different facets to it, and English psych was very different in it’s many-sided scope to the more aggressive and raw American psych of the time.