On Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 11:08:21AM -0500, Dan Easley wrote: > On 2/15/06, Brad Fuller <brad@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > What's amazing to me is that they didn't have access to an 8-track > > > until the White Album. Listen to something like > > > "I Am the Walrus" or "Tomorrow Never Knows" and imagine creating that on > > > a 4-track. > > > > > perhaps bouncing was their friend. > > yeah, I believe they commonly would fill up one 4-track, then bounce > it to one or two tracks of their other 4-track, fill that one up, and > do it again. man, i just wasn't made for those times. Yes. You had to be really, really good at creating submixes, because once you'd comitted to one, you couldn't do it over without throwing away all your later work. It helped that these 4-track machines were then state-of-the-art reel-to-reel devices. If you tried all that bouncing on a cassette portastudio, it'd sound like utter crap real quick. All hiss and no treble makes your mix a dull bore. The other trick the Beatles had up their sleeve was one of their engineers invention of automatick doubling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_double_tracking Of course, the real pioneer of all this stuff was Les Paul. He was bouncing eight guitar parts in 1947 on wax discs. He invented and paid for Ampex to build him an eight-track reel to reel overdub-capable machine in 1954. Nobody else had eight tracks until the mid sixties. -- Paul Winkler http://www.slinkp.com
