How Pink Floyd Spliced Antique Clocks Into the Tempo of 'Time'

The ticking and chiming that opens “Time” wasn’t sampled or synthesized—it was captured in one afternoon at a real antique clock shop in London. Engineer Alan Parsons and the band borrowed a portable Nagra reel-to-reel recorder and spent hours collecting the sounds of dozens of mechanical clocks, each running at its own natural speed. No MIDI, no quantizing.

Back at Abbey Road, they faced a problem: none of the clocks ticked in sync with the song’s 4/4 tempo. The solution was analog tape wizardry. They spliced individual ticks and chimes into short loops, then varisped the tape speed (slowing down or speeding up the reels) until each sound matched the beat they wanted. The chiming sequence in the intro is actually a single chime recorded and repeated at different varispeed settings, layered to feel like a chaotic spread of real clocks.

The final result is a collage that still sounds organic—partly because the loops were cut by hand using a razor blade and splicing tape. That’s