Ahem...getting back to "A Day In The Life", here's a question that someone here can probably answer. Just how did they get that very long decay at the end?
I read somewhere that "electronic trickery" had been used, but I'd like to know the rest of the story. With an EMT plate, maybe you could come close by opening the damper plate all the way and hitting the input hard, but my gut feeling is that you still wouldn't get that much decay time without picking up hum and hiss towards the end.
When I was listening in the shop last week I watched this part of the track on a scope looking for an edit point but if one was there, I must have blinked and missed it. Maybe they simply fed the output of the reverb back into the input -- common enough now, though pretty much unheard of back then. But that might have a fluttery effect, or sound unnatural. Does anyone know how this was done?