"One of these days..."
Posted almost 4 years ago
"...I'm gonna chop you into little pieces."This ominous threat from Pink Floyd drummer Nick mason is the lone line of vocals in Pink Floyd's opening marvel off of their 1971 album, _Meddle_. Claimed by Roger Waters to be a threat to then BBC Radio 2 DJ, Sir Jimmy Young for his irritation evoking babbling tendencies, this weightless admonishment is nonetheless given a menacing nature due to the digitally warped recording of the line.In his Floyd memoirs, _Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd_, Mason called his rare vocal contribution "an example of one experiment that did make it out of the lab. The line was recorded at double-tape speed using a falsetto voice; the tape was then replayed at slow speed. There are times when it really does seem necessary to do things in the most complicated way possible." The opening of the song features double-tracked bass guitars played by Waters and David Gilmour. The contrast of the two bass sounds is credited by the members of Pink Floyd to an AWOL guitar tech.In a 1993 interview with Guitar World, Gilmour states:“The opening section is me and Roger. On "One of these Days", for some reason, we decided to do a double track of the bass. You can actually hear it if you listen in stereo. The first bass is me. A bar later, Roger joins in on the other side of the stereo picture. We didn't have a spare set of strings for the spare bass guitar, so the second bass is very dull sounding. We sent a roadie out to buy some strings, but he wandered off to see his girlfriend instead.â€Mason reiterated the band’s suspicions of the tech's whereabout by saying, “His protestations of innocence were rather undermined by the smart new pair of trousers he reappeared in.â€Waters helped to create the bass sound by feeding the output into a "Binson Echorec Unit":http://www.halkans.com/images/832binson.jpg, a mechanism used frequently during the Syd Barrett era, and notably on “Interstellar Overdriveâ€, “Astronomy Domineâ€, and “Pow R. Toc H.†Called “the most collaborative effort of anything we ever did†by Gilmour, "One of These Days" was a mainstay during their live performances in the period just prior to their recording of _The Dark Side of the Moon_. The song was featured on the _Live at Pompeii_ video and recorded live on John Peel's BBC radio show in 1971.
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