Before I started my Share Music project - which has not yet been publicly announced, more on that later - I decided I should, for the first time in my life, join a band.
So I joined The Beatles. Gotta start somewhere, right? And I say, start at the top.
This is (it really is) Ringo Starr on Drums, George Harrison on Sitar and Vocals (me also on Sitar sample).
Paul McCartney’s contribution was saying in an interview he thought it was cool when people remixed Beatles tracks.
John Lennon (and, for some reason, Jim Morrison) were in the back of my mind - so that’s their contribution.
Soon, I was to start travelling the world (so far, to Africa and Japan) sharing my song (“Share Music”), and much more, with musical geniuses, inspired kids and children, and even...well, secrets and more secrets await revealing….
PS How, precisely, did I convince Ringo Starr to play with me? I hacked him.
The drums in my song, above, are actually the drum loop The Beatles used for their rather weird and esoteric song Tomorrow Never Knows.
"Drum loop?!?" you scoff, sceptically sneering. "They hadn't invented drum loops in The Beatles day. They didn't even have samplers yet. What nonsense and gibberish!"
Au contraire, mon frère. Indeed and in fact, The Beatle may well of have invented drum loops, for all I know. (More likely Les Paul, don't really know my pop music history perfectly, unfortunately.)
So much of history is hidden in the language. That democracy inevitably leads to demagoguery was known by the Greeks, and can be inferred from the words themselves.
Same with drum loops. See, at first, they were....drum loops.
Loops, y'know?
The Beatles, probably more famously in their White Album song "Revolution #9", cut recording tape into small pieces, and taped them into...yes....loops. Apparently in their song Tomorrow Never Knows - from which this drum loops comes - they enlisted every spare pair of hands they could find in the EMI building, where their recording studio was, to stand some distance away from multiple tape machines with pencils, to act as a kind of hub around which the loops would...um....loop.
The Beatles drummer, Ringo Starr, apparently played a few minutes of a potential drum part...but they used just this one section (that is also used in my song, above, "We Were Talking"). I'm not sure, but if not the first use of a drum loop, this is surely the most famous early use of one.
The other parts in The Beatle's song "Tomorrow Never Knows" from their Revolver album were things like Paul McCartney's laugh, slowed down and/or sped up, and kajillions of other things they thought up...
In my song, the other Beatles' part is George Harrison playing the sitar, from the Sgt. Pepper album song "Within You and Without You". In addition to using a section of that, I also sampled that part, and created a new part from it.
The rest of the parts are loops I made myself - playing actual genuine real instruments, oddly enough.