What instrument is that?
Can someone please identify that signature instrument used in the title song? The one that sounds like someone whistling? You can hear it in the beginning and end of the song, and in the bridge in the middle. Thanks.
shareI was wondering about this, too.
I assume it is some sort of synthesizer. I was trying to remember where I'd heard it before, and it was in John Barry's music for Midnight Cowboy - not the main theme, but the track Florida Fantasy.
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I would imagine that it was a synth. This was the time when the synthesizers were becoming popular(ie Moog) and they were being used more and more in music.
gbear
A friend of mine has read a biography on Judith Durham and The Seekers, and apparently it is a person whistling. They hired a professional session whistler for the recording session (or the producer did).
shareThere seems to be a synthetic tone there along with the whistling. Can't be a synth though, it's way too early ('65-66).
shareI think it is someone whistling, but processed electronically through the mixing desk in the studio.
shareCan't be a synth though, it's way too early ('65-66).
They had yet to become commonplace, but synthesizers were in use at the time.
RCA had built a monster synthesizer back in the mid 1950s, and by the early 1960s the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was well established, producing all sorts of electronically synthesized music and effects (the theme for Dr. Who in 1963 being one of the most well known).
It wasn't until the latter part of the sixties that reasonably compact synthesizers of the type which would become common in later pop music took hold though.
share
> I would imagine that it was a synth.
> This was the time when the synthesizers were becoming popular(ie Moog)
> and they were being used more and more in music.
No, it isn't a Moog synthesizer. If my memory serves me, the first use of a synthesizer in a pop song was by the Monkees on their 1967 LP "Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones Ltd." It featured one of the first three portable synthesizers made by Robert Moog.
I'm sure that it's actually two sounds combined, by double-tracking or simply by performing in synch. If you listen hard you can hear the very slight misalignments (more noticeable in the first part of the instrumental break) which were almost inevitable in the days before digital editing.
One element is a human whistle, the other sounds like an electric/electronic keyboard instrument.
It sounds like the same instrument you can hear, along with a guitar, in the second section of the instrumental break - but without the whistle and with slightly more sustained notes.
(All this is from listening to the film soundtrack - I don't know if there were other versions)
One possibility for the keyboard instrument would be a clavioline or one of its several similar variations. The clavioline (a synth forerunner) had been around since the early 1950s and at the time had famously featured on Telstar by the Tornados (featuring an actual clavioline) and Del Shannon's Runaway (a custom variation).
The Georgy Girl sound is cleaner than either of those examples but the clavioline was capable of a considerable variation in sound.
Alternatively, it could have been a more straightforward electric organ.
I was thinking a Mellotron though I'm not sure that could get whistling sounds.
shareNot sure that it was a Mellotron. They were just around but not very common at that date.
Also the Georgy Girl instrument does sound a bit too clean for a Mellotron - which used loops of recorded tape. Although in theory you could record any sound you wanted on the tapes few people did and the few ready made tapes at the time I believe tended to be of things like flutes (Strawberry Fields Forever) and strings (Moody Blues) rather than clean organ type sounds. Those sounds were already available anyway on keyboards at a fraction of the price of a Mellotron - and far more reliably.
Most likely it was an electronic organ instrument of some type such as the Clavioline. I remember the gliding notes as they were played, they definitely had an unique sound. This was back in an age hwen groups where creating special, new sounds that would have the listener wondering how the heck they did it, hence this fascinating discussion.
A similar type of early synth sound with gliding, sliding notes can also be heard on 'Computer Age-Push the Button' by Newcleus, recorded many years later though.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKrk5W3HQbA
It's hard to be sure, but to me the "gliding" sounds like it's being done entirely by the whistler, whereas the keyboard notes are quick short notes done without bending of pitch. Listen for the attack and decay of the keyboard notes, which have a 'ringing' edge that's brighter than the whistling. Combining the gliding of the whistler with the keyboard may just be creating the illusion that the keyboard notes are doing the same. (Perhaps that's why they used the whistler there.)
share