Automatic Double Tracking - Use By The Beatles

Use By The Beatles

The Beatles were thrilled by Townsend's technique and used it throughout the Revolver album, and on many of their subsequent recordings. It has been incorrectly claimed that the first use of ADT was on the first half of Lennon’s vocal track on "Tomorrow Never Knows", but in fact this vocal track features manual double tracking. However most of the doubletracked vocals heard on the rest of the album were created using ADT, while the group also used the technique on a number of the instrumental parts to colour the sounds – there is in fact more use of ADT on the mono version of the album than on the more widely known stereo version, with the lead guitar on "Taxman" and the backwards guitar on "I'm Only Sleeping" treated with the effect. ADT could not only be used to create a single double-tracked sound image; but when used on a stereo mix, the effect could be used to "split" the vocal between the two stereo channels, creating the impression of two different vocal parts on either side of the stereo picture. This technique was used on the stereo mixes of "I'm Only Sleeping", "Love You To", "And Your Bird Can Sing", and "Doctor Robert" (on "Here, There and Everywhere", the similar effect heard is actually two different vocals manually double-tracked and panned; on "Eleanor Rigby", the effect is obtained by a combination of manual double-tracking and ADT). This technique could also be applied to instrumental parts as well: on "Love You To", the same use of ADT was applied to the acoustic guitar track, giving the impression of multiple guitars panned left and right.