What was the first Beatles song to use a synthesiser?
Music has always had a love/hate relationship with technology. In America, in 1942, the sweet songs buffeting against the horrors of war were suddenly silenced after performers went on strike. Recorded soundtracks and the rise of jukeboxes meant that gigs in bars or cinema orchestra pits were rapidly dwindling, so musicians took a stance and said they wouldn’t enter studios until it was made abundantly clear that recorded tracks wouldn’t put them out of work. Only a few decades later, The Beatles would effectively scoff at that strike by abandoning the live circuit altogether and making a living off the studio alone.
Even over half a century later, with only two members remaining, the band is still pioneering new technology, embracing dreaded artificial intelligence to complete their 21st number one single, ‘Now and Then’. This intrepid spirit has always been part of the band’s lore. In fact, there was one ground-breaking technology that the Fab Four appropriated before the world had even had a chance to figure out the possible permutations.
“It’s very reasonable for people to be intimidated by the power of new technologies,“ Yihao Chen, the founder of AI-based music start-up ITOKA, recently told Far Out. “And there might be some arguments or adversaries towards the adoption of the new technologies. But you already know that The Beatles successfully adopted synthesiser at the very, very beginning, using synthesisers in a lot of their famous songs, and it was a hit! Now everybody loves it and admires the way that they adopted new technologies as a sound source in the music.”
Not only is it celebrated as joyously innovative now, but at the time, the mechanics of what they were doing were barely deciphered from the blur of fresh, original sound. It wasn’t until years later that the music industry would launch a failed rebuttal of the rise of synthesisers. Once again, bloody Barry Manilow finds himself as the antagonist in a cultural war. In 1982, he was about to head out on tour. In an efficiency bid, he binned off his orchestra and employed a selection of synth players instead. The Musicians Union hated this. So, on the birthday of the dastardly synth pioneer Robert Moog, they decided to push towards outlawing this new musical contraption.
Obviously, they failed in this motion, and the 1980s became the most synth-heavy decade in history. While synth players were banned from the Union until 1997, this did little to curtail the rise. And the Fab Four were once again the band many people pointed towards in a bid to rubbish the belief that synthesisers were in some way anti-music. The Beatles championed artistic development over everything, and in the process, they were just as keen to embrace an orchestra as they were to dabble on a Moog; it just depended on what was fit for the song. Either way, nobody could look back at something like Revolver and assert that it was a misstep.
So, what was the first song The Beatles used a synth for?
Of all the Fab Four, George Harrison was perhaps the keenest to embrace new sounds. When Robert Moog unveiled the modular synthesiser in October 1964, its impact may have been muted, but it seemed inevitable that Harrison would eventually tinker with one. Almost exactly four years on from the inventor’s overlooked unveiling, the guitarist received a demonstration of how the Moog functioned.
He quickly ordered one. It was only a matter of time before The Beatles embraced the instrument. After all, a few years earlier, Harrison had been introduced to the sitar, and he quickly incorporated the mystic sounds of the Indian instrument into The Beatles’ oeuvre.
Abbey Road provided the perfect chance for the band to do so. It was the first time the group had recorded in stereo. Harrison had first encountered the Moog when he was producing Jackie Lomax’s debut album Is This What You Want? Lomax was one of Apple Records’ first Liverpudlian signings, so the sessions were pressure-free enough for Harrison to experiment with the device. So, by the time he dragged the behemoth invention into Abbey Road Studios, he was already pretty well-versed in how it functioned. In fact, in the interim, he had even recorded an experimental Electronic Sounds suite, released on the short-lived avant-garde Apple Records off-shoot, Zapple.
In typical Beatles fashion, however, they very quickly managed to take this far out technology and render it mainstream—redefining popular taste in the process, edging the world closer to the interesting peripheries of possibility. Using the IIIp synthesiser, which was first available to the public in 1967, the band huddled around the oddity and created their first song to feature a synthesiser: ‘Because’.
It was a painstaking yet exciting process. Engineer John Kurlander recalls in Recording Sessions that “the Moog was set up in Room 43, and the sound was fed from there by a mono cable to whichever control room we were in. All four Beatles – but especially George – expressed great interest in it, trying out different things.” However, his interest was in using it to embellish ‘Because’ rather than overhaul it. This was always a triumphant tenet of the band; as another engineer, Nick Webb, explains, “I think The Beatles used the Moog with great subtlety. Others in a similar situation would probably have gone completely over the top with it. It’s there, on the record.”
The other reason for its subtlety was largely because, in its rudimentary phase, it was a brutal beast to operate. After the release of Abbey Road, John Lennon might have told Radio Luxembourg that it plays ”the solo in ‘Because’” due to the fact you ”can make it play anything—any style…freaky or just plain”, but Alan Parson’s caveats this by adding that you had a hell of a job on your hands trying to get ”anything out of it and you could only sound one note at a time”.
Nevertheless, the band were so enamoured with its impact on ‘Because’ that they soon sought to apply its strange sounds throughout the record. On Abbey Road, this mystic Moog pops up on ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’, and ‘Here Comes The Sun’. Sadly, they spent their last day in the studio together on August 20th, 1969. Had they kept going, who knows where the experimentation would’ve taken them—perhaps their 1970s records may have included a primitive version of ‘Born Slippy’, but what we do know for certain is that the Moog would’ve featured heavily thanks to the fact Harrison dove headfirst into deploying it on his debut solo album, All Things Must Pass.
Such innovation was key to the band’s success and should be remembered as an important part of their legacy as we move ahead into further technological uncertainty. The Beatles never got old. The general arc of pop culture is that the press and public build you up to knock you down—the trick is to survive a few rounds and come back swinging when you get a shot.
But the Liverpudlian lads defied even this cyclical secret to longevity—nobody laid a glove on them. That is largely because they never offered up the chance for anyone to land a blow. They were constantly moving, constantly redefining themselves and their sound—you couldn’t get sick of them, and you couldn’t discredit them because, unlike Mr Manilow, everything they did, good and bad, was done in the name of the advancement of art. Yes, even ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ and its horrid melody.
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