Studio Two, EMI Studios, Abbey Road
Producer: George Martin
Engineer: Geoff Emerick
Following the day of rehearsals on 28 February 1967, The Beatles began recording ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ during this session.
First of all, however, a final overdub was added to ‘A Day In The Life’. This was an extra piano part which was never used; the mono and stereo mixes had already been made, and its purpose remains unclear. The brief overdub appeared during the “He blew his mind out in a car” verse.
‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ was recorded in seven takes. Track one had George Harrison’s acoustic guitar and occasional piano from George Martin; track two had Paul McCartney on a Lowrey organ, including the distinctive introduction; track three had Ringo Starr’s drums; and the final track had John Lennon playing maracas and singing a guide vocal.
George Martin’s piano had been abandoned by the time The Beatles came to record take seven, the best attempt. Track four was erased and replaced with a tamboura drone towards the end of the session.
A reduction mix – known as take eight – was made to free up more space for further overdubs. This was done with the tape machine running at 49 cycles per second rather than the usual 50, making it sound slightly faster upon playback. The session finished at 2.15am on the morning of 2 March 1967.
A composite of takes 6, 7 and vocal overdubs recorded during the next session was released in 1996 on the Anthology 2 album.
Great to know they were doing something this great, on the day that would become my birthday, a mere four years later.
Piano was not scraped, it’s on the final mix, and even on the Rock Band multitracks (it plays on the chorus and it does that crashing chord before every bridge)
And it’s still locked in a track with the acoustic guitar 🙂
I think the “unused overdub” from this day is at the very intro of the song. It is evident in a bootleg of the four individual tracks of the take 6 four-track tape that’s available at (a wonderful Beatles Bootleg site that I will not name so it doesn’t get taken down).
Sources say it was played by Paul, and it sounds to me like it was played on one of Abbey Road’s “prepared” pianos — either the “Mrs. Mills” piano, or one of the Challen “Jangle Boxes” — both instruments had treatments that made them sound similar to tack pianos.
The part was recorded to track 4 (the sole track on Take 6 that contained orchestra, which was empty at the intro), and it doubled the acoustic guitar part quite closely. It sounds quite unnecessary and somewhat jarring in my opinion, and I think they were quite right to not bother doing the mixes again to include it. Paul stumbles in the rhythm at one point, so I’m guessing they gave up on the idea early in the attempt.
These same bootleg tracks are quite revealing in how the other piano figures during the pre-bridge verses were doubled very effectively. Apparently they were performed at the same time as one of Lennon’s vocals onto the same track of take 4, way back on the first day of work for the song (Jan. 19)