Bobby Owsinski's Big Picture Music Production Blog: Billy Preston

Monday, August 2, 2010

"Come Together" Track Dissection

Here's a great track dissection from a BBC documentary on The Beatles that features Come Together from their Abbey Road album. It does a pretty good job of describing how the song was put together track-wise, although I wish we could've heard more of each track.

A few things I noticed:
1) Listen how out of tune George's guitar is.

2) I always thought that the electric piano was a Wurlitzer and played by Billy Preston (it's a Rhodes played by Paul). Just goes to show what I know.

3) The missing guitar lick is very cool but I can see why they didn't include it in the final mix. Sometimes the space is more powerful than anything that fills it. I think it might've stepped on the vocal as well.

4) Listen to the harmony vocal in the verse. After hearing a number of Beatle's vocal tracks and dissecting how they put their harmonies together, I'm always amazed that Paul usually takes the lowest part, considering his great vocal range. George is frequently the one on the top vocal (although not on this track).