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Backmasking: A Short History of Reversed Audio in Recorded Music

By The Reverse Song Team · October 1, 2026

If you want to hear what reversed audio sounded like before phones, find a late-1960s rock record with a backwards guitar solo and listen for the notes that swell in and stop dead. That sound, once a studio novelty, has been part of popular music for more than half a century.

“Backmasking” is the word usually used for recording a sound backwards onto a track that is meant to be played forwards. This post is a short, factual history of how and why musicians and engineers have used reversed sound, from early experiments to the one-click reverse button in every modern audio editor.

Before tape: playing records the wrong way

The idea of playing recorded sound backwards is almost as old as recording itself. Early experimenters noticed that a phonograph or gramophone turned the wrong way produced strange, swelling sounds.

The best-known early artistic use came from musique concrète, a movement led by the French composer and engineer Pierre Schaeffer in the late 1940s. Schaeffer and his colleagues built pieces from recorded everyday sounds, manipulated on discs and later on magnetic tape. Their tools included changing speed, looping, cutting and splicing, and playing sounds in reverse. Reversal was one technique among many for turning familiar sounds into unfamiliar ones.

The tape era: flipping the reel

Magnetic tape made reversing practical. Tape stores sound as a continuous strip, so if you turn the reel over and play it, the sound runs backwards.

The basic studio method went like this:

1. Record a part, such as a guitar line or a cymbal hit, onto tape.
2. Physically flip the tape so it plays in reverse.
3. Either record a new part over the reversed playback, or copy the reversed sound onto another track.
4. Flip the tape back so the rest of the song plays forwards.

On multitrack tape, flipping the reel reversed every track at once. A guitarist recording a backwards solo would hear the rest of the song playing backwards in their headphones and play along to that. When the tape was flipped back, the rest of the song ran normally and the new solo ran in reverse.

This is the same principle as the reverse singing challenge: perform against the reversed version, then flip it, and your performance comes out the other way round. We explain the acoustics in why reversed audio sounds so strange.

The 1960s: reversed sound goes mainstream

By the mid-1960s, studios were treating reversed tape as a creative tool, and a few records made it famous.

Year	Artist	Track	Documented use
1966	The Beatles	“Rain”	A reversed vocal in the closing section
1966	The Beatles	“I’m Only Sleeping”	A guitar solo recorded to sound backwards
1966	The Beatles	“Tomorrow Never Knows”	Tape loops, including reversed sounds
1967	The Jimi Hendrix Experience	“Are You Experienced?”	Reversed guitar and drum parts

The Beatles’ engineers and producer have described these sessions in interviews and books over the years. For “I’m Only Sleeping”, the solo was worked out so that it would make musical sense once reversed, much like a reverse singer working out sounds that will flip into the right words.

Reverse reverb and the swell

A related technique is reverse reverb (sometimes called reverse echo). The engineer reverses a recording, adds reverb, records the result, then reverses it back. The original sound now plays forwards, but its echo arrives before it, as a rising swell that leads into each note or word.

The guitarist and producer Jimmy Page is widely credited with using it on The Yardbirds’ “Ten Little Indians” in 1967, and it has been a standard production effect ever since. You hear its descendants today in the rising swoosh before a beat drops, or the reversed cymbal that leads into a chorus.

The 1980s: a word gets a reputation

In the late 1970s and 1980s, “backmasking” became associated with public claims that certain records contained concealed reversed words. These claims attracted a lot of media attention and were debated at the time.

The more useful lesson for anyone interested in reversed audio is about perception. Reversed speech is full of sounds that are almost, but not quite, English. People are very good at hearing words in ambiguous sound, especially when someone has already told them what to listen for. This tendency to find patterns in noise is a well-known feature of human hearing, and it applies to any reversed recording, intentional or not.

That is also why reverse singing is such a good party game. Your brain wants to turn nonsense into words, and the challenge plays with that urge.

Radio edits and practical reversing

Reversal also found a practical job. Clean radio edits of songs have sometimes reversed a single word to make it unrecognisable while keeping the rhythm of the line intact. It is a quick fix that removes the word without leaving a gap.

The digital era: one click

Digital audio editors made reversing trivial. A digital recording is a list of samples; reversing it means reading the list from the end. Every modern audio editor has a reverse function, and producers use it routinely:

• Reversed cymbals and piano notes as transitions
• Reversed vocal snippets as texture
• Reverse reverb swells on vocals and snares
• Reversed sound effects in film and game sound design

What once took a careful tape flip now takes a menu click. Reverse Song’s Quick Reverse puts the same thing on your phone: tap record, and hear it reversed straight away. Our guide on how to reverse a voice recording on Android shows how.

From the studio to the challenge

The reverse singing challenge borrows directly from the tape-era trick of performing to reversed playback. Instead of a guitarist playing along to a flipped multitrack, you sing along to a flipped line of a song, then flip your attempt and see if the original comes back. The reverse singing challenge explained post covers how it works, and how to sing a song backwards gives you the method.

Reverse Song’s built-in lines are all public domain, from songs like Greensleeves, Danny Boy and Wellerman, so you can practise and share freely. See the songs page, or how it works for the full flow.

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