The original recording of the song is one of the duo's most highly
produced and took over 100 hours to record. The recording was performed at multiple locations, including
St. Paul's Chapel (Columbia University) in New York City and
Columbia studios in
Nashville and mixed on two eight-track recorders running in synchrony. The version originally released by the duo features an instrumental melody played in unison on
pedal steel guitar by
Curly Chalker and
piccolo trumpet. The song also features a
bass harmonica, played by
Charlie McCoy, heard during the second and final verses. In a 2008 edition of
Fretboard Journal,
Fred Carter Jr. recounts to interviewer Rich Kienzle: I had a baby
Martin, which is a 000-18, and when we started the record in New York with
Roy Halee, the engineer, and Paul [Simon] was playin' his Martin—I think it's a D-18 and he was tuned regular—he didn't have the song totally written lyrically, but he had most of the melody. And so all I was hearin' was bits and pieces while he was doin' his fingerpicking... I think he was fingerpicking in an open C. I tried two or three things and then picked up the baby Martin, which was about a third above his guitar, soundwise. And I turned down the first string to a D, and tuned up the bass string to a G, which made it an open-G tuning, except for the fifth string, which was standard. Did some counter fingerpicking with him, just did a little backward roll, and lucked into a lick. And that turned into that little roll, and we cut it, just Paul and I, two guitars. Then we started to experiment with some other ideas and so forth. At the end of the day, we were still on the song. Garfunkel was amblin' around the studio, hummin’, and havin’ input at various times. They were real scientists. They’d get on a part, and it might be there [unfinished] six weeks later. On my guitar, they had me miked with about seven mics. They had a near mic, a distant mic, a neck mic, a mic on the hole. They even miked my breathing. They miked the guitar in back. So Roy Halee was a genius at getting around. The first time we were listenin', they killed the breathing mic. And they had an ambient mic overhead, which picked up the two guitars together, I suppose. And so, I was breathin', I guess, pretty heavy in rhythm. And they wanted to take out that noise, and they took it out and said, 'Naw, we gotta leave that in.' That sounds almost like a rhythm on the record. So they left the breathin' mic on for the mix. I played
Tele on it and a
Twelve-string, three or four guitars on it. I was doing different guitar parts. One was a chord pattern and rhythm pattern. Did the
Dobro lick on the regular six-string finger Dobro—not a slide Dobro. I never heard the total record until I heard it on the air... I thought: That’s the greatest record I heard in my life, especially after the scrutiny and after all the time they spent on it and breakin’ it apart musically and soundwise and all of it. There was some magic in the studio that day, and Roy Halee captured it. Paul and I had a really nice groove. The song has only one drumbeat, played during the 'lie-la-lie' refrain. The session drummer
Hal Blaine created the heavily reverberated drum sound with the help of producer Roy Halee, who found a spot for the drums in front of an elevator in the
Columbia offices. The recording of the drum was recorded as the song was being played live by the musicians. Blaine would pound the drums at the end of the "Lie la lie" vocals that were playing in his headphones, and at one point, an elderly security guard got a big surprise when he came out of the elevator and was startled by Blaine's thunderous drums. Hal Blaine recounted the recording process: "There we were with all these mic[rophone] cables, my drums, and a set of headphones," says Blaine. "When the chorus came around—the 'lie-la-lie' bit—Roy had me come down on my snare drum as hard as I could. In that hallway, by the elevator shaft, it sounded like a cannon shot! Which was just the kind of sound we were after." == Lyrics ==