How Olympic Studios' tape phasing and Mellotron shaped The Stones' 1967 psych album

The Rolling Stones went full studio experimenters for Their Satanic Majesties Request, recorded mostly at Olympic Studios in London during the summer of ‘67. The big takeaway: they weren’t just copying Sgt. Pepper — they were pushing their own technical boundaries, especially with drum phasing and the Mellotron, a weird tape-loop keyboard that was a pain to keep in tune.

“2000 Light Years from Home” uses that phased, swirling drum sound. Engineer Glyn Johns manually slowed the tape while recording Charlie Watts’ kit, then varied the speed during playback to create a flanging effect — a trick they’d picked up from George Martin but pushed further. The result is that dizzy, sliding rhythm that makes the track feel like it’s spinning.

“She’s a Rainbow” leans on the Mellotron’s string and flute presets, layered with Brian Jones’ piano to give it a baroque-pop sheen. The Mellotron was notoriously unstable; it had to be recorded in short bursts before the tapes degraded. The whole album was a crash course in what a rock band could do when they stopped thinking about live performance and started treating the studio as an instrument. They never did it quite like this again.