Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Tomorrow Never Knows (Instrumentation (Most direct influence of Indian…
Tomorrow Never Knows
Instrumentation
-
Drum track continues unchanged throughout and is more prominent than in the other songs. Drum sound is altered using studio techniques, including 'reverse' cymbals.
Electric guitar is distorted using tape techniques, including being played in reverse.
George Martin used 16 short tapes of music and sound effects at various points in the song as tape loops. Manipulated tape techniques include speeding up and reversing, as well as superimposing different recordings on top of each other. The technique was called musique concrète and first introduced by French composer Schaeffer.
Tape effects include natural sounds such as laughing - the tape of laughing is played at double speed to produce the 'seagull' sound.
The vocal style includes the then new technique of artificial double tracking. Lennon's voice was first recorded and then added to the mix slightly later, as well as being altered in other ways, including speed and frequency. Lennon wanted to sound like 100 Tibetan monks chanting. An artificial way of producing something like the effect he wanted was to the Leslie cabinet to alter the vocal sounds in the studio.
Structure/Tonality
Strophic. Use of instrumental intro, an instrumental between verse 3 & 4 and outro.
-
Harmony
Use of continuous chords instead of a chord sequence was a new idea at the time. An implied C chord continues throughout most of the music.
-
-
-
Lyrics derived from a book - 'The Psychadelic Experience'. Lennon wrote the song under the influence of hallucinatory drug, LSD. 'Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream' and other lyrics refer to the effect of the drug.