We wouldn’t like to put a figure on the number of times we’ve heard The Beatles’ Here Comes The Sun (let’s just say: lots) but we’ll freely admit that we’ve never really noticed the synth parts before.
Neither, as it happens, had YouTube synth investigator Anthony Marinelli, but once he had heard them, he set himself the challenge of working out what they were and recreating them.
Now, as many of us head into spring and Here Comes The Sun finds its annual home on seasonal playlists, Marinelli has reported his findings in a video, and it’s a fascinating watch.
“It’s a classic song and I didn’t even realise it had synthesizer on it for decades,” he admits. “When I found out it had synthesizer on it I had to delve into it and see what’s going on. It took a little bit of critical listening, but now I can’t imagine the song without synthesizer.”
He concludes that there are actually four synth parts, all of which appear to have been created on The Beatles’ Moog Modular 3P synth, which shipped on 15 January 1969. As luck would have it, Marinelli’s own Moog 3C left the factory just six days later and has a very similar set of specs, so he has pretty much the perfect tool for the task at hand.
The first synth part arrives after just a few strums of George Harrison’s guitar intro, and features three triangle waves in unison. Then we have the main lead sound that drops at the start of the second verse.
Next, at the point when the song slips free of its 4/4 moorings and goes all ‘uncommon time signature’ - a compositional quirk that’s believed to have been inspired by Harrison’s love of Indian music - we get a buzzy bass. Marinelli says that he initially suspected that this was created by running the Moog through a guitar amp, but later decided that it was probably all done on the synth itself, with various settings cranked to the max to create that overdriven sound.
Finally, as we hit the third verse, we get that signature ‘whistle sound’. “These lines just kind of sing along with the arrangement,” reckons Marinelli, who goes deep on all four sounds and shows you how he recreated them.
Check out the full video above. As Marinelli says, it might just help you to “discover something new about one of the most loved songs in history”.
