The 10 strangest sound effects in popular songs
Most musicians have an innate way to create the best musical passages out of the air. Even though an artist like Paul McCartney might not be formally trained to write magnificent concertos, his way with melody has been burrowing into music fans’ hearts for decades. Then again, musicians like The Beatles have found music outside of their usual instruments.
From all walks of life, musicians have gotten the right mood for a song by using different objects to create their signature sound. While none of the instruments may have been made to be used on a song, their inclusion on some of the greatest tracks of all time has led to millions of musicians trying to recreate that kind of musical pandemonium.
Although some lavish string sections might be added or the occasional choir added for good measure, most of the sound effects used here come from spur-of-the-moment decisions using various things the band had lying around the studio. Even without using instruments, the focus was to create an atmosphere through the strange sounds that could be worked out when putting them against a microphone.
Thousands of artists might try to recreate these songs note for note, but they will always be missing something if they don’t have the subtle intricacies that went into the studio versions of the tunes. None of the items featured here will make anyone’s list of essential rock and roll instruments, but it’s every musician’s goal to look for music in the most unorthodox places.
10 strangest sound effects in songs:
10. Spouse Chatter – ‘Even the Losers’ (Tom Petty)
Tom Petty knew that he was on the verge of his best work with Damn the Torpedoes. As he struggled with his record company during the day, Petty and the Heartbreakers slaved away in the studio trying to turn songs like ‘Refugee’ and ‘Here Comes My Girl’ into radio-rock gold. While ‘Even the Losers’ became one of the most fondly remembered songs from the record, it starts with one disgruntled wife.
Between ‘Here Comes My Girl’ and the start of ‘Even the Losers’, the tape captured the sounds of guitarist Mike Campbell toying with different sound effects at his house. Taken from the demo he had made for the song, Campbell allegedly asked his wife in the next room if she could hear anything abnormal coming from the speakers, replying, “It’s just the normal noises in here.”
When combing through the tapes, the band thought that it was so funny that they left it in the finished record, with the opening guitar lick of ‘Losers’ coming in right after she finishes talking. Mrs Campbell probably wasn’t looking to be etched into history when she replied to her husband, but those few seconds serve as a nice pause in between the classics.
9. Beating a Guitar – ‘Mean Street’ (Van Halen)
For Eddie Van Halen, nothing was off the table regarding what could be done with a guitar. Even though he knew his traditional scales, using various tapping licks restructured his approach to the instrument. Although Eddie will always be defined by his approach to how people play lead guitar, ‘Mean Street’ opens with the sound of him beating the life out of his instrument.
Opening up Fair Warning, Eddie creates a kaleidoscope of sound by employing a tapping technique usually reserved for funk bass players. Rather than focusing on any musical structure, the appeal of the section comes from how chaotic the guitar sounds, especially towards the end, where Eddie goes into chords while still slapping.
Then again, this kind of experimentation was second nature for Van Halen, with Eddie going for crazier sounds on his solo spots like ‘Cathedral’, which captured him breaking his volume knob in the song’s final seconds. ‘Mean Street’ certainly isn’t the most radio-friendly track in Van Halen’s catalogue, but Eddie’s intro was about testing the boundaries of what the guitar could sound like.
8. Cat – ‘Mantra’ (Tool)
Any metal fan going into a Tool album must know what they are getting. Compared to the usual nu-metal outfits popping up in the early 2000s, Lateralus made for a massive head trip the first time metalheads put it on, with various lyrics about philosophy and questions about how life should be lived. Then again, Tool did have a funny streak, and one of the first interludes on the project had some help from a feline.
Coming out of ‘The Patient’, ‘Mantra’ is an instrumental that provides an ominous tone before going into the time signature cluster-fuck, ‘Schism’. Considering the dark funeral dirge of the proceeding track, the demonic-sounding vocal effects are a slowed-down sample of Maynard James Keenan gently squeezing his pet cat.
While most fans were already deep into the album at this point, this random cameo is pretty much a tongue-in-cheek reminder that Tool isn’t above throwing in an occasional joke here and there. I mean, these are the same people that worked with Bill Hicks throughout their previous album, so it’s not out of the question to make a few comedic jabs.
7. Dentist Drill – ‘Bury A Friend’ (Billie Eilish)
Most pop fans had a bit of an adjustment period getting used to Billie Eilish in the late 2010s. Considering the massive flux of trap music, Eilish’s first major hits like ‘Bad Guy’ felt like they should be popping up in a B-level horror movie or soundtracking a psychological thriller. While ‘Bury a Friend’ was one of the darkest singles she had put out then, one of the stuttering sounds in the background came from her dental record.
Borrowing a vocal melody from The Doors’ ‘People Are Strange’, most of ‘Friend’ plods along with Eilish trying to inflict fear into the listener at every corner. According to her older brother/producer Finneas, though, one of those unsettling sound effects was a sample from when Eilish went to the dentist for her Invisalign retainer.
While getting drilling done on her teeth, Eilish thought it would be a good idea to record the sounds of the tools to create different beats out of them, which work to glorious effect when playing off the intentional monotone of the vocal. ‘Bury a Friend’ might already sound unsettling if played on a piano, but with those drills in the background, the song practically feels like it could soundtrack Heath Ledger’s Joker.
6. Cutlery – ‘Metal Gods’ (Judas Priest)
In the studio, Judas Priest would never settle for anything less than pure metallic steel. With the release of the album British Steel, the metal titans had pioneered a new era of metal that would define how most people thought of the genre. Recorded in one of The Beatles’ houses, Priest also got accommodated to some of the domestic pleasures of recording.
Looking for different places to record, Priest found out that Tittenhurst Park was open, the estate which used to belong to John Lennon. Though the house had been sold to Ringo Starr then, Starr was known to lease the grounds out to any band that wanted to use the home studio. While Priest admitted to being Beatles fanatics, they couldn’t help but put a handful of Easter eggs into the song ‘Metal Gods’.
Telling the story of towering metal robots plodding across the land, the sound of the robot arms comes from vocalist Rob Halford shaking a drawer full of knives and forks, making for a metal stomp when paired with the drums. Any artist is going to try to write the best music that they can, but when it comes to ‘Metal Gods’, Priest was practically using the studio as their own foley instrument.
5. Anvil – ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ (Metallica)
When Metallica started in the metal scene, they had to work with the bare essentials they had. Recording their debut album Kill Em All on next to nothing, Ride the Lightning was the first project the band made where they could expand their sonic palette beyond the standard sound of them playing live. For a song called ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’, the thrash legends thought that a normal bell wouldn’t cut it.
To add that extra metallic sound, the opening chimes that kick off the song come from an anvil that the band had come across in the studio. While a bell may have worked in this instance, hearing the massive clang of the anvil actually suits the chilling tone of the song, especially playing off Cliff Burton’s maniacal bass work at the beginning of the tune.
One of the other major factors behind the song is the tuning, which is slightly sharper than standard tuning for guitar players. Considering the band was about getting a performance as tight as possible, the recording was also sped up just a few notches to make the track feel like a well-oiled machine. Even when working at their creative peak in the 1980s, Metallica went out of their way to ensure that their sound effects were made of metal.
4. Tap Dancing – ‘Seaside Rendezvous’ (Queen)
From day one, it never seemed like Queen were taking themselves too seriously. For all of the great effort that they put into their music, hearing Freddie Mercury try on different sounds like musical costumes made for the most entertaining detours in their catalogue, like the exuberance of ‘Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon’. When it came to co-opting nostalgia, though, Mercury got creative when bringing the 1920s back on ‘Seaside Rendezvous’.
Written as a pastiche to the old days of swing tunes, half of the song feels like it belongs in the background of a madcap silent movie. Since the band didn’t want to stray from the usual instrumentation of their first records, the tap dancing section of the piece was created by Roger Taylor and Freddie Mercury, wearing thimbles on their fingers and tapping on the recording console.
Even when bringing in a horn section, the band went outside the norm, with the “brass” being played by Mercury and Taylor making different brass sounds with their mouths. While a move like this could have easily sounded corny and dumb, it’s endearing whenever Mercury pulls it off.
3. Sexual Escapade – ‘Rocket Queen’ (Guns N’ Roses)
Nobody gets stuck with the moniker ‘The World’s Most Dangerous Band’ for nothing. As Guns N’ Roses were first coming up, their mission was to make music that was far more rootsy than the hair bands they were sharing the bill with on the Sunset Strip. Half of Appetite for Destruction is about celebrating that hedonistic lifestyle, but the final track on the record also comes from the band’s sexual antics.
After Steven Adler got into a massive argument with his girlfriend, Adriana Smith, she went to the studio to blow off steam when she ran into Axl Rose and Slash, putting the final vocals down on ‘Rocket Queen’. Needing a vocal break to fill out the instrumental bridge, Rose had the idea of him and Adriana having sex on the studio floor and recording it to put on the final record.
What fans got to hear on the finished product is the sound of Rose and Smith going at it, which may as well be the cries of the ‘Rocket Queen’ as Rose tries to console her. Rose may have gotten the perfect finale to the album, but it was probably awkward trying to look Adler in the eye for a few weeks after the song was recorded.
2. Beatdown – ‘Blood Sex and Booze’ (Green Day)
Coming into the 2000s, Green Day didn’t want to be known as the traditional pop-punk brats forever. They had come a long way since the release of Dookie, and Warning became one of their most eclectic albums to date, featuring pieces of acoustic rock, classic rock, and even the occasional weird track like ‘Misery’. While ‘Blood Sex and Booze’ benefits from a swing groove, the band needed a little bit of blood to be shed for the intro.
Written as Billie Joe Armstrong’s take on The Velvet Underground’s ‘Venus in Furs’, half of the song revolves around a man begging to be tortured by his mistress. Instead of going right into the song, Tre Cool got ahold of a dominatrix friend that he knew at the time and asked her to come down to the studio with her various whips and chains.
Rather than any of the band members get the snot kicked out of them, one of the group’s roadies was coaxed into taking the brunt of it. Being tied to a chair in the middle of the studio, the unlucky roadie withstood a handful of whips from the dominatrix before Armstrong’s guitar came in. While no one might have expected this sharp contrast from Green Day, a story about a man wanting nothing more than to be whipped, feels like the spiritual older brother to the masturbation anthem, ‘Longview’.
1. Radio Broadcast – ‘I Am The Walrus’ (The Beatles)
Most artists who try to make unusual sounds in the studio are just expanding on what The Beatles had done first. For most of their later career, the Fab Four turned the studio into their own personal playground, using any instrument or sound effect they could to get the right feeling for the song. Although countless Beatles songs would suffice for such a list, ‘I Am the Walrus’ gets the top spot by happening purely on the spur of the moment.
Written during an acid trip that John Lennon had at the time, ‘I Am The Walrus’ benefits from being an ode to absurdity, with every line not connecting to the one before it. While it’s hard to find out what Lennon is on about, the star of the show is the backing track, made up of a rollercoaster of different chord changes climaxing in a women’s and men’s choir chanting completely different things in each speaker.
Once the song began to fade out, though, Lennon had the idea of recording sounds off the radio, landing on a radio adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear as the track came to an end. Though Lennon may have been getting into songs that were too avant-garde for most with Yoko Ono, this is the best example of controlled chaos that The Beatles ever made.
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