I'm Only Sleeping

Story Section status: Outdated

Recording

Equipment Section status: Outdated

Recording Timeline

• 27 April 1966 — Studio Three, 11.30pm–3.00am: takes 1–11 — The basic track, with George Martin producing, Geoff Emerick engineering and Phil McDonald second.¹ The rhythm track was perfected before anything else was attempted, which mattered more than usual because the song was mostly acoustic at this stage and had an extra few bars of strumming at the front that were lopped off in the remix.¹ Eleven takes for an acoustic performance with no overdubs on it is a high count, and it says that the difficulty here was the feel rather than the arrangement — a song about not getting up has to sound unhurried without sounding slack, and that is a performance problem no later session can repair.
• 27 April 1966 — the tape running slow — The backing track was recorded with the machine deliberately set away from the normal 50 cycles, a treatment this song shares with Rain.² A machine only slightly slowed produces a still-subtle change in pitch when the tape is played back at standard speed, which is the point: the effect had to be inaudible as an effect. The album’s varispeed log puts this song’s vocal at approximately 48 cycles and the Revolver mixing at 47.75.²
• 29 April 1966 — Studio Three, 5.00pm–1.00am: superimposition onto take 11 — The first of three overdub sessions, shared with Eleanor Rigby, which was being finished and mono-mixed the same evening.¹ Take 11 stayed the working master through every one of these sessions; nothing was ever re-made, and the acoustic performance of 27 April sits underneath the finished record unchanged.
• 5 May 1966 — Studio Three, 9.30pm–3.00am: superimposition onto take 11 — Five and a half hours overnight, and the only song on the booking.¹ Two guitar parts — one ordinary, one fuzz — were superimposed on top of one another to be heard backwards.¹ Two ways of recording a backwards instrument exist, one easy and one difficult, and the difficult one was taken: the instrument actually plays a melodic run, so the sound still has the aural attraction of a backwards tape while the notes go where the song needs them.¹
• 6 May 1966 — Studio Two, 2.30pm–1.00am: superimposition, reduction take 11 into takes 12 and 13 — Vocal harmonies by John, supported by Paul and George, and reduction mixes run to create the space for them.¹ A four-track tape that already carries a rhythm track, two stacked backwards guitars and a lead vocal has nowhere left to put a harmony, so two tracks are bounced into one and the freed track is spent immediately. Take 13 is what came out of that arithmetic, and every mix the song has ever had is made from it.
• 7 May 1966 — Studio Two control room, 1.00–2.15am: mono remixes 1–4 from take 13 — The band went home and the mixing began in the same booking, seventy-five minutes after the last overdub.¹ Four mono passes in that time is fast work, and none of them was the end of the matter.
• 20 May 1966 — Studio One control room, 11.00am–12.30pm: stereo remixes 1 and 2 from take 13 — Ninety minutes, three songs, two stereo mixes of this one, shared with And Your Bird Can Sing and Doctor Robert, both of which were edited from their two remixes on the spot.¹ This song’s two stereo remixes were not edited together; they went out separately, on different sides of the Atlantic (see Releases).
• 6 June 1966 — Studio Three control room: mono remixes 5 and 6 from take 13 — A second mono pass a month after the first, on the same day as mono work on Tomorrow Never Knows.¹ Which mono pass supplied which released record is a point on which the sources diverge: the session sheets record mono remixes on 6/7 May and again on 6 June, while the variants literature dates the released mono to a 12 May mixing and puts a second, separate mono on 6 June.^1,3 Both readings agree that more than one mono of this song was made and issued.
• 5 August 1966 — UK album release: Revolver — Fourteen weeks from the first take to the shops, of which the last ten were spent mixing rather than recording.¹ In the United States the song had already been out for six weeks by then, on a compilation the band did not assemble (see Releases).

Studio Notes

• The hard way to record a backwards guitar — There are two ways of putting a backwards instrument on a record, one easy and one difficult.¹ The easy way is to play the part normally and turn the tape round, which gives a reversed sound but also reverses the musical sense: the phrase now ends where it began and lands on the wrong chord. The difficult way keeps the music and reverses only the sound — the instrument is actually playing a melodic run, and the recording still has the aural attraction of a backwards tape.¹ This song is the catalogue’s clearest example of the second method, which is why the solo sounds strange and yet resolves properly against the verse underneath it.
• Learning a solo in reverse note order — Harrison first learned the two guitar solos in reverse note order, knowing they would eventually play back the other way round.² That is a demand of a different kind from anything else asked of a player on these records. The part has to be composed forwards, transcribed backwards, memorised backwards, and then performed backwards against a tape running backwards, with no way to audition the result until the machine is turned round again. Every judgement a guitarist normally makes by ear — where to lean on a note, how long to let it ring — has to be made in a mirror.
• Why a backwards note sounds the way it does — Reversal does not change pitch or the order of the notes when the part has been learned backwards; what it changes is the envelope. A plucked string starts loud and decays; run backwards it swells from nothing into a hard stop. The listener hears an instrument with no attack and a sudden ending, which is why the effect reads as unearthly rather than merely unusual, and why it suits a song about the border between sleep and waking better than any conventional guitar figure would.
• Two guitar parts, one ordinary and one fuzz — The overdub is not one backwards guitar but two, one clean and one through a fuzz box, superimposed on top of one another.¹ Doubling a reversed part is harder than doubling a forward one, because the two performances have to align at the ends of notes rather than at their beginnings and the ear is far less forgiving about a ragged swell than about a ragged pluck. The fuzz part supplies the body, the clean part supplies the definition, and the pair is why the solo sits so far forward in a mix that is otherwise soft-edged.
• Five and a half hours for one overdub — The 5 May booking ran from half past nine at night to three in the morning and carried no other song.¹ Set against a basic track that took a single evening, the ratio is the story of the record: the performance was ordinary studio work and the eight bars of guitar were an engineering project. Time on this scale also explains why the method was not repeated often — it works, and it costs a night.
• A tape machine running two cycles slow — The backing track was recorded with the machine set away from the normal 50 cycles, a treatment this song shares with Rain, and a machine only slightly slowed gives a still-subtle pitch change on playback.² The point of a small varispeed is that it must not be recognisable as one. Halve the speed and a vocal comes back high-pitched and cartoon-like²; move it by two cycles and the record simply feels slightly wrong-footed, which on this song is the entire mood.
• The numbers in the varispeed log — The album’s varispeed table lists this song’s vocal at approximately 48 cycles and the Revolver mixing at 47.75.² Two things follow. The vocal was not treated the same way as the backing, so the two layers were recorded against different references and only meet at the mix; and the mixing itself was varispeeded again, meaning the released record is a third speed rather than a return to the second. Nothing on this song is playing at the speed it was performed at.
• How the session was miked — The setup reconstructed for the 27 April 1966 session shows several changes from earlier practice: a D19c as overhead and the standard AKG D20 on bass drum, a D20 on the bass amplifier, a U47 on guitar and a U47 on vocals.² Emerick had also begun putting screens around the guitar amplifiers.² Screening the amps is what makes an overdub-heavy record possible at all: it cuts the guitar out of the drum microphones, so the rhythm track can be reduced and bounced repeatedly without the leakage building up into mud.
• Eleven takes, then never re-made — Takes 1 to 11 on 27 April, and the song was never attempted again.¹ Take numbers at EMI count attempts rather than quality, so eleven is a statement about how long the feel took to find. What makes it notable is that the same tape then absorbed three overdub sessions and two reductions without anyone proposing a fresh start; the acoustic performance of the first night is still audible underneath everything added to it.
• The introduction that was removed — The song as recorded had an extra few bars of strumming at the front, and they were lopped off in the remix.¹ That is a decision taken at the desk rather than in the studio, and it changes the record materially: instead of easing in on guitar the song now starts on the vocal, which is a far more abrupt opening for a song about drowsiness. The removed bars exist on the multitrack and on nothing that was ever issued.
• Four mixes, four placements of the same solo — The backwards guitar is heard in different places on the four issued mixes.³ This is the single most useful thing to know about the song’s discography, and it follows directly from how the record was made. A backwards overdub occupying its own track can be dropped in wherever the engineer chooses; with four separate mixing passes spread over a month, four different choices were made and all four were pressed. No other song on the album rewards an A–B comparison this specifically.
• Where the sources disagree — The session sheets record mono remixes 1–4 on 6/7 May and mono remixes 5 and 6 on 6 June; the variants literature dates the released mono to a 12 May mixing and treats the 6 June mono as a second, separately issued mix.^1,3 The disagreement is about which pass became which product, not about the underlying fact that the song was mono-mixed more than once and that more than one mono was issued. Where the two accounts cannot be reconciled from the mounted record, both are given here rather than one being chosen.

Releases

Four separate mixes of this song were issued, and the backwards guitar sits in a different place on each. Nothing else on Revolver repays an A–B this directly, and the two 1966 stereos — one British, one American — are the pair to start with.

• 1966 UK mono LP — Revolver (5 August 1966, Parlophone PMC 7009, side one track three) — Dry and centred, with the vocal well forward and the two backwards guitars stacked in the middle of the picture rather than spread across it. The song opens on the voice; the bars of acoustic strumming that began the recorded performance are not here (see Studio Notes). This is the attended mix and the reference for everything below.
• 1966 UK stereo LP — Revolver (5 August 1966, Parlophone PCS 7009, side one track three) — Mid-1960s EMI stereo convention: voice and rhythm on opposite sides, and the backwards guitars spread across the image instead of stacked. The separation makes the doubling audible — the clean part and the fuzz part can be told apart here, which is very hard in mono.
• 1966 US LP — Yesterday and Today (20 June 1966, Capitol T 2553 mono / ST 2553 stereo) — The song reached America first, six weeks before the British album, on a compilation assembled from tracks Capitol had held back. The stereo here is not the British stereo: it is the other of the two mixes made that May, and the backwards guitar enters at different points. Some pressings carry an electronic mock stereo made from the mono instead — the mono spread apart, not a mix.
• 1980 US LP — Rarities (Capitol SHAL 12060) — The fourth mix, a second mono that had not previously circulated in America, collected here because it differs audibly from the familiar mono. A mix reported for years as a separate “French EP” version is this one.
• 1987 CD — Revolver (EMI CDP 7 46441 2) — The first digital issue, carrying the 1966 UK stereo. It held the field for twenty-two years.
• 2009 stereo remaster — Revolver (Parlophone 99458 2) — The 1966 UK stereo remastered rather than remixed, so the wide 1966 placement is intact and the backwards parts are cleaner against the vocal. The Beatles in Mono box of the same year carries the 1966 mono; the two together are the cleanest way to hear both British mixes.
• 2022 new stereo and Dolby Atmos — Revolver Special Edition (28 October 2022) — Remixed by Giles Martin and Sam Okell from the original four-track tape, using de-mixing technology developed by WingNut Films to separate instruments that were bounced together in 1966. The two backwards guitars can finally be heard as two, and the harmony vocals come out from behind the lead. The Super Deluxe edition adds a rehearsal fragment, takes 2 and 5, and mono mix RM1 — the song before the backwards overdubs went on.