Rockpedia
Rock branch Full entry · 1966

Psychedelic rock

Emerged 1966 Origin San Francisco / London Subgenres 5 Vocals Sung
Heaviness
3
Speed
4
Melody
8

Sung. Melodic singing throughout.

In short

Effects, sitar, feedback and songs that fall apart halfway through. The lab that produced prog, space rock and, indirectly, doom.

How it sounds

  • Studio effects: phasing, reversed tape, tape echo, extreme panning.
  • Instruments unusual for rock: sitar, theremin, mellotron, harpsichord.
  • Structures that come apart — a song can have three unrelated sections.

Hear what that means

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 2 of 3 are cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
70-140 bpm
Song length
3-10 min
Tuning
Standard, and frequently detuned or retuned by ear mid-session. Sitars, and guitars made to sound like them by bending into notes rather than fretting them.
Production
The studio as an instrument: tape reversed, flanged by pressing a thumb on a reel flange to drag one machine fractionally behind another, and vari-speeded so the whole track shifts pitch. Almost every effect in the modern producer's kit was invented or popularised here.
Written about
Perception and its failure, Childhood, The English pastoral, Ego dissolution

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Modal rather than bluesy — drone strings left ringing under a moving melody, so the harmony never resolves. Feedback is held as a note rather than avoided as a fault.
  • Bass Melodic and high in the mix, often the only thing keeping a song locatable while everything above it dissolves.
  • Drums Loose, tom-heavy and reluctant to mark the backbeat, borrowing from Indian classical cycles as much as from rock.
  • The studio Genuinely an instrument here rather than a room. Reversed tape, phasing, vari-speed and the first extensive multitracking — the record cannot be reproduced live, which was a new idea in 1966.
  • Vocals Doubled, drenched and often panned somewhere impossible. The voice is treated as material to be processed rather than as a performance to be captured.

What it isn't

That it is a mood rather than a technique. Almost every studio effect that defines modern record-making — flanging, phasing, artificial double-tracking, backwards tape, vari-speed — was either invented or first used seriously on these records, largely at Abbey Road between 1966 and 1968. The whimsy dates; the engineering is still in daily use on records that sound nothing like this.

Told apart from

  • Acid rock Acid rock is psychedelia's loud, guitar-led American side: longer, heavier, built on jamming rather than on studio construction.
  • Space rock Space rock takes the drone and the repetition and drops the whimsy — one chord for twenty minutes, pointed outward rather than inward.
  • Krautrock Krautrock arrives from the same impulse with no blues in it at all, replacing the jam with a motorik pulse and the trip with a machine.
  • Neo-psychedelia Neo-psychedelia is the revival: the same effects deployed knowingly, by people who grew up with the records rather than inventing them.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

In 1966 and 1967 the studio itself became an instrument. The Beatles at Abbey Road and the San Francisco bands pushed the available technology to its limits, under the influence of LSD and Indian music. The fashion passed quickly, but the techniques stayed: nearly every rock production since uses something invented then.

Descended from

Branches into

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.