I would lay odds that Ken Scott was talking about a baritone guitar. This was a very common practice on country tracks.
You know, I think when referring to "Tic tac" bass {he calls it tic toc !} in country music, he thought it was bass guitar and double bass but he may be mistaken as it would appear the baritone guitar
is the bass doubler in question. But on the Beatle tracks, he's adamant about the 4 and 6 string bass. Whereas George would play standard 4 string if he played bass, John would use a 6 string bass. I think some of the early ones were tuned as a guitar {EADGBE} but an octave lower so they were generally easy for guitarists to play. When Noel Redding first played with Jimi Hendrix, I think he used one because he was a guitarist.
Are you facepalming me or someone else - cause I don't think anything I said is facepalmy...
I don't think anything you said was facepalmy, facepalmable or facepalmesque.
Lennon didn't use chorused effects, he use flanging. It is quite interesting how they achieved this. It involved the use of three tape machines, recording the original vocal on two synchronized machines and then while mixing to the third machine the engineer careful placed his finger on the real of one of the original two machines and slowed it down about 20 microseconds causing an out of phase or comb effect. Doing this repeatedly between the two original tape machines made John Lennon's iconic sound.
That wasnt the case all of the time and in fact maybe only a few times at all......he loved just plain ole double tracking his voice
He was a regular double tracker up to "Revolver" in 1966. Then the ADT thing came in. It was still pretty basic by todays press button and instant karma standards but revolutionary at the time.
What I've long found interesting about artificial double tracking is that it doesn't appear to have caught on. It seems that even in the 60s, artists preferred to manually double track. Having said that, I used to have this cheap Zoom effects unit and it had so many settings for each effect. I noticed that one of the reverb settings could be set to produce a kind of ADT. It wasn't chorus but I never liked it. You couldn't alter the volume of either of the voices.
Is layering not a form of double tracking ? If I'm going to play electric mandolin, I quad or quintuple track it but each individual mandolin track sounds way different. Some distorted, some DI, some clean, some through a sitar emulator or whatever. But instead of panning them I crunch the lot together and EQ madly to make one big unique sound.
The Beatles (with Martin producing) are exceptions to most rules!
The more I read about the ways artists have recorded their albums over the years, the more I realize this is true. It was a long time before you had the vast amount of detail about what went on in the studio and the way specific songs and albums were recorded. And because the Beatles were seen to have changed so much about recording, it was their sessions that people tended to write and talk about. So I grew up with the twin principles of randomness and experimentation in my head, which still serves me well.
They were like big kids in a way, when it came to their recordings. They got bored once they'd done something and would move on to try some other technique which partially explains their progress and innovation through each album and early on, single.
