Rain

(Lennon/McCartney)

Quick Facts

Composer	John
Lead Vocal	John
Recorded	April 1966
Length	3:02
Key	G
Noted Takes	8
Producer	George Martin
Engineer	Geoff Emerick

Originally released on

Paperback Writer (single)

Parlophone — R 5452

Find on Amazon

Page status: In review

Story Section status: Outdated

Rain is a form of precipitation where water droplets that have condensed from atmospheric water vapor fall by gravity. Rain is a major component of the water cycle and is responsible for depositing most of the fresh water on the Earth. It provides water for hydroelectric power plants, crop irrigation, and suitable conditions for many types of ecosystems.

Rain is a song by The Beatles, written by Lennon and led on vocal by John Lennon. B-side of 'Paperback Writer'; first commercially released backwards vocal. Within the catalogue, its b-side thread connects it to You Can't Do That, Thank You Girl, I'll Get You. John Lennon's impressionistic B-side to 'Paperback Writer' captured the group at their most experimental: a lyric celebrating precipitation's indifference paired with reverse-recorded vocals and backwards guitar passages. Lennon's vocal processing, created through tape reversal and Leslie speaker treatment, transformed his lead into an otherworldly presence. The song's heavy rhythm section and drone-like accompaniment presaged later psychedelic work (Lewisohn 1988, p.74). Kozinn identifies 'Rain' as part of the single pairing with 'Paperback Writer' for June 1966 release, serving as contemporary companion material to the Revolver album proper. (Kozinn 1995, p.144)

The session work falls within the band's Revolver / Studio Awakening (1966) period, recorded 14 Apr 1966 at EMI Studios, Abbey Road. George Martin produced; Geoff Emerick engineered. Recorded on 14 April, the track employed reverse-tape techniques for both vocal and instrumental elements, creating the song's signature disorienting soundscape. Lennon's vocal was recorded normally then reversed, then reversed again for effect; guitar passages underwent similar processing. George Martin and Geoff Emerick's technical mastery enabled these experiments while maintaining sonic clarity. The rhythm section's heavy, almost hypnotic groove provided foundation for the experimental vocal and instrumental layers (Lewisohn 1988, p.74).

What’s distinctive

The first Beatles recording released with a backwards vocal on it, and the clearest surviving demonstration of what EMI’s vari-speed could do to a whole record rather than to one overdub: the rhythm track was played fast and dragged down on playback, the lead vocal was taped with the machine slowed to roughly 42 cycles and came back fast, and the two speed decisions pull against each other for three minutes. Take count: 8 — takes 1–5 on 14 April 1966, take 5 reduced into take 6, and takes 7–8 on 16 April; every documented mono remix was made from take 7.^1,2

Recording

Rain was made in two EMI evenings, eight days apart, at the front end of the sessions that would become Revolver. The rhythm track went down on 14 April 1966 in Studio Three between 8.30pm and 1.30am, in five takes, with George Martin producing, Geoff Emerick engineering and Phil McDonald as second engineer. The overdubs, the reduction and the mono mixes all came on 16 April in Studio Two, an afternoon-to-night booking that ran from 2.30pm to 1.30am with the same three men in the room. Two sessions is a small budget for a record this strange, and the reason it worked is that almost nothing on Rain was decided in the mix. The things that make it sound the way it sounds were done to the tape while it was being recorded, which is also why they cannot be undone.¹
The record is built on two opposite speed decisions taken on the same song. The band played the rhythm track deliberately fast so that slowing the tape for playback would thicken it — the drag in Ringo Starr’s drums and the sag in the guitars are the audible residue of that choice, not a performance mannerism. The lead vocal went the other way: taped with the machine running below standard speed, it returned fast enough that Emerick described the playback as halfway to Mickey Mouse.¹ The varispeed table in Recording the Beatles puts a figure on it — the Rain lead vocal at roughly 42 cycles per second against a nominal 50.² Eight cycles below standard is a large move, close to the point where a voice stops reading as a voice recorded in a room; what saves it is that the backing has been pulled the other way by a comparable amount, so the record as a whole sits in a plausible key while every individual element is in the wrong place.
The bass on Rain and on its A-side is the other technical event of these sessions, and it is the one that changed EMI practice rather than just decorating one song. Emerick’s solution to a chronically polite British bass sound was to use a loudspeaker as a microphone — a driver positioned directly in front of the bass speaker, its coil wired as an input rather than an output, so that the moving cone generated the signal instead of reproducing it. The idea came from Ken Townsend, and the result, on Emerick’s account, was the first time the bass sound had been heard properly on a Beatles record.¹ The same passage names the instrument that carried it: the signal was driven through a power bass, a Rickenbacker.¹
What arrives at the end of the record — Lennon’s vocal running in reverse under the fade — is the first backwards content on any released Beatles track.² The technique had been in the building for a week by then; loops and reversed guitar had been tried during the Tomorrow Never Knows sessions of 6 and 7 April, and I’m Only Sleeping would take it further still. But Rain reached the shops first, on 10 June 1966, and so it is the record that introduced the sound of a tape running the wrong way to a mass audience.^1,2
Source conflict — who found the backwards vocal. Two accounts of the discovery sit side by side in the literature and neither has been retired. Lennon’s, given in 1980, has him arriving home from the session with a tape, threading it the wrong way round while stoned, and sitting there listening to what came out.² The competing account credits George Martin with lifting a piece of the vocal, reversing it and placing it while Lennon was out of the building.² Ryan and Kehew set the question aside rather than settle it, and this page does the same: the attribution is flagged, not resolved, because no session document decides it.

Equipment

Studio	EMI Studios, Abbey Road — Studio Three (14 April 1966), Studio Two (16 April 1966)¹
Tape machine	Four-track, with a tape reduction of take 5 into take 6 and vari-speed used in both directions across the song^1,2
Vari-speed	Lead vocal taped at approximately 42 cycles per second against a nominal 50; rhythm track played fast and returned slow^1,2
Bass	Rickenbacker, captured with a loudspeaker used as a microphone in front of the bass cabinet (Ken Townsend’s method)¹
Outboard / effects	Artificial double tracking on the vocals; short tape echo (STEED) on the backing vocals; reversed vocal tape under the fade²
Production team	George Martin (producer), Geoff Emerick (engineer), Phil McDonald (second engineer) — both sessions¹

Recording Timeline

14 April 1966 — Studio Three, 8.30pm–1.30am: takes 1–5 — The rhythm track, cut in five takes on a five-hour evening booking, with George Martin producing, Geoff Emerick engineering and Phil McDonald second.¹ The band played it fast on purpose. Slowing the tape for playback is what gives the finished record its weight, and it is worth being precise about the mechanism: this is not a mix that has been made to sound heavy, it is a performance that has been physically slowed, so the drums lose attack and gain body, the cymbals lengthen, and the guitars acquire a thickness no amplifier setting would have produced on the night. The same session is where the bass was taken with a loudspeaker standing in for a microphone, the technique that gave the Paperback Writer single its unusually forward low end.¹
16 April 1966 — Studio Two, 2.30pm–1.30am: superimposition onto take 5, reduction into take 6, takes 7–8, mono remixes 1–4 — Eleven hours, and the whole of the rest of the record.¹ Overdubs went onto take 5; take 5 was then reduced into take 6 to free tracks; takes 7 and 8 followed; and four mono remixes were made before the night ended, all of them from take 7 rather than from the higher-numbered take 8. That last detail is the one worth holding on to, because it means the master of Rain is not the last thing recorded that night. A reduction and two further takes were made, and the mixing team went back one number. The lead vocal — the part taped with the machine slowed to about 42 cycles — belongs to this session’s overdub work rather than to the 14 April basic track.^1,2
19 May 1966 — Studio One: promotional film clips — The Beatles took over Abbey Road’s largest room to shoot promotional films for Paperback Writer and Rain.¹ The booking belongs in a recording timeline because of what it says about the position the band had reached by mid-1966: a studio built for orchestras, hired for a day so that a song nobody would perform live could be presented to television audiences who would otherwise never hear it. The record could not be toured; it could only be filmed and broadcast.
10 June 1966 — UK single release: Paperback Writer / Rain, Parlophone R 5452 — Twenty-seven weeks had elapsed since the previous single, the longest gap the band had yet left between releases.¹ Rain reached the public eight weeks before Revolver, which is why the first backwards vocal most listeners ever heard arrived on a B-side rather than on the album where the technique was actually developed.^1,2
16 April 1966 — mono mixing: remixes 1–4, all from take 7 — Four mono remixes closed the same eleven-hour session that produced the overdubs, the reduction and takes 7 and 8.¹ They were made from take 7 rather than from the higher-numbered take 8: take numbers at EMI record the order of attempts, not a ranking, and the team mixed the take they wanted rather than the last one made. Which of the four became the master is not on record.

“I got home from the studio… and I was stoned…”
— John Lennon, 1980, on finding the backwards vocal²

Studio Notes

Two vari-speed decisions pulling in opposite directions. Most Beatles records that use vari-speed use it once, on one element, in one direction. Rain uses it twice, on the two largest elements, in opposite directions: the rhythm track recorded fast and replayed slow, the lead vocal recorded slow and replayed fast.^1,2 The consequence is a record in which the band and the singer are not merely in different acoustic spaces but in different tape realities. Nothing in the arrangement produces the song’s slightly seasick quality; the transport does. It is also why the track resists cover versions: a band playing the parts at a single tempo, in a single key, at a single speed, can reproduce the notes and none of the sensation.
Forty-two cycles is a long way down. The varispeed reference table puts the Rain lead vocal at approximately 42 cycles per second.² Against EMI’s nominal 50, that is roughly a sixth slower — nearly three semitones of upward shift on replay, plus everything else a speed change carries with it. The surrounding discussion of the technique is explicit that the extremes did not work: taping vocals at genuine half-speed made them cartoon-like on return, while nudging the machine only slightly left the effect too small to be worth the trouble.² Forty-two sits in the narrow band between the two failures, which is why the number is worth recording rather than rounding to ‘sped up’.
The speed change is not a pitch shift. EMI vari-speed altered the rate of the tape transport itself, so a change of speed moved pitch, tempo, high-frequency response and tape bias behaviour together and inseparably. Playing back a slow-recorded vocal at standard speed does not just raise it; it shortens every consonant, compresses every vibrato cycle and lifts the whole spectrum, which is what makes Lennon’s vocal on this record sound not so much higher as differently made. The brightness is a by-product of the mechanism, not an equalisation decision anyone took at the desk.^1,2
A loudspeaker used as a microphone. The bass on these sessions was captured by placing a loudspeaker directly in front of the bass cabinet and taking the signal from it, a Ken Townsend idea that inverts a driver’s normal function — a large, heavy cone moved by air rather than moving it, generating a signal with far more low-frequency content than a conventional microphone of the period would pass. Emerick’s account is that it produced the first properly heard bass sound on a Beatles record, and that the signal was driven through a Rickenbacker power bass.¹ The technique matters beyond this single: the reason 1966 is where Beatles records suddenly acquire a bottom end is largely this piece of improvisation, and cutting engineers spent the next few years complaining about it.
Backwards tape, printed rather than mixed. The reversed vocal under the fade is the first such content on a released Beatles recording.² It reached the public first, though it was not invented first — loops and reversed parts had been in play at the Tomorrow Never Knows sessions the previous week. What gives the Rain instance its permanence is that it was committed to the multitrack during the 16 April overdub session rather than added at a mix. There is no version of this song from which the backwards vocal can be removed, and every remaster and every future remix inherits it exactly as it was placed on the night.
A disputed discovery, left disputed. Lennon told the story in 1980 as an accident at home: a tape from the day’s session, threaded the wrong way, heard while stoned.² A competing account gives the credit to George Martin, working on the tape in Lennon’s absence.² Ryan and Kehew decline to adjudicate, and the honest position is that no session document settles it — the session sheets record what was recorded, not who had the idea. Readers who have seen the story told confidently either way have not been misled by carelessness; they have been given one of two accounts that the primary literature holds in suspension.
Artificial double tracking on the vocals. Rain appears in the ADT application list, with the treatment on the vocals.² Stacked on a vocal that has already been vari-speeded, ADT does something more interesting than thickening: the two images are separated by a short, wavering delay derived from a second machine’s speed, so a voice already unmoored from its recorded pitch is further unmoored from itself. Much of what listeners describe as the ‘drugged’ quality of the lead is this stack — a speed change and a delayed double, neither of which is audible as an effect on its own.
Short tape echo on the backing vocals. The single is listed with a short pre-delay tape echo — the STEED send, at 0:47 — applied to backing vocals.² Naming a timecode against an effect is unusually specific documentation, and it points at how these records were assembled: not a reverb setting left up for the length of a song, but a send opened at a particular moment for a particular phrase. The harmonies on Rain do not sit in a consistent space, and that is deliberate.
Four mono remixes, from take 7 and not take 8. The 16 April session produced a reduction, two further takes and four mono remixes, and the remixes were made from take 7.¹ Take numbers at EMI record the order of attempts, not a ranking, and a higher number carries no implication of a better performance; the team mixed the take they wanted rather than the last one made. For anyone reading the session sheets as a narrative of steady improvement, this song is a useful corrective.
Everything decisive happened before the mix. The speed changes, the reversed vocal, the loudspeaker bass and the ADT were all committed to tape across the two April sessions. The four mono remixes that followed set relative levels on material whose character had already been fixed^1,2 — which is why this song, unlike most of the catalogue, has almost no interesting mix history until 2022. The record was finished when the tape stopped rolling on 16 April, and everything between then and the Giles Martin remix was a question of transfer rather than of interpretation.

Releases

A short list, because for fifty-six years this song existed in one mix. The 2022 set is where it finally becomes interesting to compare.

1966 UK mono single — Paperback Writer / Rain (10 June 1966, Parlophone R 5452, B-side) — The mix everyone knew for decades, made from take 7 on 16 April 1966. The loudspeaker-captured bass sits further forward than on any earlier Beatles record and the reversed vocal enters under the fade (see Studio Notes). This is the reference version.
1966 US single — Paperback Writer / Rain (Capitol 5651, B-side) — The same 1966 mono master through Capitol’s cutting chain, brighter and more compressed in the way US singles of the period generally are. No Capitol-specific remix.
1978–79 UK — Rarities (Parlophone PSLP 261, later PCM 1001) — The 1966 mono again, gathered onto a compilation for listeners who had never owned the single. Of interest as a pressing, not as a mix.
2009 remasters — The 1966 mono master transferred flat for the remaster programme of 9 September 2009. Nothing is rebalanced: the varispeed, the reversed vocal and the bass are all printed to the master tape and survive any transfer unchanged (see Studio Notes).
2022 new stereo mix — Revolver Special Edition, “Revolver EP” disc (28 October 2022, Giles Martin and Sam Okell) — The first substantially new mix this song has ever had, built from the four-track master with the de-mixing technology developed for the set. The bass and the drums separate, and the reversed vocal is placed rather than simply faded in. The same disc carries the original mono remastered, which makes it the easiest way to hear the two against each other.
2022 — take 5 at both speeds, Revolver Special Edition Super Deluxe (Sessions One) — The one to hear if you want the point of this record. The set releases take 5 twice: once at actual speed, and once slowed for the master tape. Two tracks, one performance, and the whole varispeed decision audible in the gap between them.

Sources

Mark Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions (New York: Harmony Books, 1988), 74–75, 79, 83, 200.
Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew, Recording the Beatles: The Studio Equipment and Techniques Used to Create Their Classic Albums (Houston: Curvebender Publishing, 2006), 286, 292–293, 296, 302–303.

Frequently asked

Who wrote Rain?

Rain is a John Lennon song, credited as always to Lennon–McCartney.

Who sings lead on Rain?

John Lennon, on a vocal taped with the machine slowed to roughly 42 cycles per second and carrying artificial double tracking on the finished record.^1,2

When was Rain recorded?

The rhythm track was taped on 14 April 1966 in Studio Three at EMI Studios, Abbey Road, between 8.30pm and 1.30am. The overdubs, the tape reduction, takes 7 and 8 and all four mono remixes followed on 16 April in Studio Two, 2.30pm to 1.30am.¹

How many takes did Rain require?

Eight. Takes 1–5 were recorded on 14 April 1966; take 5 was reduced into take 6 on 16 April, and takes 7 and 8 followed. Every documented mono remix was made from take 7, not from the higher-numbered take 8.¹

Why does Rain sound slowed down?

Because the rhythm track was played fast and the tape was slowed for playback, while the lead vocal was taped below standard speed and returned fast. The two speed decisions run in opposite directions on the same record, which is the source of its unsettled quality.^1,2

Was Rain the first Beatles song with a backwards vocal?

It is the first released Beatles recording to carry backwards content. The technique had already been tried at the Tomorrow Never Knows sessions the week before, but Rain reached the shops first, on 10 June 1966.^1,2

Who discovered the backwards vocal effect?

The sources disagree and this page does not resolve it. Lennon said in 1980 that he found it at home by threading a session tape the wrong way; a competing account credits George Martin with reversing a piece of the vocal in the studio while Lennon was away.²

Is there a stereo mix of Rain?

Not from 1966. No stereo remix session for Rain appears in the documented session record, and the song was issued in mono on the 1966 single.¹ A new stereo mix, built from the four-track master, was released in 2022 on the Revolver Special Edition — see Releases.

On this page

Story Section status: Outdated

What’s distinctive

Recording

Equipment

Recording Timeline

Studio Notes

Releases

Sources

Frequently asked