8 Things The Beatles Pioneered

this video is sponsored by solo contuti the free app that lets musicians play together over the internet have you ever heard someone say the beatles are overrated i know as a beatles fan it's a pretty shocking statement but the thing is the beatles are very highly rated in the same way that william shakespeare is presented as the greatest playwright of all time the idea that the beatles are the greatest band of all time is often presented as a fact not an opinion this is a very high standard for the band to meet and to a newcomer to the beatles music i can understand why they could feel like the band are at least a little bit overrated however to truly understand the significance of the beatles to understand why they are time and time again touted as the greatest band of all time you actually have to do more than just listen to their music their music is amazing of course it's groundbreaking but what is so special about the beatles is that they were pioneering many things in the music industry today which are ubiquitous which we just take for granted were first done by the beatles so today we're going to talk about eight innovations eight things that the beatles did for the first time today the idea of a rock band filling out a large sports stadium for a concert is nothing unusual but the first band to ever do this to perform in a massive sports stadium rather than a conventional theater or club was the beatles in 1965 the beatles set out on a north american tour of sports venues and stadiums with the most famous date being the opening night at shear stadium the share stadium concert was the first event of its type the first stadium rock concert and at the time it set records for the highest grossing concert of all time and the largest attendance of all time with 55 000 people in the audience of course being the first stadium rock concert ever the amplification equipment capable of filling a space like that didn't really exist yet as george harrison explains in this clip the amp company vox did build some special super powerful amplifiers for the event but they still weren't powerful enough vox made a special big amplifiers for that tour and they were like 100 watts we went up from the 30 watt amp to the 100 watt amp and it just obviously you know wasn't enough the stadium also had an in-house pa system which they usually used for making announcements during baseball games but as paul explains in this clip the pa was not built for music what the audience actually heard at shear stadium besides the thousands of people screaming probably wasn't that good it was the baseball stadium's pa we were just working off the normal columns which are at ladies and gentlemen my next player is you know and our stuff is coming out there so it kind of sounded too good shane stadium made amplification companies realize that they needed to up their game when it came to these events they needed to produce bigger and more powerful systems which meant that by the time that bands like led zeppelin were playing in stadiums people could actually hear what they were playing and it wasn't just live music and stadiums that the beta was pioneered today broadcasting a live television show across the world isn't anything unusual but until the beatles it had never been done before on the 25th of june 1967 the beta was performed on the first ever international satellite television show called our world and they performed a song that they had prepared specially for the event all you need is love [Music] [Applause] and this wasn't some pre-recording that they all mimed along to as george martin explains in this clip although there were some pre-recorded elements it was ultimately a live performance the first of its kind and we had prepared a track a basic track for the recording for the television show but we were going to do a lot live and there was an orchestra that was live and the singing was live and a certain audience and so on the man upstairs pointed his finger and that's it we did it one take 600 million people the first time ever but you know now it's uh it's like a standard thing people can do you know like michael jackson did 200 billion people and you know uh guns and roses have done that but then this was the first you know that was also exciting because we were doing a lot of firsts and we were big enough to command that you know and it was for love was for love and bloody peace again you know it was fabulous time so in the 1960s the beatles set the standard for what live music would look like for decades to come but the beatles greatest innovations didn't happen on the stage they happened in the studio many techniques and ideas that are now used every day when recording music were first pioneered by the beatles an idea in music production that is really quite typical now is loops building songs from layers of short loops is a common almost now mundane thing to do particularly in electronic and dance music in the 1960s the idea of using loops of tape to create music had been explored by experimental classical composers but it was the beatles who brought it to the mainstream of pop and rock music for their 1966 track tomorrow never knows paul experimented with tape loops literal loops of tape which featured a whole range of sounds including a recording of mccartney laughing sped up to resemble the sound of a seagull [Applause] an orchestral chord of b flat major a melotron playing a flute setting [Music] another melotron playing a string sound and a sitar playing a scale but sped up [Music] as paul explains in this clip these different loops fade in and out during the track to create the song's unique atmosphere i had two brunel machines and i used to be able to create tape loops with them and so i brought a little plastic bag with about 20 tape loops in and we uh we got machines from all the other studios and with pencils and the aids of glasses and stuff got all these loops to run i think we i'm not sure we might have 12 recording machines we normally only needed one to make a run we're all running with these loops all fed through the desk and then you just brought they were on it's actually like how a lot of guys mix now a lot of the dance people mix like that get it all running eternally and then pick into it and out of it so that's how we did the solo in tomorrow never knows [Applause] guitar feedback used as an intentional musical element is an almost cliche element of rock music now but until the beatles most audiences thought of the sound of feedback as nothing more than an unintended ear piercing noise that changed though with the beatles 1964 track i feel fine which opens with a guitar feeding back [Music] as paul explains in this clip when john inadvertently left his guitar lent up against his amp he decided that he should use the resulting feedback as a musical effect and john leaned his against the empire yeah and then we were just going to go on and talk about the song and suddenly the the a string started feeding back and forth we'll just what can we can you do that you know george where he was like look at it on the front or something so you know because we used to do it on stage then live so john figured out you know you just have to hit the a and i get it by the way buzzing by the amp so that was the start of all that andrew jimi hendrix it probably was actually you know and i think it was the first time was it not that feedback was used on a record he loved things like that he loved the weird kind of effects and it was his idea it was great and although feedback had been used as a deliberate musical effect by some blues guitarists prior to this the beatles i feel fine was the first commercial mainstream song to use this effect introducing the idea to a whole generation of guitarists yet another studio technique that the beatles pioneered was back masking which is when you play clips in reverse in 1966 during the recording session for revolver john started experimenting with reversing the tape player reversed guitar solos and reversed vocal lines have been utilized in countless songs over the last half century but it all started with the beatles the beatles 1966 track reign is the first use of a backmaster voice on a pop or rock song [Music] and if you've ever wondered what jon is actually saying in reverse here well it's just a clip from earlier in the song played backwards [Applause] [Music] a technique that was literally invented for the beatles by the abbey road studio technicians is adt artificial double tracking also known as automatic double tracking normal double tracking is when for example you record two takes of a vocal and play them both back together this has the effect of thickening the sound as these small variations between the two takes creates a wider fuller sound that you wouldn't achieve by just making a perfect copy of the first take double tracking can be quite a tedious process though as the singer has to match the particular timing and phrasing of the original take for the desired effect to work john lennon amongst others had become tired of spending time double tracking his vocals so studio engineer ken townsend developed a technique for creating automatic double tracks as townsend explains in this clip he routed the signal in such a way that a second version of the vocal take would arrive on the tape a split second after the original meaning you wound up with two versions of the same vocal take but slightly out of time with each other creating a similar effect to the conventional double tracking i've got two signals one is the original signal and then the same original signal but delayed by um about 100 milliseconds i think if it's um one and a half inches out of 15 inches per second and then that delay and i can put the two together and see what it sounds like we played it and john lennon was most impressed actually um he fell in love with it straight away we can hear the effect here on i'm only sleeping the first line that john sings which is lift my head it's just a normal dry vocal take but the next line i'm still yawning has been passed through adt giving it a thicker sound i'm still young for decades now it's been standard marketing procedure that when a band releases a single they make a music video to accompany it well that too started with the beatles by the mid-60s every major music television show around the world wanted to book the beatles to perform and the beatles just couldn't make all of these appearances they didn't have enough time so the solution they came up with is that they would film dedicated promotional videos for some of their songs they would film music videos and then they could just send that video to be played instead of appearing themselves as ringo explains in this clip sending a music video was far easier than performing live this is a great idea we can send the movies you can turn the you know the film out there not only we even thought of calling them like videos we felt this is a great ruse let's do these and we can stay home an innovation that george harrison brought about was the use of indian instrumentation in western pop music in the mid-60s george harrison developed an interest in indian classical music he purchased a sitar from a shop in london and soon put the instrument to work on the track norwegian wood norwegian wood was the first western pop record to feature the sitar and george soon delved deeper into indian classical music creating some tracks that really introduced indian music to a western audience for the first time in the late 60s and 70s fusing indian music with western pop music became quite popular with bands like the rolling stones steely dan the mummers and puppers and the moody blues all using the sitar in their music but this all began with george harrison and norwegian wood something that the beatles are well known for is their album covers before the beatles album covers almost always simply consisted of a portrait of the band or some sort of stock photograph and although the beatles early albums started out by following this trend they began becoming more extravagant with their covers culminating in sgt pepper's legendary cover art and although album art would soon go on to become even more symbolic and expressive the beatles ultimately started this idea that an album cover can actually be a thematic extension of the music itself sgt pepper was also the first album to come packaged with all of the song's lyrics inside which is now an industry standard so that's eight industry defining things that the beatles pioneered within their relatively short career but the last thing i want to tell you about is the beatles sheer commercial success because although we all know that the beatles dominated the pop charts the feats that the beatles achieved in the pop charts had never been achieved before and largely these feats have not been matched even to this day they were the first artists to have seven consecutive number ones in the uk they were the first and only artists to have more than four us number ones in any given year as you can imagine they have the most u.s billboard number one singles of any artist ever but perhaps their most amazing chart achievement was on april 4th 1964. on this date the beatles occupied the entire u.s top five a feat which as you can imagine has not been replicated since the thing about the beatles is not only in the span of about seven years did they record some of the most interesting and original music ever recorded but they also changed forever the way that pop music is recorded the way it's consumed the way it sounds and perhaps most importantly the way it's perceived by society they showed that pop music could be more than a throwaway thing designed to squeeze money out of teenagers and it's by the beatles standards that we still make and measure pop and rock music to this day do you think the beatles are out of style never they'll never go out of style how long do you think the beetle's going to last well i wish they'd last forever they could bring happiest to everybody don't you think this whole beetle craze is sort of silly and strictly for girls no not really i think they're very talented musicians and talented songwriters an excellent showman you like them yeah how long do you think that can last as long as they keep playing they'll last and thank you to solo contuti for sponsoring this video solo cantuti is a free app that allows you to make music with other musicians over the internet with minimum latency typical video conferencing services like zoom have far too much audio lag to allow for music making but solo cantuti allows up to six different musicians to come together over the internet and make music together and as i said for a limited time it's absolutely free of charge so do go try it out if you're interested and as always a massive massive thanks goes to everyone who supports me on patreon including the names you see on screen right now and andrei science diagram andy deacon andrew andrew brown andrew sussman austin barrett austin russell bob mckinstry whitney parker cameron alvila colin aiken chris cabal christopher ryan david rivers donald howard dr darren wicks elena schwarchenko eugene leroy fd hodor greg kopowski iolamo latona hamish brocklebank hernick kutcher hugo miller ivan pang jake fisher james chao j.a hokensberger john dye josh sanderlin justin vigor lee lawrenson mark ziegenhagen max o'keefe melody composer squared melanie shona michael vivian nancy gillard nathan lawrence nathaniel park paul middleton paul muller hazel peter dunphy richard bride roger clay john kennedy steve daly stephen lazzaro tim beaker homer aharoni trisha adams tim payne victor levy bidder flowers vladimir kodakov balti and weyland fairbanks [Music] you

Channel: David Bennett Piano

Views: 246,060

Rating: 4.9588203 out of 5

Keywords: the best band ever, john, paul, george, interview, stadium rock, the first ever, reverse, backmasking, adt, guitar feedback, music videos

Id: fy9a_ClKxqM

Length: 17min 55sec (1075 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 11 2021