The Beatles "Revolver"

Revolver is a masterpiece, a step into what you can do with music with some ingenuity. It shows that when you want to change, you can. Before Revolver, The Beatles were doing your typical songs, mostly about teen love. After, The Beatles had released an album that changed the course of music in history. They turned from a stereotypical image of playing love songs to branching out and singing and doing things that were kind of odd for that time period. The Beatles took a three month break before recording Revolver, and during that time The Beatles had an experience with acid, and it heavily influenced Revolver, making it "one of the very first psychedelic LPs.” For Revolver, The Beatles used the studio to create ADT, or Automatic Double Tracking. ADT is used to create two sonic images at once, overlapping them, but altering each image’s details to create new acoustical depth. Along with ADT, Revolver was one of the first albums to use compression on the drums, making them seem “right up in your face.” This technique would soon be used from then on to make the drums heard more clearly and effectively. The use of the revolving speaker in “Tomorrow Never Knows,” is also a good example what you can do with the right mindset. The speakers create a vocal track that seems “spacy,” and more like what you would experience if you were only LSD. The use of other people to play instruments with them is a first for them, since it was usually The Beatles and their producer playing most of the time. The String track in “Eleanor Rigby” provided an excellent string pad for the song, serving as both a string pad and a percussion section. While the sitar in “Tomorrow Never Knows” adds to the overall feel of the song being “out of this world.”

No matter how you look at it, Revolver changed the way music was produced. It changed the way the lyrics spoke. It showed that anything can influence you,and you can use that influence to make your music better. Finally, it showed that you could break away from the normal and make something good that will affect the rest of the world. It shows that when you are doing something well, you can change your ways and make it better.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolver_(album)
http://www.prx.org/pieces/15368-everything-was-right-the-beatles-revolver