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Rock SnobberyFilm SnobberyFood SnobberyWine Snobbery
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Leslie, the. Hefty chunk of audio hardware originally designed as an amplifier for the HAMMOND B3 organ. The Leslie is distinguished by a high-range speaker horn that rotates atop its cabinet, lending a strange vibrato and distortion to the sounds that are processed through it. The Beatles forever expanded the utility of the Leslie when, eager for a dramatic effect in the final verse of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” they broke into the circuitry of the cabinet and fed John Lennon’s vocals through the speaker. Ever since, the Leslie has been put to similarly exotic uses—to make guitars sound like sitars on the Box Tops’ 1967 hit “Cry Like a Baby,” and to make Mick Jagger’s vocals sound sinister on Exile on Main Street. More recently it has enhanced Portishead vocalist Beth Gibbons’s atmospheric keening on a song entitled, in tribute, “Leslie.”