Wall of Sound in I Want You | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Slight diversion: Phil Spector created his Wall of Sound by assembling dozens of musicians in the studio. He’d get several bassists, drummers, guitarists and so on, all playing at once, often smothered in echo too.

IWY(SSH) wasn’t done in the same way; as you say, it was multitracked over many months and sessions, though the massed guitars seem to have been added on one day. Here’s the entry for 18 April 1969 from Mark Lewisohn’s Complete Recording Sessions book:

George Harrison , John Lennon , Chris Tomas, Jeff Jarratt and John Kurlander then went into studio two to work on I Want You: overdubbing multi-tracked Lennon/Harrison guitars for the song’s momentous finale onto the 23 February Trident master; then creating a reduction mixdown (called take one) of that master and then overdubbing yet more guitar parts onto that take one; finishing off with a rough stereo remix of the song’s latest incarnation. “John and George went into the far left-hand corner of number two to overdub those guitars,” recalls Jeff Jarratt. “They wanted a massive sound so they kept tracking and tracking, over and over.”

To bulk up the sound they could have used ADT, plus different guitars, changing EQ etc. I’d have thought they’d have used some variation otherwise it would have given a horrible chorus effect, but I don’t know. It’s hard to pick out individual instruments so I suspect they just used two guitars but varied the tone.

As for the white noise, Lewisohn says:

John had used the Moog in conjunction with a white noise generator to produce a swirling, gale-force wind effect for the first three minutes of the song.

The Moog was a modular synth. I won’t try to explain it because I’d just get in a muddle, so here’s Wikipedia:

The Moog modular system consists of a number of various modules mounted in a cabinet. Each module performs a specific signal-generating or -modifying function. These modules offered unprecedented control over creating sounds by allowing a user to modify primary sound waveforms (sine waves, square waves and other waveforms provided by voltage controlled oscillators or VCO) with amplitude modulators (voltage controlled amplifiers or VCA) and spectral modulators (voltage controlled filters (VCF) or fixed filter banks) and other modifiers. Envelope generators provided further control by modulating the attack, decay, sustain and release (ADSR) parameters of the VCAs, VCFs and other modules. The modules are patched together with patch cords with ¼i-inch mono plugs. The patch cords and module parameter knobs could be adjusted in countless ways to create a nearly infinite number of sounds. The final sound was heard (‘triggered’) from the system by pressing a key on an attached keyboard or pressing on the ribbon controller.

According to Wikipedia, the 903 module was used to create white noise on the early Moogs. I assume George Harrison ‘s Moog had one of those. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M…..er#Modules

Fun fact: the white noise was added on the afternoon of 8 August, after the Abbey Road cover photograph was taken. Ringo also added more drums during the same session.