Each note between the guitar and harpsichord had to be exactly together, and as I’m not the world’s greatest player in terms of timing, I would make more mistakes than John did. “We created a backing track,” wrote Martin, “with John playing a riff on guitar, me duplicating every note on an electronic harpsichord, and Paul playing bass. To keep the tempo solid while recording the basic track of Lennon’s guitar, McCartney’s bass and Martin’s harpsichord, Ringo was their click-track/time-keeper, as George Martin recalled in his book All You Need Is Ears. Since the song is the only one on Abbey Road without drums, Ringo does not play on the track. The Beatles recorded it over four days in August of 1969 with George Martin producing and playing the electric harpsichord and with Geoff Emerick engineering. “When you really listen to it, ” she said, “you see that he did play the chords backwards at one point but I think eventually it cleaned up a bit into a pop format. When I interviewed Yoko in 1992, I asked her about her memories of the origins of “Because.” The lyrics speak for themselves they’re clear. I said, ‘Can you play those chords backward?’ and wrote ‘Because’ around them. “Yoko was playing ‘Moonlight Sonata’ on the piano,” Lennon said to Peter Scheff. It’s there that John wrote “Because,” inspired by Beethoven, as played by his wife. John and Yoko were staying together at Ringo’s house in March of 1969.
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