Beatles Vs Beach Boys Essay

Live Sound 11998085

The Beatles and the Beach Boys are two of the most recognized, well-known and most popular musical acts of the 1960’s right through to the 1970’s. I will be focusing on the group acts rather than solo performers such as John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison of the Beatles, who took their own stylistic approach to their music after the Beatles’ separation. Each group’s arrangement and use of instruments classify them as part of the overall associated sound and typical subject matter of songs in the 1960’s, yet remain different enough to distinguish between each group’s desired sound.

The Beach Boys’ signature sound, apart from their stringy guitars, southern Californian and Hawaiian influenced instrumentals, was their complex harmonies and articulate multi part vocal tracks. In one of the first instances of Phil Spector’s ‘wall of sound’, originally pioneered by Bryan Wilson, implementing the idea of the mixing technique into Spector’s mind, the lead vocals of the Beach Boys were often double tracked onto in mono, creating that smooth yet thicker sound the Beach Boys are often known and recognized for. This is explained in Bryan Wilson’s liner notes on the remastered Pet Sounds CD. They would record the band on four track with maybe a few overdubs, but mostly live.

They would mix this four track to mono on another four track which would give them three tracks to overdub vocals onto.
On Pet Sounds it was mixed to an eight track machine which allowed Bryan to do all of the parts himself or fewer vocalists to perform more parts since they had seven tracks instead of three.
Backup vocals were a lot denser and more heavily mixed, with a touch of delay and a small room reverb. Each vocal was recorded in unison, a single microphone for all of the singers. The double track effect was not created through use of reverb, despite it being added a small amount in post production, but by performing the part again. This would essentially create six to eight parts for a simple three part harmony, giving the vocals that full, lush sound.
The arrangement of the vocals was much fuller than their counterpart the Beatles, often using 3 or 4 part harmonies with lots of six and seventh chords and suspensions and so on, whereas the Beatles would often use very simplistic two or three part harmonies, usually in thirds, sixths or fifths, since there were significantly less vocalists than there were in the Beach Boys.

In a Beach Boys style vocal harmony, the lead vocal would be tracked with another voice a third above, another an octave above, and a bass part singing the root of the chord or an augmented chord, or alternatively, providing a choral pad of major or minor seventh chords, a suspended fourth, or a

ninth.

Beatles

Guitar
Beach Boys

Beatles