"Two Heads" and "How Do You Feel"

[graceslick_rocks]

Hey everyone, I'm gonna discuss "Two Heads" and "How Do You Feel".
Actually, I have a few questions I want answered.

On "Two Heads", how exactly did they do the effect of two Graces singing at the end? And on "How Do You Feel", how exactly did Grace sing and play the recorder at the same time?

I'm 14 and I love the Airplane.

Oh, and if anyone doesn't know what Marty sings behind Grace in "Two Heads", I figured it out: "Reflections in the door of a green Volkswagen.....Reflections in the door of a green Volkswagen. Reflections...Run(s)..ON!" *Note: the "(s)" in "Run(s)" is in parenthesis because you can't really notice the "s" sound.

Thanks, Autumn

[TakeMeOnYourFlight]

Both of these recordings were done using over-dubbing on multi-track tapes.

For How Do You Feel, most likely an instrumental backing track was recorded first and then vocals overdubbed on to the backing track afterwards.

Two Heads would be the same and two get the to Grace effects there's a few techniques they may have used. Likely they recorded more than one vocal track of Grace, and also it sounds like they used a lot of echo, delay and reverb.

[TakeMeOnYourFlight]

I've heard with the old reel to reel recorders people used to remove the erase head so they could overlap different recordings several times over and not lose much sound quality.

[DonRico1967]

The Beatles and George Martin used to use "tape loops" where they would wind reel-tape around a pencil and splice it together with Scotch tape and play the loops back on the TEAC.

Listen to "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Revolution #9" and you will hear what I am talking about.

Nowadays of course everyone has DIGITAL delays that can do all of that and much more.

[freakmeout]

This doesn't really have anything to do with anything, since your question has been already answered, but I hope to someday record (using very primitive recording devices) a solo, entirely a capella version of Dark Side of the Moon. Sound effects, random voices 'n' everything. And just mash everything together so it's exactly like the real thing, only a capella.

...Yeah.

[graceslick]

I've recently been playing around with computer music recording and production, and I can get many of my voice or whatever playing over each other. It's all about using multiple tracks.

My guess in terms of things where Grace played the recorder and sung at the same time was the multi-track thing, and when they played live, someone else would play the recorder for her...or else my longheld belief that Grace is magical is true...it could be. Maybe she plays the recorder through her nose and sings through her mouth, as normal.

Ok, I'm really tired so ignore that last bit there. It's too weird, even for this forum. lol

[JoeD80]

RCA was already using 8-track recording technology at the time of "After Bathing at Baxter's," so the Airplane wasn't constrained to play multiple instruments on one track, and Grace could easily record her double-voice on 2 of the 8 tracks.