“Tomorrow Never Knows”

With much satisfaction I have completed my latest project. For the longest time, I’ve had this idea in my head to remake “Tomorrow Never Knows” by The Beatles album “Revolver”. The song has always been something special to me for many reasons. The original song was recorded using mostly tape loops taken from various orchestral compositions, sound effects, and any other tape The Beatles could get their razor blades on. Since they only had four track technology then, I’ve read accounts of how George Martin had every available person standing in every available space, such as closets, holding tape loops on the ends of pencils and such, so that he could fade them in and out throughout the song. I always thought that it would be fun to recreate the entire song, including all the strange tape loops, on guitar.
This became an even more interesting idea when I started using the Line 6 Variax digital modeling guitar which can emulate a whole studio full of guitars (including electrics, acoustics, banjo, 12-strings, and more), and the Line 6 Pod XT which digitally models amps, cabinets, effects, etc.
Here is the result of my mad scientist experiment (It’s about 4MB). Aside from the vocal, drums and tambourine, everything you hear was done on guitar. Everything. Including the seagulls. And the bass. Everything. Hell, even the vocals got run through my Pod XT for the last verse. I am quite pleased. As is always the case with me, I feel I could do so much more work on it to make it better, but I was anxious to get it out there, and sometimes you just have to designate a stopping point. I’m sure there will be tweaking, as I’m already nitpicking it all to hell, but for the most part I’m fairly happy with it.