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Volume 3
Hi Lisa, Hi Mona,
I feel like this is a confession, but it’s actually a story of an amazing MLT discovery. As we were watching the marathon VLOG I realized I had not heard your cover of White Room. It is awesome!
So I did a little clickety-click search and discovered I had totally disregarded Volume 3. How could this be? I have been here for over a year now. What’s this? Best Years, Glass Onion, Yesterday…? Where have I been? Immersed in everything else MLT. So I immediately downloaded it and turned up the volume.
Hey, according to Jung, Glass Onion has a backwards message. I have missed something very kool. Jung advised that this had been covered before, so I purposely did not look it up in the forum until I heard it myself.
I found a way to reverse the Glass Onion and heard those eerie whispers. Too kool for sure. Now when I listen to Best Years and you sing,”If I knew how to whisper, I’d whisper for you,” my ears will be waiting for’”Stay Groovy, stay groovy….” That is awesome!
Wow, looking back in the forum, it looks like everyone had fun with your mystery. Well done!
After that long story I will get to my question. Have you ever done any other backwards tracking? It sounds like you did on Once Upon A Time.
Some of those soft backing guitar riffs sound like they are recorded backwards. The lick at about 1:07, after “a new age of Aquarius has begun” sounds like it. And I love how these riffs swirl around from left to right. Very psychedelic.
So, backwards guitars or some other effect?
JP
I feel like I have a new MonaLisa Twins album. If anyone is looking for me, I will be listening to Volume 3 at volume eleven.
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19 Replies
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Hi JP! Your story made us laugh, we’re happy we’ve released a brand new album just for you. Vol 3 came out at the same time as Vol 2 (it was a double release) so maybe there’s even some songs on Vol 2 that you have missed! 😉
Yes, you are right in guessing that we used some backward guitars for “Once Upon A Time. It was an entertaining process as it is really hard to predict how a certain melody or lick is going to come out once you reverse it. Lots of trial and error and recording a bunch of guitar lines and then picking the best ones.
The only other time we have used a “backwards” effect was in our song “Nothing Is In Vain” off our debut album. If you listen to the end of it you will hear a backwards swoosh sound that cuts off really abruptly. That’s actually a cymbal being played backwards 🙂
All the best and yvoorg yats !
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I love that ending with the self-repairing light ????! Now I know how you got that yvoorg sound to go with it! Great question, JP, and welcome to volume 3!
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I read how the Beatles got that backwards guitar solo on I’m Only Sleeping. First George Harrison played the notes as normal in the order that was wanted. This was then played backwards, and he copied the results, now of course playing the notes in reverse order. This second recording was then played backwards. This produced the notes as originally recorded, but sounding backwards! (Still with me?!) Talk about being inventive, and going to a lot of work to get the desired results!
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Wow, thanks Melvin. I have not heard about that before. It’s crazy to think of all the manual labor that went into creating that effect. Nowadays it’s clickety-click. Back in the eighties I knew a guy with a nice reel to reel. We could simply switch the reels to the opposite spindles and change it to the opposite channel to hear a recording backwards. That was how we were able to hear the backward message on Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
Thanks for that little tidbit. I love hearing about how bands were able to create some kool effects long before the digital world.
JP
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Hi JohnnyPee,
As Lisa says above, just recording a random guitar line and reversing it can produce pretty random results, which do not necessarily fit a piece of music very well. So, with the limited technology available in 1966, the Beatles had to do what they did to get a satisfactory result. skrow tI!
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JP, I was able to finally hear the backwards message in Glass Onion thanks to you! I just heard about what the message was but did not have a way to play it backwards until now.
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Ok so now I am going to see what the backward message is on Glass Onion, so please explain to me how to do this? This is so cool and fun everyone!!
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Yes, please tell us how to listen to it backwards on Android/Ipad phones/tablets…I’m now curious about the message….Thankyou ????
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To play a track in reverse, I would use Guitarband on my Apple Mac. You can drop a track into this and select reverse playback. Not sure how you would do it in any other device, but I expect there would be apps which can do this.
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Thanks Melvin, I have an Android so I will give it a shot and let you all know. Cool
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Tangentially related, there’s a YouTube channel that specializes in Beatles songs played backwards:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5FfKJQQbfDTVHL2JLmy-iw/videos
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David, that is pretty cool. Listened to Hey Jude backwards and the na na na na, yeah, yeah, hey, hey sounded the same. Made me wonder if it would be possible to write a song that sounds the same played forwards or backwards?
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Neat idea, Jung! I’m sure you could write a palindromic tune, although it might end up sounding either rather boring if simple, or a little awkward if more complex. And if the instruments were acoustic there’d be the issue of the notes getting louder and cutting off suddenly, instead of starting suddenly and getting quieter.
The lyrics would be a bigger problem. I took a phonetics/phonology class in college, largely motivated by the desire to be able to transcribe speech backwards and see if there was anything to the claims of “backward masking” in music.
The main issue is something known as regressive assimilation, which is the tendency (in English, at least) for a sound to be influenced by the sound that immediately follows it. For example, the a in “cat” sounds normal, but the sound of the a in “can” is nasalized to match the n. Playing it backwards, it would kind of sound like “nac”, but you’d have a nasalized a followed by a non-nasal c, which wouldn’t sound quite right.
There’s also a more dramatic factor called aspiration. Any p, t, or k sound at the beginning of a syllable is followed by a little puff of air, to make it clearly distinguishable from b, d, and g respectively. So “Paul” played backwards would sound like “Lauhhhp”, which again doesn’t match the pattern of normal English.
I found these sorts of things to be really fascinating when I took the class, and I still love thinking about it. Maybe you could make palindromic lyrics work, but you’d really have to tiptoe around the sound sequencing.
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Hi David. That Phonetic/phonology course sounds quite fascinating. Palindromic tune, never heard of it before but sounds interesting and perhaps like something Bach might have done with all the symmetry he puts in his music. I can see the challenges creating music that sounds the same forwards and backwards with lyrics, regressive assimilation, and aspiration factors you mentioned. But if one could do it and make it work, it would be artistic I think.
Visually I see it like a mirror ambigram like these, except done in sound and music. I am not sure how musically appealing it might be, but I have a feeling it could be good. In the Beatles “Because” , the beginning part is a somewhat reversed Beethoven Moonlight Sonata which sounds good in Because. I listened to Because backwards on that youtube link, and the instrumental part at the end kind of resembles Moonlight Sonata done very sloppy on an organ.
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I found an example of palindromic music (without lyrics) on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=614EnGKBtv0
Yeah, I took that course to fulfill a general education requirement, but it turned out to be my favorite class ever. I had no idea that there is actual science behind the way we speak: rules of how we combine sounds together that are completely unconscious and that vary from language to language. In fact, when someone has an accent, it’s often them using the phonetic rules of their language on your language.
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Here’s another one, this time with lyrics, but it’s palindromic only in spelling and not in pronunciation:
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