Six more sounds, voices, and instruments you have been mishearing.
You name a sound and you think you have named the thing making it. A guitar riff, a piano hook, a wall of strings, a band locked in a room. The ear files it instantly and never reopens the file. That is the whole comfort of a song you know by heart: nothing in it needs checking.
These six need checking. The “guitar” everyone air-plays is a keyboard. The other guitar everyone air-plays is also a keyboard. The bass holding up one of the biggest riffs of its decade is a guitar wearing a costume. The orchestra swelling under a singer is a single cello note, retriggered. The cash register that opens a song about money was never a till at all, it was spliced together by hand with a razor blade. Each one is the most recognisable second of its song, and each one is something other than what you would swear it is.
None of this changes how the song feels. It changes what you know is happening while you feel it. Surface any of these and one familiar sound tilts a few degrees. Surface all six and you will start second-guessing every “obvious” instrument you hear for the rest of the week.
6 pearls in this string
“That iconic opening riff is one of rock's great guitar lines.”
It isn't a guitar at all. The instantly recognizable intro, the part your hand air-plays, is a keyboard: Jonathan Cain on piano layered with an ARP Omni synthesizer. No six-string anywhere in it. AllMusic calls it one of the best opening keyboard riffs in rock, and most people who have sung along for forty years have never once registered that the sound they love is a guy at a piano. Listen again. It was never a guitar.
“That iconic opening riff is a guitar line.”
It is the most recognizable few seconds Linkin Park ever recorded, and there is no guitar in it. The hook that opens Numb is a keyboard refrain, played by Mike Shinoda, the rapper, not the guitarist. The band the world filed under rap and guitars built its signature anthem on a synth line from the man who mostly handled the verses. Listen again and the riff you always heard as a guitar dissolves into keys.
“That bass line is the most famous riff of the 2000s.”
There is no bass on it. There is no bass anywhere in The White Stripes; the band never had a bassist. What you hear is Jack White's hollow-body guitar run through a pedal that drops it a full octave, with a fuzz box ahead of it in the chain. The lowest, heaviest sound in modern rock is a guitar pretending, and once you know, you can hear it stop pretending.
“The huge operatic wall in the middle is a synthesizer.”
There is no synthesizer anywhere on this record. The cathedral you hear, that towering, choir-of-a-thousand swell, is three men, Mercury, May and Taylor, singing the same lines over and over until the voices stack into a wall, plus Brian May's electric guitar layered on itself many times over. So many listeners insisted it had to be a machine that early pressings printed a defensive little line on the sleeve: "No synthesizers." Play it again and try to find the keyboard. It was never there.
“That soaring orchestral hook is the sound of a string section.”
There is no string section. The huge, aching line that carries the whole song is a single cello note, sampled into a Fairlight, a 1980s digital synth, and played from a keyboard. One recorded cello stroke, retriggered. The orchestra you've always heard swelling underneath Kate Bush doesn't exist; it's one note wearing the costume of a hundred. Listen again and you can hear it isn't bowing. It's pressing.
“The song opens with a cash register ringing in time.”
There is no till. Roger Waters recorded each money sound on its own, coins, a tearing receipt, a counting machine, some of them out in his garden shed, then physically cut and spliced the tape into a loop. He built it to land in exactly seven beats, so the thing you hear as background noise is also the count-in. The groove you have hummed for fifty years was assembled by hand with a razor blade.
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