Beatles Studio Tricks

[cuthbert]

I knew about some of these, but it's cool to actually see and hear them demonstrated. This brief article and the accompanying video focuses mainly on what George Martin referred to as "wind-up piano", which was setting the recorder to record to half-speed, playing the piano an octave lower at half-tempo, and then resetting the recorder back to full speed:

https://www.culturesonar.com/wind-up-piano/


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_JczTXVISI

[Groundy]

Clever Buggers...

[hooper]

One song he didn't mention... Lovely Rita.  At least I think The Beatles used wind-up piano on this one... 

I tried wind-up piano once on a cover of Lovely Rita:
https://songcrafters.org/forum/index.php?topic=8009.msg105825

Slowing down/speeding up audio digital recordings is do-able with professional grade equipment but not so good at the home studio level.  However, changing speeds with MIDI is no problem.  So, I opened a new project and created a partial backing track with piano chords and drum machine.  Then played the piano solo over that with the BPM slowed down.  Then set the BPM back up to the same tempo as the original Project and rendered the MIDI piano solo to an audio track, then imported the piano audio track into the original Project.  Changing tempo with MIDI doesn't change the pitch so it's not necessary to use double-speed or half-speed to produce an exact octave difference in pitch.

[T.C. Elliott]

That's cool.

re: hooper -  I'll say that the digital world is catching up. I use reaper and there are tools to speed up and slow down recorded audio without losing quality. I have an electric piano now (relatively new and relatively unused) but have been remiss in practicing so I seldom use it. Maybe this technique can help.

[Farrell Jackson]

That is great info Cuthbert! I was always amazed at the speed George Harrison played that guitar solo bit in Hard Days Night, now I know how did it. A very cool technique!

Hooper, nice work on Lovely Rita!

Farrell

[Jean Pierre]

TC Eliot say

I use reaper and there are tools to speed up and slow down recorded audio without losing quality.

...

exact, with Reaper, it happened to me to record fast sentences (for example in dobro) with a reduced speed, then to incorporate it at normal speed
I had trouble finding it... but for example in my cover of Gary More's Still Got the Blues, at the dobro, there was a short sixteenth note sentence that I couldn't play properly, I recorded it at a speed reduced to 50% and then reincorporated into the mix at normal speed

the sentence in the mix  is at 1'25"

https://songcrafters.org/forum/index.php?topic=25904.0

in joint piece the recording with speed reduce





Well, it's cheating a little bit, but when you're not a virtuoso...