Old Records Containing Sound Effects

[Satchmo Distel]

 'Telstar' begins with the backwards tape of a flushing toilet to simulate the sound of a rocket engine.

'Yellow Submarine' apparently has:

John Lennon blowing bubbles into water using a straw
George Harrison swirling water in a metal bathtub
Two ships' bells being rung
A noisemaker being rattled
Low-level voices for a party atmosphere
An ocarina, played by The Rolling Stones' Brian Jones (heard during the third verse)
A propeller being wound and put into water
Coins being scattered
A foghorn
Chains being rattled in the bathtub
Clinking glasses
More party chatter
A brass band
Lennon, recorded in the studio echo chamber, shouting naval phrases into a microphone connected to his Vox guitar amplifier. "Full speed ahead, Mr Boatswain, full speed ahead!"
Whooshing sound effects
Lennon's "life of ease" vocals
A marching band drum played by Mal Evans

https://www.beatlesbible.com/1966/06/01/recording-yellow-submarine-2/

[purlieu]

I'm not sure exactly how it was made, but 'Higher and Higher' by The Moody Blues starts with a pretend rocket take off that always impressed me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IIC3YBY3DI

Here Come the Fleas by The White Noise contains more sound effects than I'd like to try and list. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkFIZeFT-s8

[olliebean]

I thought you meant this sort of thing:

[earl_sleek]

[Chriddof]

Speaking of which...



As to the OP, only thing I can think of is the fake video game effects in Blur's Jubilee, made using those "relieve the stress of someone cutting you up" sound effect boxes they used to sell in the Innovations catalogues. Actually, come to think of it there's some BBC fx of seagulls in Blur's "Clover Over Dover" as well.

[buzby]

Kate Bush's Babooshka features a 'shattering glass' sound effect, played on a Fairlight (Never For Ever was the first album released to use one). However, the first TV appearance of the track was a playback on the BBC's  Dr. Hook TV Special on 20/03/80, three months before the single was released and nine months before the album) that appears to use a pre-mix of the track minus the sound effect - presumably she hadn't taken delivery of it by that time.

New Order's The Perfect Kiss uses the croaking frogs from the Emulator sample library in the middle 8.

Pink Floyd's Grantchester Meadows features a tape loop of a skylark singing, a honking goose which then takes off and the sound of a buzzing fly which someone walks over and swats at the end.

I'm not sure exactly how it was made, but 'Higher and Higher' by The Moody Blues starts with a pretend rocket take off that always impressed me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IIC3YBY3DI

They asked NASA for a recording of one of their rocket launches and they sent them a tape to use, but it didn't sound very impressive. Instead, they recorded a piano hitting the floor after being pushed off a roof, slowed it down and added some electronic processing and reverb.

[Twed]

New Order's The Perfect Kiss uses the croaking frogs from the Emulator sample library in the middle

Any idea about the sheep in Fine Time?

[Attila]

A number of the tracks on the Kinks Face to Face album have sound effects on them -- phone ringing on Party Line, rags swirled in a bucket to simulate surf in Holiday in Waikiki, &c.

[jobotic]

Spinning Rock Boogie needs a mention.

https://youtu.be/2OWe1ANJCOU

[massive bereavement]

1966 Byrds - 2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song) opens with what must be a vacuum cleaner.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EitHMUG69eI

[Ambient Sheep]

Pink Floyd's Grantchester Meadows features a tape loop of a skylark singing, a honking goose which then takes off and the sound of a buzzing fly which someone walks over and swats at the end.

One of my favourites.  Who was it that "paid homage" to that around 25 years later?  Maybe The Orb on one of the "Blue Room" mixes?

It wasn't their first though.  Their very first album opens with morse code beeps on "Astronomy Dominé" (although they may have been played on an organ) and ends up with lots of wind-up clockwork sounds (as well as other things) on "Bike".

Really just about all of Floyd's output could be listed here, depending on how early the cut-off is for "early". :-)

[Glebe]

John Lennon blowing bubbles into water using a straw

Ringo does that on Octopus's Garden.

[Absorb the anus burn]

One Night In Paris by 10cc starts with a minute of bonkers sfx.

[massive bereavement]

For a 60s Motown hit single, the opening to The Supremes "Reflections" is pretty far out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfK9LkUOWWg

[a duncandisorderly]

One of my favourites.  Who was it that "paid homage" to that around 25 years later?  Maybe The Orb on one of the "Blue Room" mixes?

It wasn't their first though.  Their very first album opens with morse code beeps on "Astronomy Dominé" (although they may have been played on an organ) and ends up with lots of wind-up clockwork sounds (as well as other things) on "Bike".

Really just about all of Floyd's output could be listed here, depending on how early the cut-off is for "early". :-)

a favourite floyd bootleg of that era (immediately post-syd) is "more furious madness from the massed gadgets of auximenes", which has a lot of sound effects in it. waters, perhaps surprisingly, was the one who brought the cash-register loop in for 'money'. a bloke I worked with for a while used to work at brittania row & built the replacement azimuth co-ordinator (the quad panner) after the original was stolen.

[Ambient Sheep]

waters, perhaps surprisingly, was the one who brought the cash-register loop in for 'money'.

Yup, made it in his wife's potting shed (as you probably know).

[buzby]

One of my favourites.  Who was it that "paid homage" to that around 25 years later?  Maybe The Orb on one of the "Blue Room" mixes?

I'm not sure, but The KLF's ambient stuff like the Pure Trance versions of Last Train To Trancentral, Chill Out and  Space are pretty much glued together by samples from sound effects albums.

On a related note, there's the hoot of the Northern Loon that appeared on Sueno Latino and 808 State's Pacific State (part of which was used in Chill Out). This again originated from the Emulator II's sample library (Disk #22 - Wind Chimes / Birds / Stream) and had been converted or resampled for virtually every sampler that had been produced since (in 808 State's case it was the Casio FZ-1)

[ajsmith2]

A number of the tracks on the Kinks Face to Face album have sound effects on them -- phone ringing on Party Line, rags swirled in a bucket to simulate surf in Holiday in Waikiki, &c.

Rainy Day In June as well. I didn't know the intro to Waikiki was rags in a bucket, assumed it was an off the peg recording.

The birds library sound effect intro to End Of The Season too, which was on the album after, but is a Face To Face outtake.

Bells intro to Big Black Smoke, again not on the album but from the same era.

You probably already know this, but the whole Face To Face album was originally supposed to be more conceptual and include sound affects to link every track, until Pye got their hands on it and dumbed it down. I would love to hear the original version that Ray Davies conceived.

[NoSleep]

Leader Of The Pack: https://soundideas.sourceaudio.com/#!details?id=7579641 from a stock library.

I've spotted this in other places over the years.

[Panbaams]

A discussion of "Suburbia", from the Pet Shop Boys' Please/Further Listening booklet:

Chris: "When we made the demo we had just discovered a car crash sample on the Emulator."

Neil: "So that was all over it. We would always bicker with Stephen Hague about things like that and the number of sampled orchestra hits. He would say, 'right, we will take out fifty per cent of the orchestra hits on this track because there are so many orchestra hits, and you can't have the car crash that loud ...' We had a car crash solo on it originally. We used the riot noise off a film, and the high keyboard sound is influenced by 'Axel F', which was a hit at the same time. We didn't spend long recording this track because we made the whole album in ten weeks, and we always felt we'd rushed through this song. When Please came out, all of the fans, and our families, said 'Suburbia' should be a single. We'd, typically, gone off it by that point. Then we decided to re-record it as a single, with Julian Mendelsohn, who Tom Watkins recommended to us. Julian had remixed 'Relax', and he brought in his keyboard programmer Andy Richards, who we were very impressed with because he had worked on loads of Trevor Horn records and we were always incredibly impressed by Trevor Horn. And we decided to make the new version more filmic. Andy Richards took the synth line and made it verge on a horn section sound. The new version had dogs on – we upped the dog quotient. The twelve-inch version, 'Suburbia (The Full Horror)' – which the seven-inch is basically just an edit of – is more epic. It's very Diamond Dogs, very Frankie Goes To Hollywood, especially the 'where the suburbs meet utopia' bit. By the way, that's where the word 'suburbia' comes from: 'suburb' and 'utopia'. Lots of bombs go off at the end. An entire suburb is being destroyed in a riot. Twelve-inch mixes weren't really made for dancing back then. We also recorded the sound of smashing glass in Sarm West studio two. They couldn't find a good smashing glass sample anywhere, so we got a pane of glass and the assistant smashed it, with half a brick, I think."

Chris: "There were several attempts."

I enjoy the idea of a car crash solo.

Discussing "I Want A Lover":

Neil: "There's another car crash on this - a different car crash. [...] It's got my favourite line: 'driving through the night, it's so exciting', followed by a car crash."

[buzby]

A discussion of "Suburbia", from the Pet Shop Boys' Please/Further Listening booklet:

I enjoy the idea of a car crash solo.

New Order had previously used the same car crash sample from the Emulator library as part of the cacophony at the end of The Perfect Kiss ('Auto Skids' from Disk G7 I believe, which was sampled from the Hanna Barbera SFX library).

[famethrowa]

There's a pretty bad car skid/crash effect on the timeless classic Transfusion by Nervous Norvus. As a youtube commenter says, it sounds like a seal honking

[steveh]

I'm not sure, but The KLF's ambient stuff like the Pure Trance versions of Last Train To Trancentral, Chill Out and  Space are pretty much glued together by samples from sound effects albums.

Back in the late eighties I bought the Authentic Sound Effects series from the sound effects section downstairs in the big HMV on Oxford Street and was amused when bits of Volume 2 then turned up on Chill Out. They probably bought it from there too. Seems amazing now that a record shop would have a whole rack devoted just to sound effects.

[Twed]

buzby may I please request again any knowledge you have of the sheep sample in Fine Time? It seems like something that might be part of the sample bank of an early sampling synthesizer.

I believe the meaning behind it is "everybody was pushing out acid house hits so we referenced that we are sheep by doing the same thing". Can't verify it though. The sheep make the track, which I (apparently alone) think is one of NO's best.

[gib]

Earliest one i can think of is Prince Buster's Al Capone (1964) with machine guns and a car screeching and crashing at the beginning, presumably taken from an Al Capone movie.

[NoSleep]

Earliest one i can think of is Prince Buster's Al Capone (1964) with machine guns and a car screeching and crashing at the beginning, presumably taken from an Al Capone movie.

Ahem...

Spike Jones - You Always Hurt The One You Love (1945): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRqWWRCT5Cs

(go straight to 1:35 if you can't wait)

[McChesney Duntz]

Always been charmed by the DIY effects on the first two Velvet Underground albums - the chair pushed across the studio into a pile of metal plates in "European Son," the respirator noises in "Lady Godiva's Operation," and my favorite, the sound of the sheet-metal cutter plunging into Waldo Jeffers' head at the end of "The Gift." Apparently, it was a knife going into a melon or some such thing, and Frank Zappa of all people was the one who helped them mic it. Crazy old world.

[olliebean]

I had a tape of the Doctor Who sound effects record when I was a kid, that I used to listen to as though it was music. Consequently I always immediately recognise when the Dalek Control Room loop is used in any non-Doctor-Who SF thing, and it's been used in a hell of a lot of them.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Leader Of The Pack: https://soundideas.sourceaudio.com/#!details?id=7579641 from a stock library.

I've spotted this in other places over the years.

They supposedly got a motorbike in the studio for the motorbike bits though.

[buzby]

buzby may I please request again any knowledge you have of the sheep sample in Fine Time? It seems like something that might be part of the sample bank of an early sampling synthesizer.

I believe the meaning behind it is "everybody was pushing out acid house hits so we referenced that we are sheep by doing the same thing". Can't verify it though. The sheep make the track, which I (apparently alone) think is one of NO's best.

I hadn't forgotten your question, I've just been doing some research.

The wiki article for The Perfect Kiss says there is a bleating sheep sample at the end of it, but it's not. The Emulator library (which would have been the only one they had access to at the time) didn't have any sheep samples on it's Animals SFX disks (E-Mu were a US company, and as I'm sure you know sheep aren't really a thing over there). Originally they wanted to use Porky Pig's  'That's All Folks!' at the end (which is why that is etched in the runout groove on the 12"), but couldn't afford to licence it from Warner Brothers. Instead they used a sample of the synthesized voice and sound FX from the Williams Firepower pinball machine in Britannia Row's games room (you can just hear it fading out after the car crash sample, and it can be heard more clearly at the end of The Kiss Of Death) which is what people have mistaken for a sheep bleating.

By the time of Technique, they had moved from the (by now terribly unreliable) Emulators to using Akai S900 samplers, and there were definitely sheep samples available for that in libraries from companies like Big Fish Audio. However, as Steve and Giillian lived in a farmhouse in a small village outside Macclesfield they could well have recorded some local sheep and sampled it, or from around Real World Studios near Bath where the bulk of the recording was done, or simply taken it off an SFX album like The KLF did. The same sample crops up again a few years later though, slowed down and buried in the mix during the instrumental breaks on on Ruined In A Day.

As to it's meaning on Fine Time, like the frogs on TPK I don't think there is any meaning. I've seen the explanation you quoted before on the fan-made discography sites and reproduced in press articles, but it's not attributed to anything the band have ever said. The only comment any of them have made about was Hook in his inside New Order book, where in his comments on the track he just says it continued their animal noise fixation. Stephen in particular liked messing around with samples - see the 1987 Hacienda soundcheck where he's playing round with the SFX and Star Trek dialogue samples that he used to throw in when playing live.

Also from the Technique sessions there was Fine Time's B-side, Don't Do It, which was largely composed by The Other Two as a potential soundtrack built around samples from the 1988 BBC adaptation of Alan Aykbourn's play Way Upstream (plus a reversed sample from The Exorcist at the end for good measure).