Tomorrow Never Knows

Story Section status: Outdated

Recording

Equipment

Recording Timeline

• 6 April 1966 — Studio Three, 8.00pm–1.15am: takes 1–3 of Mark I — The first session of the Revolver project, and the first song attempted.¹ The order matters: a band returning from a break did not ease in with something familiar, it opened with the most radical thing it had. Three takes were recorded and take 3 became the master. The Leslie-routed vocal belongs to this night, arrived at after the alternative proposal — swinging the singer round a microphone on a rope — was set aside in favour of routing the signal through a rotating speaker instead of rotating the singer.¹ The session also sits in the middle of the period in which artificial double tracking, invented at Abbey Road in response to this band’s vague requests, had become standard equipment.¹
• 7 April 1966 — Studio Three, 2.30–7.15pm: superimposition onto take 3 — The loops session. The entire afternoon went on overlaying loop material onto take 3, with five tape machines running at once and their reels kept in tension by pencils and by hands along the corridors while the control room mixed the returns live.¹ Nothing about this is reproducible. The loop bed exists in exactly one performance, captured once, and no session document could restore the balance because the balance was made on faders in real time by people who could not hear what the others were doing. Five hours of a single afternoon produced the thirty seconds that changed what a pop record could contain.
• 22 April 1966 — Studio Two: further superimposition onto take 3 — A second Lennon vocal, again routed through a Leslie speaker.¹ That the treatment was repeated rather than replaced is worth noting: the Leslie was not a one-night experiment that happened to survive to the master, it was the settled sound of the song, reached for again more than two weeks later when the vocal was revisited.
• Late April 1966 — mono mixing: remixes 1–9, all from take 3 — Nine mono remixes, every one from the take recorded on the first night.¹ Nine passes on a three-minute song is a deep mono session by the standards of the period, and it reflects the mixing problem this record presented: a bed of loops already committed to tape, a vocal with a rotating-speaker signature that behaves differently at every level setting, and a drone that has to sit under both without being buried. None of the nine became the released mono — that was made on 6 June (below).
• June 1966 — the released mixes — The mono that reached the album was made on 6 June 1966 and the stereo on 22 June, more than two weeks later.³ This supersedes the earlier April mono pass: the nine mono remixes from take 3 logged in the session paperwork were not the end of the mixing, and a mono remix numbered 11 exists and has since been released. Two distinct 1966 monos are documented, separable by matrix number on early UK pressings.³

Studio Notes

• The Leslie cabinet on a human voice. A Leslie is a speaker enclosure containing a rotating horn, designed so that a Hammond organ would acquire the moving air and shifting phase of a pipe instrument. Routing a vocal through one puts the singer inside that mechanism: the voice acquires a cyclical pitch wobble and a swept amplitude that no outboard effect of 1966 could imitate, because the modulation is physically produced by a spinning horn in a wooden box.^1,2 The reason it sounds like distance rather than like an effect is that the room the cabinet stands in is being recorded along with it — the treatment is partly an acoustic event, not purely an electrical one.
• Rotating the speaker instead of the singer. The idea that produced the Leslie routing began as a proposal to hang Lennon from a rope and swing him around a microphone, which would have produced a genuine Doppler shift by moving the source.¹ The solution adopted achieves the same physics by moving a horn instead of a man, and the anecdote is more instructive than it is comic: it shows the request arriving as a description of a sensation rather than of a device, which is exactly the pattern that produced ADT as well.
• Five machines and no recall. The loop session ran five tape machines simultaneously in rooms across Abbey Road, with reels held in tension by pencils and by staff, feeding the control room where the returns were ridden live on faders.¹ Every element of that arrangement is a workaround: machines were fixed installations, so the loops went to the machines rather than the machines to a room; a loop long enough to be musically useful is longer than a tape path, so it needed physical tensioning; and the desk had no automation, so the balance existed only while hands were on the faders. What was captured is one performance of a system that was dismantled the moment it finished.
• The seagull is a guitar. The most-discussed sound on the record — the piercing gull-like cry that arrives over the drone — is a distorted guitar.¹ This is the single most useful corrective to the mythology around the song. Listeners reach for exotic explanations because the sound is unfamiliar, but the loops were made from ordinary instruments processed until their origin stopped being legible. The strangeness is entirely in the treatment, and treatment is documented, repeatable and teachable in a way that mystery is not.
• Backwards tape as structure rather than ornament. The main guitar solo runs backwards, as does much of the loop material.² Reversal does something specific to a note that no other process does: it removes the attack and puts it at the end, so a plucked string becomes a swell that arrives at its own beginning. On a record with one chord and no harmonic motion, that inversion of envelope is doing structural work — it supplies the sense of arrival and departure that a chord change would ordinarily provide.
• One chord, and what that costs. The song sits on a drone, and a drone removes every conventional means of creating movement. There is no cadence to resolve to, no modulation to lift the last verse, no harmonic rhythm to mark the form. Everything that makes the record feel as though it is going somewhere has to be supplied by timbre, density and the entry and exit of loops — which is why the loop session was where the song was actually composed, and why the arrangement work happened at a mixing desk rather than on paper or with instruments in hand.¹
• Three takes, and nothing after. Takes 1 to 3 were recorded on 6 April and take 3 carried the entire subsequent history of the record.¹ A band that would later spend dozens of takes on far simpler songs settled this one in three, because the basic track is not where the difficulty lay. The performance needed to be a stable bed; the work was all in what went on top. Take numbers measure the difficulty of the thing being attempted, not the ambition of the song.
• A sitar entering at take three. The sitar came in at take three.¹ Placed against the song’s drone, the instrument is doing something more integrated than the decorative Indian colour it is often taken for: a sitar has sympathetic strings that ring in fixed relation to a tonic, so an instrument built around a drone is being used on a song built around a drone. It reinforces the harmonic premise rather than decorating it.
• Artificial double tracking as the background condition. ADT was devised at Abbey Road in response to this band’s frequently vague requests for a doubled vocal without the labour of singing it twice, and by these sessions it was ordinary equipment.¹ Its significance for this song is indirect but real: once a vocal can be thickened without a second performance, a vocal can also be routed, delayed and treated without anyone worrying about whether it will still sound like a person. The technical permission that ADT established is what makes a Leslie-routed lead vocal a reasonable suggestion rather than a wild one.
• The engineering was the composition. Almost everything a listener identifies as this song — the loop bed, the Leslie vocal, the reversed solo — was produced by decisions taken about signal paths and tape transports rather than about notes.^1,2 That is the reason the record is treated as a hinge in the band’s history, and the reason it is the natural first entry in any account of what the studio became for them: it is the point at which the equipment stops serving the song and starts being it.
• Nine remixes in the books, eleven on the tape. The session paperwork logs mono remixes 1–9 from take 3, which for years was taken as the extent of the mono mixing.¹ The released mono was in fact made in June, and a mono mix numbered 11 survives and has been issued.³ The gap is a reminder of what session sheets are: a clerical record of booked studio time, not a complete account of every pass made at a desk. Where the paperwork and the tapes disagree, the tapes are the primary evidence.

Releases

Two mono variants, a late stereo, and a 2022 remix that finally pulled the loop bed apart. Worth hearing in that order.

• 1966 UK mono LP — Revolver (Parlophone PMC 7009, side B track 7) — The attended mix, made on 6 June 1966. The loop bed is dense and centred and the Leslie-routed vocal sits inside it rather than in front of it — the closest thing to what the control room heard on 7 April (see Studio Notes).
• 1966 UK mono LP, first-pressing variant (Parlophone PMC 7009, matrix XEX 606-1) — A second mono of the same date exists, distinguished by its matrix number. Early pressings carrying XEX 606-1 are the collectable ones for this song, and the difference is a mix difference rather than a cutting difference.
• 1966 UK stereo LP — Revolver (Parlophone PCS 7009, side B track 7) — Mixed on 22 June 1966, more than two weeks after the mono. The loops spread across the field and become individually traceable, which is either the attraction or the problem depending on what you want from the record: separation reveals the construction and dilutes the wall.
• 1966 US LP — Revolver (Capitol T 2576 mono / ST 2576 stereo) — The same 1966 masters through Capitol’s chain. Note that the US Revolver is three tracks shorter than the UK album, so this song arrives in a different running order.
• 1996 — take 1, Anthology 2 (Apple CDP 8 34448 2) — A 1995 stereo mix of an early take, released as an outtake. The drone and the drum figure are there; almost none of the loop bed is. It is the clearest available demonstration that the loops, not the song, are what took the work.
• 2009 remaster — Revolver (Parlophone 99458 2, 9 September 2009) — Flat transfer of the 1966 masters, stereo and mono. Nothing rebalanced; the loop bed cannot be, because it was mixed live to the multitrack (see Studio Notes).
• 2022 new stereo and Dolby Atmos — Revolver Special Edition (28 October 2022, Giles Martin and Sam Okell) — The first mix able to do anything the 1966 team could not. Machine-learning de-mixing developed at WingNut Films separated the four-track into components, so the loops, the drums and the vocal can be placed independently for the first time. The Atmos mix puts the loops around the listener rather than across a stereo pair — arguably closer to the intention of the 7 April session than either 1966 mix managed.
• 2022 — the mono the paperwork does not have, Revolver Special Edition Super Deluxe (Sessions One) — A mono mix numbered RM 11, released alongside take 1. A useful corrective to the session paperwork, which logs nine mono remixes: the mixing of this song ran further than the numbered sequence in the books suggests.