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Thursday, August 5, 2010

"She's Leaving Home" Dissected Track

Back to The Beatles and a great track dissection, this time with "She's Leaving Home" from the Sgt. Pepper album. This is a fairly simple track in that it's just orchestra and vocals, but there's a lot more to the recording, as you'll hear.

1) The orchestra was recorded beautifully, but as the commentator points out, a lot has to do with the fact that the studio was based around 1inch 4 track tape machines. This means that the signal to noise ratio was better than most other machines because of the tape width used. As a result, these 4 tracks sounded much better than the 24 track tape machines that we revere so much these days.

2) Paul's vocal performance is great. It sounds like a complete performance without any punches (I don't hear any), but there's no way to be sure.

3) John's vocal was printed with reverb, which is what needed to be done in order to print both vocals on the same track. That's the way it used to be in recording once upon a time. You had to make a decision while you where recording instead of waiting until the mix.



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1 comment:

Bob Buontempo said...

Very cool, again!!

EXCELLENT sound quality. One would be hard pressed to be able to replicate it today!!

I can very clearly hear the room on Paul's vocal. I believe that Geoff Emerick sometimes recorded the vocals with an omni pattern, as he mentioned in his EXCELLENT book "Here, There, and Everywhere".

He used Neumann U47s and U48, typically, on vocals.

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