page_title: Tomorrow Never Knows
section_title: Recording
hierarchical_section_title: Tomorrow Never Knows / Recording
caption_attribution_description: A small gompa sits atop a small hill south of main Leh looking lonely in front of the vast near-6000m mountains behind.
context_page_description: "Tomorrow Never Knows" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written primarily by John Lennon and credited to Lennon–McCartney. It was released in August 1966 as the final track on their album Revolver, although it was the first song recorded for the LP. The song marked a radical departure for the Beatles, as the band fully embraced the potential of the recording studio without consideration for reproducing the results in concert.
  When writing the song, Lennon drew inspiration from his experiences with the hallucinogenic drug LSD and from the book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner. The Beatles' recording employed musical elements foreign to pop music, including musique concrète, avant-garde composition and electro-acoustic sound manipulation. It features an Indian-inspired modal backing of tambura and sitar drone and bass guitar, with minimal harmonic deviation from a single chord, underpinned by a constant but non-standard drum pattern; added to this, tape loops prepared by the band were overdubbed "live" onto the rhythm track.
context_section_description: "Tomorrow Never Knows" was the first song attempted during the sessions for Revolver, which started at 8 pm on 6 April 1966, in Studio 3 at EMI Studios (subsequently Abbey Road Studios). Geoff Emerick, who was promoted to the role of the Beatles' recording engineer for Revolver, recalled that the band "encouraged us to break the rules" and ensure that each instrument "should sound unlike itself". Lennon sought to capture the atmosphere of a Tibetan Buddhist ceremony; he told Martin that the song should sound like it was being chanted by a thousand Tibetan monks, with his vocal evoking the Dalai Lama singing from a mountaintop. The latter effect was achieved by using a Leslie speaker. When the concept was explained to Lennon, he enquired if the same effect could be achieved by hanging him upside down and spinning him around a microphone while he sang into it. Emerick made a connector to break into the electronic circuitry of the Leslie cabinet and then re-recorded the vocal as it came out of the revolving speaker.
  Further to their approach when recording Rubber Soul late the previous year, the Beatles and Martin embraced the idea of the recording studio as an instrument on Revolver, particularly "Tomorrow Never Knows". As Lennon hated doing a second take to double his vocals, Ken Townsend, the studio's technical manager, developed an alternative form of double-tracking called artificial double tracking (ADT) system, taking the signal from the sync head of one tape machine and delaying it slightly through a second tape machine. The two tape machines used were not driven by mains electricity, but from a separate generator which put out a particular frequency, the same for both, thereby keeping them locked together. By altering the speed and frequencies, he could create various effects, which the Beatles used throughout the recording of Revolver. Lennon's vocal is double-tracked on the first three verses of the song: the effect of the Leslie cabinet can be heard after the (backwards) guitar solo.
  The track includes the highly compressed drums that the Beatles favoured at the time, with reverse cymbals, reverse guitar, processed vocals, looped tape effects, and sitar and tambura drone. In the description of musicologist Russell Reising, the "meditative state" of a psychedelic experience is conveyed through the musical drone, enhancing the lyrical imagery, while the "buzz" of a drug-induced "high" is sonically reproduced in Harrison's tambura rhythm and Starr's heavily treated drum sound. Despite the implied chord changes in the verses and repeatedly at the end of the song, McCartney's bass maintains a constant ostinato in C. Reising writes of the drum part: 
  Starr's accompaniment throughout the piece consists of a kind of stumbling march, providing a bit of temporal disruption ... [The] first accent of each bar falls on the measure's first beat and the second stress occurs in the second half of the measure's third quarter, double sixteenth notes in stuttering pre-emption of the normal rhythmic emphasis on the second backbeat – hardly a classic rock and roll gesture.
  The use of ¼-inch audio tape loops resulted primarily from McCartney's admiration for Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge. By disabling the erase head of a tape recorder and then spooling a continuous loop of tape through the machine while recording, the tape would constantly overdub itself, creating a saturation effect, a technique also used in musique concrète. The tape could also be induced to go faster and slower. McCartney encouraged the other Beatles to use the same effects and create their own loops. After experimentation on their own, the various Beatles supplied a total of "30 or so" tape loops to Martin, who selected 16 for use on the song. Each loop was about six seconds long.
  The overdubbing of the tape loops took place on 7 April. The loops were played on BTR3 tape machines located in various studios of the Abbey Road building and controlled by EMI technicians in Studio Three. Each machine was monitored by one technician, who had to hold a pencil withi
caption: A small gompa (Buddhist monastery) in Ladakh. Lennon sought to capture the mood of Tibetan monks chanting from a mountaintop.
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