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... a movie for you ears.
I always loved that line...
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Underwood plays the parts of eight or ten musicians, playing complicated sections of piano and organ, as well as woodwind parts including multiple flutes, clarinets and saxophones.
Insane!
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"It Must Be a Camel" is also an intricately arranged tune with numerous wind and keyboard overdubs by Underwood. The tune contains a very unusual melody which often makes large melodic leaps. The title of the piece may come from the fact that these melodic leaps resemble "humps" when written on paper.
Weren't we discussing this, about the title, here somewhere? I've always assumed it was because of the cigarette brand... Hilarious!
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While Zappa was recording Hot Rats in Los Angeles, The Beatles were working on their Abbey Road album at EMI's soon to be famous Abbey Road Studios in London. By comparison, The Beatles were limited to 8-track technology.
Haha!
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Zappa used the most advanced recording equipment available to create an album of outstanding technical and musical quality for the time. The album was recorded on what Zappa described as a "homemade sixteen track" recorder which was custom built by the engineers at T.T.G. Studios in Hollywood in late 1968. The machine was also moved to Sunset Sound in Hollywood and Whitney Studios in Glendale, California as needed. It was not until early 1969 that Ampex Corporation completed their MM-1000 design and put the first 16 track audio recorder into mass-production. The 16-track technology was far more sophisticated than the usual 4 and 8-track productions of the era. The additional tracks made it possible for Zappa to add numerous horn and keyboard overdubs by Ian Underwood. Only a few musicians were required to create an especially rich instrumental texture which gives the sound of a large group.
16-track technology also made it possible to create a very realistic "full stereo" drum sound for the first time on a rock album. The standard in that period was to mix the entire drum set to a single (mono) track of an 8-track recorder, but on Hot Rats four of the 16 tracks were assigned to the drum kit alone, including individual tracks for the snare and bass drums, along with "left" and "right" tracks for other drums and cymbals. In this setup, the engineer had unprecedented control over the volume of each component in the drum set during the final mix. This recording technique did not become the norm on pop music recordings until 16-track and 24-track recorders became common in the early 1970s.
Zappa pioneered the use of tape speed manipulation as a technique for producing unusual timbres and tonal colors. On "Peaches en Regalia", "Son of Mr. Green Genes", and "It Must Be a Camel", Zappa plays "double-speed percussion." After completing basic tracks of drums, bass, guitar and piano, etc. recorded at the fast speed (30 inches per second) of the multi-track recorder, Zappa played additional drum overdubs while listening to the basic tracks at half speed (15 ips). On the finished recording, played at normal speed again, these overdubs are heard at twice the usual speed and pitch, making them sound like toy drums and giving them a surreal, comical quality. Zappa's earliest music lessons were in drum techniques, long before he decided to make the guitar his main instrument.
Other instruments were processed in a similar way, including keyboards, saxophones and bass. Zappa is also credited with "octave bass" (a bass guitar sped up to double speed)—the resulting sound is similar to that of a guitar. Additionally, a processed electronic organ was integrated as an orchestral voice within an ensemble of woodwinds and piano. "It Must Be a Camel" features the sound of a hard plastic comb being stroked, sounding almost like a jerky, audio slow-motion bell tree or wind chime. All of this was done with analog technology more than 10 years before modern digital sound processing equipment became available.
Very Os Mutantes approach, lol... I always wanted to know what kind of percussion instrument made that "eehoohee" sound on the introduction, ahah very nice to learn it is a comb.
What a great album... I imagine it must have been very exciting working on it...
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