All My Loving

MP3 DOWNLOAD

This song brings back memories! It's my first cover of a song by my (and many others') all-time favorite group: The Beatles. While credited to "Lennon-McCartney" (like so many Beatles songs), All My Loving was actually written by Paul McCartney. It was also the Beatles' opening number (at 1:08 in the video) on their debut performance on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, from which Beatlemania exploded in the United States, and from there, the world.

The Beatles were talented in so many different ways! Among other things, they were "precision singers": they could sing, with perfect tone and duration, whatever a song required. In All My Loving, there are two great examples of this: double tracking and harmonies.

Double tracking. In the first two verses of the song, Paul McCartney is doing what is known as "double tracking". He is singing with himself; but he is replicating his voice so precisely that the end result doesn't sound like two voices, but a single voice that is stronger, fuller, and with more "character" than if he had just sung once. This is not at all easy to do with the precision required, so that you don't hear two separate voices! Because I wanted to create a similarly rich vocal tone, I also double-tracked my voice for the first two verses. Here's what me singing the first two verses just once sounds like:

Now hear how much fuller the double-tracked voice sounds:

Over time, technology was created to automate the voice doubling process. (Indeed, the first "automatic double tracking" technology was developed by Ken Townsend, the Beatles' recording engineer, at the Beatles' request, to relieve them of the time and tedium of tquired to do high quality, manual double tracking.) But many artists continue to take the time to do manual double tracking (as I did here) because it has a more natural and richer sound, due to the (tiny but tangible) differences in the two performances.

Harmonies. The Beatles excelled at creating beautiful, perfectly phrased and blended harmonies. It is one of the many things that makes their recordings so appealing to so many people. One thing that made their harmonies particularly beautiful: they were able to harmonize even when they were allowing their voices to slide or go into "vibrato". That is the case in All My Loving, as Paul harmonizes with himself when singing the third verse, making it the highlight of the song. So I make a point of doing the same, and consequently, it is my favorite section of the song: