Strawberry Fields

[Carl]

Any truth to this?

Song Name: Strawberry Fields Forever

Artist: The Beatles:

SongFacts: This song was originally going to be an acoustic track with john singing and playing guitar. After this version was recorded John decided to make the more famous version with all the instruments. Since he liked both versions he used both of them and overlapped the sounds for the final single. The orignial acoustic version's opeing line was going to be "let me take you down a peg" instead of "let me take you down...". The acoustic version was recorded and can be found as a bootleg.

[TheLizard]

This is what Wikipedia has to say:

The released version of the song is actually an edit of two different performances. The band recorded multiple takes of two quite distinct versions of the song. The first version was (reputedly) an attempt to emulate the acid rock sound of American bands like Jefferson Airplane, and it featured a relatively basic instrumentation including Mellotron, guitars, bass and drums. For the second version, recorded some weeks later, Lennon had opted for a much more complex arrangement (scored by George Martin) that included trumpets and cellos, along with the prominent sound of backwards cymbals during the verses.

Reviewing the various takes, Lennon decided that he liked the first minute of Take 7 (the "acid rock" version), and the ending of Take 26 (the "orchestral" version). He wanted the finished master to combine these sections from the two versions, so he nonchalantly gave producer George Martin the task of somehow joining them together.

The problem was that the two versions were played in different keys and tempos. Fortunately for Martin and his engineers, the faster version was also in the higher key, and so the two were reasonably easy to combine. The edit is subtle but detectable, at one minute into the song, though some CDs may show the edit at 59 seconds. (The widely-repeated story is that the first version had to be speeded up and the second had to be slowed down. Comparison of the original versions with the final one shows that both of the original versions were slowed down, the second by more than the first.) The pitch-shifting used in joining the versions also gave Lennon's lead vocal a subtle "off-kilter" quality

[skybluesky]

I think I remember seeing Sir George Martin saying he took the master tapes of the two versions, cut them into pieces, threw them in the air, then randomly reassembled the tape, and that's how the song came together.

[skybluesky]

According to Abbey Road to Zapple Records: A Beatles Encyclopedia, John wanted a rock song, so they recorded an upbeat version with electric guitars and drums, but the song ended up sounding more raucous than introspective. They enlisted the help of an orchestra, but John didn't like those results either. Geroge Martin sped up the slower one by 5% so it corresponded to the key and tempo of the other version, and the two tapes were combined 60 seconds into the song.

SFF is supposedly the song that has "I buried Paul" subliminally at the end, but John claims he was saying "Cranberry Sauce." Another theory, though not true, is that Strawberry Fields refer to the track marks on a junkie's arm.

[daslied]

I think I remember seeing Sir George Martin saying he took the master tapes of the two versions, cut them into pieces, threw them in the air, then randomly reassembled the tape, and that's how the song came together.

I think they actually did that on a different song. For "Tomorrow Never Knows" he gave each Beatle a tape recorder and asked them to record random sounds. He then gathered the tapes, cut them and threw them in a pile. The random assembly became the backwards effects on the song.

[edna]

Martin talks about that in "The making of Sgt Peppers...", a TV documentary. I think he´s talking about "A day in the life" but anyways, this is part of Geoff Emerick´s book, "Here, there & everywhere":

The brass band on “Yellow Submarine†was added late at night as a substitute for a Harrison guitar solo, when “everyone was too knackered—or stoned†and they couldn’t have gotten live horn players in. Martin had an assistant pull Sousa marches from the EMI library, make a tape copy of a sequence that was in the right key, and then snip it into pieces, toss them in the air, and splice them together in the random order that resulted in order to avoid copyright issues. “That’s why the solo is so brief, and that’s why it sounds almost musical but not quite,†Emerick writes. “At least it’s unrecognizable enough that EMI was never sued by the original copyright holder of the song.â€Â 

The team would do the same William Burroughs-style cut-up with calliope music for “Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite†on Sgt. Pepper a year later, but Martin evidently has forgotten he first used the idea on Revolver, Emerick says. 

Here is a technical view about SFF. It´s quite complicated...

[edna]

Maybe this can help... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9GghyfzNX4&mode=related&search=

It´s part of "The making of Sgt Pepper´s..." and George Martin talks about how SFF...