Favorite Instrumental...? (2 Side Questions) | Page 2 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

The Hole Got Fixed said
Great list, I’d struggle to put it better myself! 

Ahhh Girl said 

I love the music bit in Any Time At All from 1:27 to 1:45. What instruments are playing during that section? Piano, drums, ____, ____

  

…bass, and guitars. So simple, yet so effective.

 

I like the instrumental bit immediately after The Fool On The Hill . Neat little section there

  

Well yes; if you read the sleeve notes on ‘A Hard Day’s Night ‘ you’ll see that it suggests that that album was (then in 1964) the first ever Beatles album to include only self-written and self-performed material (i.e. no session musicians, no extra contributions from George Martin, in this case; and no guest performers)  – so yes, just John and George’s guitars, Paul’s bass guitar and Ringo’s drums.  I remember at the time, some very young musicians friends of mine (as I was then) advised that the (electric) guitars being used there were the now legendary Richenbacher model: with its semi-hidden – at the machine heads – second course of stirngs; thus, in fact a twelve-string…. and a Gretsch (that would be John’s rhythm guitar) – althouugh, if you watch the movie, in the closing action of that where they perform all of the numbers on Side One – on ‘And I Love Her ‘, Ringo plays bongos and it looks as though George’s instrumental break melody is played on some kind of semi-acoustic guitar (and I notice he seems to be using a plectrum or pick).

Thanks to both of you also – for breathing life back into this thread as well!!

Any thoughts on ‘Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite’ – the astonishing break I mean? 

As you all know, I’m sure; it was John’s creation of course, but Geroge Martin wanted to get the effect of a fairgound organ (not sure if that effect was what John asked for also;  or else entirely George Martin’s idea?).  Martin tells of how he searched and researched for some old recordings of fairground organs in action; plenty of them about, yes – but problems!  Firstly, these were all recoginsably familiar old popular favourites – not only would not have fitted in with the musicial structure of the whole piece, but also: copyright worries.  Geroge Martin’s ingenious solution, as we know: he got these all on open reel tape, and then cut them all into little bits (with some help from his production room staff) – THREW THEM ALL UP IN THE AIR willly nilly … and then they all set about the painstaking (?) task of splicing these all back together.  I think Martin must have done quite a bit with the playback speeds too, on this ‘long snake’ of spliced bits afterwards, to get those extraordinary swirlling glissando rises and falls effects.  And, in my view, he put a little of his own famed harmonium playing over this – at least on the final reprise of this instrumental passage at the end?  Was it a harmonium – or one of those rather mellow sounding electric pianos (so called) which were poular at the time (cf. the tonal qualty of one of these – in this case played by John (?) on ‘We Can Work It Out ‘, for example…).