Moog Plays The Beatles - Marty Gold

 

Fool On The Hill

Moog Plays The Beatles

The Electronic Music Of Marty Gold

Arranged and Produced by Marty Gold

Programmed by Walter Sear for Sear Electronic Music Productions, Inc.

All songs composed by John Lennon & Paul McCartney

Engineer: Russ Hamm

Cover and Liner Design: The Mixed Media Machine, Inc.

Avco Embassy STEREO AVE 33003

1969

From the inside cover: "Moog Plays The Beatles" Yet! Less than a decade ago, this would have sounded like a preposterous title for nobody knew then what either a Moog or a Beatle was. Now, of course, we all know the Beatles. And, record by record more and more of us are learning about the Moog. The Moog, as those in-the-know know, makes music electronically. Specifically, it's an elaborate, electronic synthesizer, name after its inventor, Robert Moog (the vowel sound is like "Mow," rather than "Moo"). And the tremendous variations of sounds it can produce have begun to revolutionize many of today's recordings. Now, some of those Moog sounds haven't always been downright appealing, simply because they have tended to emphasize the synthesizer's tremendous technical prowess without paying too much attention to the development of its musical potential. And that's pretty understandable, of course, because so often when something new like this does come along, people at first tend to become more entranced by what it can do, than by how it can do what they want it to do. Marty Gold has been around a long time, and he's always wanted to make good musical sounds – on his own big orchestral albums and in back of girl singers like Lena Horne, Patti Page and Sarah Vaughan, boy singers like Ed Ames, Eddy Arnold, Perry Como, Sergio Franchi, John Gary and Jimmie Rodgers, and pianists like Peter Nero and Roger Williams. And now he has come to the Moog, an instrument, as he puts it, "That really challenges one's creative imagination simply because it can create an infinite number of new sensations for the ear, far beyond the sounds of the usual musical instruments we've been used to hearing. "What I've tried to do on this record is not merely bring out those sounds for their own effects, but, even more so, to blend them with other contemporary musical sounds." And what could be more contemporary-sounding vehicles than a dozen of the Beatles' best songs! Gold has managed to maintain the original flavor of many of these by utilizing a strong, driving rhythm section of an electric guitar, an electric bass, an electronic harpsichord, a Lowrey organ, drums and percussion. "The spontaneous drive of live rhythm section created a lot of excitement," he notes. Using an eight-track recorded, he laid his basic rhythm sound on four tracks, and then, on subsequent sessions, filled the remaining four with sounds from the Moog synthesizer. "I was helped tremendously," he readily admits, "by Walter Sear. He'd worked with Robert Moog for many years, and so he could show me exactly how to get every sound I wanted. What was so especially great about working with Walter was, that besides being an experienced electronic engineer, he's also a first-rate musician. He has played tuba for leading symphonies and he's also an arranger. So you can see that it became pretty easy for us to communicate." With Sear sitting by, Gold used the Moog keyboard to embellish his basic sound tracks. Though his pre-session sketches program it for him accurately. "Walter not only gave me whatever effects I was trying for, but he also made some excellent suggestions, especially some of those programmed Moog sound effects, like the wind on 'Fool On The Hill'." The collaboration of these talents has resulted in some unusual and attracting sounds – like the human voice effects in the opening of "Eleanor Rigby;" "The Automatic octave slurs in "Norwegian Wood;" the beautiful purity of sound in "Yesterday" and in "Michelle," which also has some attractive whistling effects; the Mozart-like approach to "Hey Jude;" the canon approach to "Fool On The Hill," and the eerie, unmatched vibratos that permeate "Good Nite," the lovely, but not too-well-known song that has closed so many of the Beatles' concerts. The inherent danger in a project like this one – the temptation to adapt the music to the instrument, rather than the instrument to the music – is something Gold and Sear strove hard to avoid. "I wanted more than anything else," says Gold, "to retain the musical values of these great Beatles songs, and certainly not to sacrifice them to any machine. The Moog is a magnificent instrument. But I was interested in creating something beyond another pure Moog album. Rather, I wanted to create a musically valid electronic album, complete with other musical instruments, that featured the Moog within a total musical picture. I hope I've succeeded. – George T. Simon

Eleanor Rigby

Norwegian Wood

Day Tripper

Yesterday

Get Back

Penny Lane

Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds

Michelle

Hey Jude

In My Lfe

The Fool On The Hill

Good Night