Recording
The working title was "It's Not Too Bad", and Geoff Emerick, the sound engineer, remembered it being "just a great, great song, that was apparent from the first time John sang it for all of us, playing an acoustic guitar." Recording began on 24 November 1966, in Abbey Road's Studio Two on a 4-track machine. It took 45 hours to record, spread over five weeks. The song was meant to be on the band's 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, but was released as a single instead.
The band recorded three distinct versions of the song. After Lennon played the song for the other Beatles on his acoustic guitar, the band recorded the first take. Lennon played an Epiphone Casino; McCartney played a Mellotron, a new home instrument purchased by Lennon on August 12, 1965, (with another model hired in after encouragement from Mike Pinder of The Moody Blues); Starr played drums, and Harrison played electric guitar. The first recorded take began with the verse, "Living is easy...", instead of the chorus, "Let me take you down", which starts the released version. The first verse also led directly to the second, with no chorus between. Lennon's vocals were automatically double-tracked from the words "Strawberry Fields Forever" through the end of the last verse. The last verse, "Always, no sometimes...", has three-part harmonies, with McCartney and Harrison singing "dreamy background vocals". This version was soon abandoned and went unreleased until the The Beatles Anthology series in 1996.
Four days later the band reassembled to try a different arrangement. The second version of the song featured McCartney's Mellotron introduction followed by the refrain. They recorded five takes of the basic tracks for this arrangement (two of which were false starts) with the last being chosen as best and subjected to further overdubs. Lennon's final vocal was recorded with the tape running fast so that when played back at normal speed the tonality would be altered, giving his voice a slurred sound. This version was used for the first minute of the released recording.
After recording the second version of the song, Lennon wanted to do something different with it, as Martin remembered: "He'd wanted it as a gentle dreaming song, but he said it had come out too raucous. He asked me if I could write him a new line-up with the strings. So I wrote a new score (with four trumpets and three cellos) and we recorded that, but he didn't like it." Meanwhile, on 8 and 9 December, another basic track was recorded, using a Mellotron, electric guitar, piano, backwards-recorded cymbals, and the swarmandel (or swordmandel), an Indian version of the zither. After reviewing the tapes of Martin's version and the original, Lennon told Martin that he liked both versions, although Martin had to tell Lennon that the orchestral score was at a faster tempo and in a higher key (B major) than the first version (A major). Lennon said, "You can fix it, George", giving Martin and Emerick the difficult task of joining the two takes together. With only a pair of editing scissors, two tape machines, and a vari-speed control, Emerick compensated for the differences in key and speed by increasing the speed of the first version and decreasing the speed of the second. He then spliced the versions together, starting the orchestral score in the middle of the second chorus. (Since the first version did not include a chorus after the first verse, he also spliced in the first seven words of the chorus from elsewhere in the first version.) The pitch-shifting in joining the versions gave Lennon's lead vocal a slightly other-worldly "swimming" quality.
Some vocalising by Lennon is faintly audible at the end of the song, picked up as leakage onto one of the drum microphones (close listening shows Lennon making other comments to Ringo). In the "Paul is Dead" hoax these were taken to be Lennon saying "I buried Paul." In 1974, McCartney said, "That wasn't 'I buried Paul' at all—that was John saying 'cranberry sauce'. It was the end of Strawberry Fields. That's John's humour. John would say something totally out of sync, like cranberry sauce. If you don't realise that John's apt to say cranberry sauce when he feels like it, then you start to hear a funny little word there, and you think, 'Aha!'".
Shortly before his death in 1980, Lennon expressed dissatisfaction with the final version of the song, saying it was "badly recorded" and going so far as to accuse McCartney of subconsciously sabotaging the recording.
Read more about this topic: Strawberry Fields Forever
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I didn’t have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial recording room. Weary, I would beg for a break, an intermission, time enough, let’s say, to go to the toilet or take a breath of fresh air on the balcony. Nothing doing!”
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