From the course: Sylvia Massy: Unconventional Recording

Sylvia's book "Recording Unhinged"

From the course: Sylvia Massy: Unconventional Recording

Sylvia's book "Recording Unhinged"

- I wrote a book called Recording Unhinged, and it's a book about unconventional recording. There's a lot of people that are doing very unusual things that you don't really hear about that's not in any textbook. They're experimenting and sometimes succeeding with these ideas and, and then a lot of what they try and succeed with, become standard operating procedure in the studio. For instance, there's a, a great Engineer/Producer named Geoff Emerick, and Geoff was the Engineer on almost all the Beatles recordings. So he did the album that was most influential to me, which was Beatles Revolver. And when I talked to him in the book, he, he contributed to the book. When I talked to him, he told me a story about working with John Lennon, and how John wanted some crazy sound like a voice, that sound like it's being sung from a, a hill 25 miles away, sung by the Dalai Lama, or something like this, it's some crazy idea, that John had, and it was, Geoff's job to make it happen. So Geoff's looking around the studio, and he sees a, a Leslie speaker cabinet from an old Hammond organ, and he's thinking to himself, what if I patch into, get into those electronics, send his voice into the Leslie speaker, which is made for an organ, but I'm gonna put a vocal in there, I'm gonna put John's voice in there instead, and let's see what that sounds like. And that's a major part of the recording on Tomorrow Never Knows, I believe that was the song, but today, it's kind of standard procedure to put a vocal or a guitar through a Leslie cabinet, but that was the first time it had ever been done. So there's many, many stories like this in the book. Like 35 people all shared their little secrets, their techniques, and I got to draw diagrams of how they did things.

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