And Your Bird Can Sing

Story Section status: Outdated

Recording

• There are two recordings of this song and only the second one was released. The first was made on Wednesday 20 April 1966 in Studio Two, in a session running from 2.30pm to 2.30am that also produced the first four takes of Taxman — nothing of which was ever released in this form. Six days later the whole thing was started again from nothing. George Martin produced throughout, Geoff Emerick engineered and Phil McDonald was second engineer.¹
• The 20 April version got as far as two takes. Take 1 was a rhythm track only, guitars and drums, and it was unrecognisable in this form from the song which finally evolved. Take 2 was marked best and then buried under innumerable overdubs — at least three lead vocals from John, two harmony vocals from Paul and one from George, plus tambourine and bass. Five mono remixes were made from it. All of it was abandoned.¹
• That tape is also the one every collector knows. During one of the overdubs John and Paul collapsed into hysterical laughter, developing into impromptu whistling by the song’s end — a performance that stayed unissued for thirty years and now sits on the Revolver session discs beside the straight take from the same reel.¹
• The re-make on Tuesday 26 April opened with a count-in that has become the song’s signature: “Okay boys, quite brisk. Moderato. Foxtrot!” Takes 3 to 13 followed, in a session that again ran until quarter to three in the morning. Take 3 was a very heavy recording but the song grew progressively lighter across the run, although guitars were always well to the fore. Take 10 was the keeper and the vocals went on top of it that same night.¹
• The ending came from somewhere else. An interesting blend of lead guitar strumming and Paul’s bass guitar notes ended the song, and the best version of this section came at the conclusion of take six — so every released mix, mono and stereo, is an edit of takes 10 and 6. The splice was made afresh in each mixing line rather than carried across from one to the other, which is why the mixing sheets list the mixes as coming from two takes rather than one.^1,3
• Mixing then ran for six weeks. Mono remix 6 was made from take 10 on 27 April; mono remixes 7 and 8, from takes 10 and 6, on 12 May, with the edit performed in the same session; mono remixes 9 and 10, again from takes 10 and 6, in June. Stereo did not exist for the song until 20 May, when remixes 1 and 2 were made from the same two takes and edited together.¹
• The 27 April sitting is the one where the band started turning up. Eleven remixes were made in one evening and none was chosen for inclusion on Revolver, but the habit that began there mattered more than the output: they found that they could get more control of the sound that they wanted by actually being there for a mix. Even so, they still paid little attention to stereo.¹
• The vocal is varispeeded. Kehew and Ryan’s table of varispeed applications across the catalogue lists this song’s vocals at roughly 48.5 cycles — the tape machine running slow while the voice was recorded, which at the normal fifty-cycle playback lifts the pitch and the pace of everything on that track. The same vocal also carries ADT, so the doubling a listener hears is a tape delay and not a second performance.²

Equipment

Recording Timeline

• 20 April 1966 (Wed) — takes 1–2, first version, Studio Two, 2.30pm–2.30am. Twelve hours shared with the first four takes of Taxman. Take 1 carried guitars and drums only. Take 2 was marked best and then loaded with overdubs — three or more lead vocals, two harmonies from Paul and one from George, tambourine and bass — and five mono remixes were pulled from it. It was during those overdubs that the laughing and whistling were taped. None of it survived the week.¹
• 26 April 1966 (Tue) — takes 3–13, the re-make, plus vocal superimpositions onto take 10, Studio Two, 2.30pm–2.45am. The session opened with John’s foxtrot instruction and ran twelve hours again. Take 3 was heavy; the arrangement thinned as the takes went on without ever letting the guitars recede. Take 10 was chosen, take 6 was noted for its ending, and the lead and backing vocals went on before the night was out.¹
• 27 April 1966 (Wed) — mono remix 6, from take 10, Studio Three control room, 6.00pm–11.30pm. One of eleven remixes made that evening across three songs, none of which was chosen for the album. The session is more significant for who was in the room than for what came out of it: this is the period when the band began attending mixes rather than leaving them to the staff.¹
• 12 May 1966 (Thu) — mono remixes 7 and 8, from takes 10 and 6, then edited, Studio Three control room, 1.45–3.30pm. Ninety minutes that also produced mono mixes of Doctor Robert and I’m Only Sleeping. The two-take splice was assembled here, and this mono is the one Capitol used in America two months before the British album appeared.^1,3
• 20 May 1966 (Fri) — stereo remixes 1 and 2, from takes 10 and 6, then edited, Studio One control room, 11.00am–12.30pm. The song’s first stereo, made in a ninety-minute sitting that also covered Doctor Robert and I’m Only Sleeping on a desk that was set once and not reset between them. The splice was made again from scratch in stereo.¹
• June 1966 — mono remixes 9 and 10, from takes 10 and 6. A third mono line, made as the album was finalised; Brennan dates the mono that reached the British Revolver to 6 and 8 June 1966. Three separate mono mixing dates lie behind a song that was finished, as a performance, on 26 April.^1,3

Studio Notes

• The record is a splice, and both formats were spliced separately — The body of the song is take 10 and the ending is take 6, joined in the mixing room. What made take 6 worth keeping was its close: an interesting blend of lead guitar strumming and Paul’s bass guitar notes ended the song, and the best version of this section came at the conclusion of take six. The mixing sheets record every released remix, mono and stereo, as coming from both takes, which means the join was cut afresh in each line rather than inherited — a small piece of evidence that the ending was regarded as a deliberate component of the finished record and not a happy accident preserved by luck.^1,3
• Two versions, and almost nothing carried over — The 20 April recording and the 26 April recording share a song and very little else. The first was heavy and overdub-laden; take 1 of it was guitars and drums and unrecognisable in this form from the song which finally evolved. The re-make was faster, lighter and thinner, and the guitars — the one element common to both attempts — were pushed forward rather than embedded. The decision to scrap five completed mono remixes and start again is the most expensive thing that happened to this song, and the sessions give no reason for it.¹
• What the laughing take actually is — The famous outtake is not a separate performance but take 2 of the first version, caught during one of its vocal overdubs, when John and Paul lost control and the collapse developed into impromptu whistling by the song’s end. It circulated for decades before Anthology 2 issued it in 1996, and the 2022 Revolver session discs now carry the straight take 2 and the giggling take 2 side by side, which is the clearest way to hear how much the re-make changed.^1,3
• The vocal is running fast — Kehew and Ryan’s survey of varispeed across the catalogue lists this song’s vocals at about 48.5 cycles. The mechanism is simple and its effect is not: recording at a frequency below the normal fifty means the tape is travelling slower than it will on playback, which lifts the pitch and the tempo of that track when the machine is returned to standard. The voice on the record is therefore slightly higher and slightly more urgent than the one John sang into the microphone, and it sits a shade above the guitars in a way that a straight overdub would not.²
• Doubling that is not a double — The vocals also appear in the album’s ADT examples. Artificial double tracking runs the voice through a second machine at a shifting delay, so the thickening a listener hears is one performance heard twice rather than two performances. This matters for the stereo, where the delay return is a separately pannable signal — and on this record it was panned somewhere the original vocal is not.²
• The desk was set once and left — The 20 May stereo session mixed three finished songs in ninety minutes on a fixed layout: music tracks pulled not quite to the centre of the spread, tracks three and four — vocals and whatever had been bounced up with them — hard right, and the ADT return hard left. Kehew and Ryan read this as pre-determined panning that certainly sped up the mixing process, but it shows how relatively unimportant stereo mixes were considered. The same geometry is audible on Doctor Robert and I’m Only Sleeping for exactly that reason.²
• Why the vocal sits at the edges — The consequence on headphones is a voice split between the two walls of the room with nothing in the middle: the dry track on the right, its tape double on the left, and a band that never quite reaches the centre either. It is often taken for a fault in the transfer. It is the mixing desk’s standing setting for that hour of that morning, applied to a song whose arrangement — twin guitars in harmony, a vocal riding above them — is unusually badly served by it.²
• An unusually dry record — Very little echo-chamber capacity was used across Revolver; only a few tracks, among them Here, There and Everywhere and Yellow Submarine, carry appreciable chamber, and this is not one of them. The close, hard sound flatters the guitar harmony, which needs to be heard as two distinct lines rather than as a wash, and it is why the handclaps read as percussion rather than as reverb tails.²
• The mono mixes are not interchangeable — Brennan separates the American mono of 12 May from the British mono of June and finds real differences between them: the earlier mix has louder handclaps, and the guitars behave differently under the vocal. This is the ordinary condition of a Beatles song mixed three times to mono in three different rooms over six weeks, and it is the reason the mono line here rewards comparison rather than being treated as a single object.³
• The band were in the room, and it changed the mixes — The 27 April evening produced eleven remixes across three songs and nothing usable, but it belongs to the moment the group stopped treating mixing as somebody else’s job. They found that they could get more control of the sound that they wanted by actually being there for a mix. The qualification is the interesting part: even so, they still paid little attention to stereo — which is precisely why the stereo of this song was made three weeks later, in ninety minutes, on a desk nobody bothered to re-set.¹

Releases

• 1966 US LP mono — “Yesterday”… and Today (20 June 1966, Capitol T 2553) — The song’s first appearance, two months ahead of Britain, in the mono made on 12 May. Handclaps are noticeably louder here than on the British mono and the guitars sit differently against the voice; everything is summed to a point, so the two lead lines interlock rather than separate.
• 1966 US LP ‘stereo’ — “Yesterday”… and Today, first issue (20 June 1966, Capitol ST 2553) — Mock stereo manufactured by Capitol from the mono rather than a stereo mix: wide but hollow, with the width produced by filtering instead of by placement. American pressings from the early 1970s replaced it with the genuine 20 May stereo.
• 1966 UK mono LP — Revolver (5 August 1966, Parlophone PMC 7009, side two, track two) — The British mono, mixed in June and the last of the three. Drier and tighter than the American one, with the handclaps set back and the guitar harmony carrying more of the weight.
• 1966 UK stereo LP — Revolver (5 August 1966, Parlophone PCS 7009, side two, track two) — The 20 May mix, and the one that puts the vocal on both walls at once: dry voice hard right, its tape double hard left, band pulled towards but not into the middle. The guitar harmony survives this better than the singing does (see Studio Notes).
• 1987 CD — Revolver (EMI CDP 7 46441 2) — The 1966 stereo transferred unaltered, which is where most listeners first met the split vocal image on a format that gave them no choice about hearing it.
• 1996 CD — Anthology 2 (Apple CDP 8 34448 2) — The first official release of the abandoned 20 April version: take 2 with the laughter and the whistling, in a 1995 stereo mix. A different arrangement of the same song, and the only way to hear the version the band decided against.
• 2009 remasters — Revolver (9 September 2009, Parlophone 99458 2), and the mono companion — A cleaner transfer of the 1966 stereo, with more definition on the two guitar parts; the British mono is on the mono set. Neither is a remix, so the panning is untouched.
• 2022 remix — Revolver Special Edition (28 October 2022, Apple) — The Giles Martin and Sam Okell stereo, built from the four-track master with de-mixing developed by WingNut Films: drums and bass move to the centre and the split vocal is gathered into one place, which is the largest change any release has made to this song. A Dolby Atmos mix and the 1966 mono master accompany it, and the session discs carry take 2 of the first version, the giggling take 2, and take 5 of the re-make.