The Smiley Smile Message Board

This is a question for Mark but feel free to contribute if you're not Mark -

On Let Him Run Wild, from what I can pick up from the various sources available to me, had a sort of unusual routing scheme to the 3-track, and I'm wondering if you can, A.) Tell me if I'm more or less right, and B.) if I am right, if you have any insight into the methodology behind doing it that way.

It sounds to me like the electric guitars are essentially multed and then have two layers of reverb going to them, and it's possibly the same with the acoustic guitars, although that could be down to bleed, which seems pretty heavy on this track especially.

With everything else, it certainly could be leaking/bleed into other mics, but I have always assumed that the electric guitars went direct like 95 percent of the electrics did in those days, in which case it is puzzling to hear them on one of the tracks with light reverb (along with the dry-ish drums and the basses) and then again in heavy reverb on the track with the Piano and Vibes and the other stuff.

Does that sound like an accurate assessment of what's going on?  Is it possible they routed the direct guitar signals to the drum/bass buss, sent some of that signal to that send's echo send, and then also routed the guitars to the piano/vibes track's echo send as well?

Regardless, do you think it sounds like EMT on the heavier reverb return, on the vibes/piano track?  It has a very unique quality on the higher electric guitar.

Anyway, I'm always curious what was going on when I run into something that doesn't quite follow the norm -- I'm trying to transcribe the arrangement into a full score, so it's getting the hard listening treatment now.

Thanks, Mark.

Bumping in case Mark ever comes by again.

Bumping one last time

I see Mr Linett looked in yesterday. I can only assume he's unable to answer your question, although it might be polite of him to say so. ???

Well, I still can't figure out exactly what was going on here, but I realized the same thing is happening on California Girls; Carl's guitar is mostly dry (but not completely) on one channel, and pretty much all plate return on another channel.  If it weren't 1965 I would suggest that Carl had his guitar running through a reverb pedal on the way into the board, and then that signal's echo buss got patched to a different channel.  But as it is, I don't know what to make of it.  Can't figure out what two separate reverbs would be doing in mono.

Just an idea: is it possible the second echo is a group of instruments sent to the chamber/plate via tape delay? This could explain why the echo might appear twice.