The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band/With a Little Help from My Friends -Guitar Cover

This cover debuts a specially designed, custom made Mattiboo guitar pedal, that when run into a slightly distorted Vox AC15 tube amp captures the clear and tight sound of a real Vox UL. The key to the fantastic “Pepper Tone” on the Sgt. Pepper album is the Vox UL730 amplifiers that George, Paul, and John recorded through. The UL features a solid state (transistor) preamp section and a tube output amplifier, all with unique EQ controls and an optional diode clipping fuzz. An extremely rare amplifier, the Vox UL represents the Holy Grail of 1966-67 era Beatles tone. I will go over how the “Pepper Tone” was used to create these sounds throughout the description.

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The rhythm track of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” has Paul McCartney on rhythm guitar and George Harrison playing a “semi-lead” picking guitar part. For my cover, the rhythm guitar with the pickguard on is Paul’s part, the one without the pickguard is George’s (as was his Casino during 1967). Balance Engineer Geoff Emerick remembers that Paul knew exactly what he wanted out of the rhythm guitar, and that he would be better off to play it himself. John Lennon played bass on Takes 1-9 of “Sgt. Pepper”, a contribution that was later wiped when Paul added the final bass line.

One of the challenges in the making of this cover was selecting the guitar that I believed Paul and George played. Options available for Paul would be the Epiphone Casino or Fender Esquire, and for George the Casino or Fender Stratocaster. After testing each guitar, I suppose that Paul and George played their Casino’s due to the thick low end and hollow body-sounding nature of the tracks. The Fenders sounded too thin in my tests. More discussion on the guitar used for Paul’s fuzz overdub is included later.

An interesting aspect of these basic track guitar parts is Paul’s atypical voicings for the seventh chords. Notice how he plays the G7, A7, and Bb7 on the lowest three strings, getting a clunky sound as he chunks out the rhythm. Listening to the Sgt. Pepper Deluxe Edition’s “Take 1” reveals this driving rhythm, and also that the C7 and D7 chords feature a fifth in the bass (see 0.07). The final seconds of “Take 1” have Paul playing an open E string during the C7 chord, leading me to believe that he used his thumb wrapped around the neck to grab the low G.

During the intro, Paul’s rhythm guitar has a large slide to an open E string at (0.03). Notice how this rhythm guitar plays a series of three strums in the chorus while the fuzz overdub only plays two (0:43). The C7 to D7 at 0:35 is played staccato while the C7 to D7 at 1:18 is played legato. Not shown, Paul releases the C7 and strums the open E, A, and D at 1:38.

George’s rhythm/lead guitar part involves the picking of individual notes of the chord. He begins on an A7, adding his pinky at 0:03 to create a very dissonant sound. Notice the slight bends at 0:06 to the open G and B strings. In the first verse, George mostly sticks to outlining the chords through the note being played on the G string. He only touches the B string once at 0:19. In later verses, he picks between the G and B strings.

A slight mistake is made at 0:32 as George slides up to a D note instead of an F chord. At 0:41, George hits the D7 a bit harder.

During the chorus, George throws in a lot of bendy notes with some wild vibrato occasionally (0:55). He plays all G notes at 1:10 during the C7 to G7 chord progression. Perhaps the most unusual, but ear-catching choice is George’s use of a C9 chord at 1:23. Not shown, at 1:35, George plays a C7 chord when he technically should be playing an A7. Some sweet arpeggios at 1:47 finishes out the basic Take 9 of Sgt. Pepper!

Description continued in pinned comment below!

Instruments Used:
Paul McCartney, George Harrison, John Lennon rhythm and lead guitars: Epiphone Casino Elitist
George Harrison WALHFMF Lead Guitar: 1989 Fender Stratocaster MIJ
Amp: Vox AC15C1
Pedal: Mattiboo Custom “Pepper Tone”