On April 6, 1966, The Beatles went into EMI Recording Studios (it wouldn’t be named Abbey Road Studios until 1976) to begin work on their seventh album. And the first number they recorded would be their most audacious work to date. The song that began life as “Mark I” and was ultimately “Tomorrow Never Knows” saw the band taking a bold step into new sonic worlds.
It was the song that set the tone for the album that would be. It marked the first time the group really explored what could be done with sound in a recording studio, how you could make it sound differently when you recorded it and how to manipulate it after recording. When vocals weren’t being sent through a Leslie speaker, they were compressed, treated with varispeed (varying the speed and thus the pitch of a recording) or artificial double tracking (ADT; a delay effect created by EMI Studios’ Ken Townsend, as a means of duplicating a recorded performance without having to record it twice). Guitars sounded like they were being played backward. Strange noises appeared and disappeared at random. “They are purposedly composed to sound unusual,” Paul McCartney said at the time of the album’s songs. “They are sounds that nobody else had done yet.
