I quite like Eleanor Rigby too and I give credit to George Martin for the arrangement. That classic lyric of "wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door", and he paints an unforgettable picture of a lonely person.

I saw an interview some time back, I believe it was George Martin but can’t be sure, who said Paul wanted sharp, stinging instrumentation, “kind of like the stabbing scene in “Psycho”.” So Martin put together a quartet of violins, a couple violas and a couple cellos, then stacked them two or three times and Paul approved. Martin toned down the “shrieks” but kept it staccato, which Paul loved.

So it was with so many Beatles compositions. John said he wanted a musical calliope for “The Benefit of Mr. Kite” and Martin set up a speaker on a spinning turntable, and organ and some other stuff, then recorded them as usual but played it through the spinning speaker into yet another microphone to achieve the swirling effect that John had asked for.

I’m always interested in this sort of thing. I remember the story from Paul Simon about Roy Halle being entranced by various kinds of echo, and he would search out stairwells, elevator shafts, and other odd places to record. One, and I forget the song, was being recorded in a stairwell and (supposedly) on the best take people suddenly walked through the door foolishly thinking it was a stairwell and not a recording studio. Ha! Bit of a surprise all around, I’d say.

I love this stuff. If I hadn’t done what I did, that could have been a path for me.

OK, one more. “I’m Not in Love” by 10cc uses 12 tape loops, each one a recording of the group singing “Aah” at a different note on the scale, and each stacked 16 times to form a choir, then each spliced into individual loops so each “Aah” would play endlessly, and then 12 tape machines were used each with one of the chromatic notes for background. The engineer would bring up the appropriate note(s) when called for, and silence the others when not. Before digital tricks made this sort of thing easy, this is what producers, engineers, and groups went through to produce “a unique sound.”