A great example came on the Sgt Pepper’s epic “A Day in the Life.” For the end of the song, John Lennon asked his producer and engineers for ” a sound building up from nothing to the end of the world.” So they hired and orchestra and got as close as they could.
(source cheatsheet.com)
While that track might be the peak of the Beatles’ experimental phase, it didn’t come out of nowhere. Revolver, which the band recorded and released a year earlier (1966), showcased the Fab Four building toward those highs. By the time it was released, they’d quit touring for good.
But that doesn’t mean the experiments were successful right away. For example, George Harrison tried to record a guitar solo backwards one day. As the hours passed and Harrison kept on, engineers started to go nuts.
One of the lows came during the recording session for John’s “I’m Only Sleeping.” (In the U.S., it got released on Yesterday And Today). Sometime earlier, technicians had played a tape backward accidentally, and every Beatle in attendance loved the sound. So George decided to try a backwards guitar solo on it.
Instead of playing a tape backwards, George wrote a normal solo and retraced his steps from the end to the beginning. But he didn’t get far after a few hours. “At the best of times, George had trouble playing solos all the way through forwards,” Emerick wrote.
“So it was with great trepidation that we all settled in for what turned out to be an interminable day of listening to the same eight bars played backwards over and over and over again.” By the time they finished, nine hours had passed in the studio.
“I can still picture George – and later, Paul, who joined him to play the backwards outro in a bizarre duet – hunched over his guitar for hours on end, headphones clamped on, brows furrowed in concentration,”G. Emerick
