I was listening to an Easy Listening station this week and heard what seemed to be a solo version of Denny Doherty singing the Mamas and Papas hit “Monday, Monday.” But as I continued to listen, it seemed instead to be the original M&P song with (almost) all of Michelle Phillips and Cass Elliot (the Mamas) edited out. There was none of the “Bada, badadada” lines by the Mamas except very faintly at the beginning of each verse. All of the echoes of Denny Doherty by the Mamas were gone - Doherty would sing the line (say, “Every other day”) and instead of the Mamas repeating the line there would be a pause, then Doherty would sing the next line right on cue.
I’ve listened to the original countless times on the radio and on CD, but I swear what I heard was the original M&P song, just no Mamas. Anyone else familiar with this?
Stereo separation.
It’s most likely that they had the balance adjusted all the way to one side. On the original recording the Mamas are on the left channel and Denny on the right channel.
OK, this is one question I’ve been working on for a long time. First, the separation in some of the M&P recordings was a little more than we are used to today, so if one channel is absent and you have good ears, you will probably notice it more than other songs.
Decades ago, I observed this same phenomena on one radio station, and I called them to tell them something was wrong with their stereo mix. Needless to say, the engineers thought I was crazy and could find nothing wrong.
This happened again, in another town, on another station, and I made another phone call with the same result.
Then another town, this time hearing a different radio station over restaurant speakers. Over 30 years, since my ears perk up when I hear M&P, I’ve heard it several times.
By now, I’m getting suspicious that my diagnosis is wrong and the radio station (or canned music service) isn’t at fault, but when I compare what I hear with the original tracks in my collection, both LPs and CDs, there certainly is something wrong with the radio play and only one original channel is present, routed to both stereo channels in the output.
So here’s what I think is the reason. Long ago, some company or studio dude converted tunes from some original source to a package provided to radio stations. When new stations are formed, the same converted songs are sold to them. Why would they ever go back to the original recordings?
I suspect the company that did the conversion made a technical mistake, probably on other songs as well, but it’s less noticeable on most, and unless some music fan can track this down back to the culprit, it will never get fixed.
Don’t get me started on the Mamas & Papas…I’ve been collecting technical anecdotes on them for years…
My thoughts as well. My mother has a somewhat unreliable speaker on her home stereo, and this is much more apparent on some songs than others. I once had the odd experience of hearing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” this way, and there was a whole section near the beginning where the song became just quiet drumming and Bowie counting backwards. Creepy. Had the other speaker been on the fritz, it would have been just the guitar and the “Commencing countdown, engines on” portion of the lyrics.
Since then when I’ve suspected that my own speakers were acting up I’ve put on “Space Oddity” and it becomes obvious.
I have always said that there’s something wrong with “I Saw Her Again,” but I can’t explain what the problem is. I’ve heard it since the song first came out (yeah, I’m that old), and each time I try to figure out exactly what sounds wrong to me. It doesn’t matter whether it’s on the radio, CD or LP. It just sounds wrong.
They have fixed the CD in regards to that Stereo Seperation. I bought a CD of “The Mamas and Papas” when CDs were first coming out and it was HORRIBLE to listen to with a walkman. It sounded OK in a stero but in a walkman you definately annoying to clearly hear the seperation.
I recently saw the same CD marked as “reissued and enhanced” at the library so I checked it out and you no longer have the “seperation” like the older CD has.
So no one believes my theory? Not even a discussion about it? What am I, chopped liver?
Notice that it applies only to radio station airplay, not CDs, LPs or cassettes, but the OP said it was an Easy Listening radio station that caught his ear.
The way to test the stereo separation or channel assignments on a standalone player would be to play a different recording, ideally a stereo test record (do those exist for CDs? They used to be available for LPs). If it happens on all recordings, it’s your system, not the recording.
And what is it about the Mamas & Papas mixdowns? They seem to have been done by an engineer who was stoned at the time, and left stuff in that should have been mixed out. In Creeque Alley, IIRC, a flute is “tuning up” at one spot. No way that was supposed to be a solo. And a previous take of the word “reality” is left in so it sounds like “-ty” in the wrong place when the engineer punched out too soon.
I’m replying from memory, but I think you are referring to the entire group seeming to jump the gun, not just Denny. “I saw her…I saw her again last night…” If so, while that always bothered me, it was so prominent that I had to believe it was an intentional arrangement filagree. Maybe not.
I spotted some of these when the CD was first released. The separation was better than the LP, and I heard some things on one track that I couldn’t remember having heard on the LP, However, going back to the LP and checking carefully, I found the flaw there after all; they were just not a prominent because of the poorer stereo separation of the medium.
By “fixed,” do you mean decreased it (more blend)? I haven’t heard a remix or the enhanced version, but I don’t think the first CD releases were remixed.
Or mixdown tastes have changed. Onceuponatime, stereo was so novel that engineers often went to great lengths to keep tracks distinct so you’d hear the effect and moaned about the poor sep available on consumer LPs (max about 15db).
Another set of major victims of stereo-separation mayhem in the radio-mix tracks: Beatles American releases on Capitol, from the middle period. Paperback Writer gets hit mighty hard. I’ve heard it happen to other mid-60s music, come to think of it; apparently part of the problem is that the recordings were often produced as if (or indeed with the intent of being) for monaural pressing, with each instrument/vocalist on a mono track; and when it was decided to release (or rerelease) them in stereo you’d end up with this unnaturally forced “separation” as they’d essentially just take the final number of mix tracks and leave half on one channel and half on the other.
Having worked at a cheapo college radio station, I remember that the poor man’s version of stereo-> mono conversion is to patch the left channel of your stereo source to the mono output device, which will clerly result in the OP phenomenon. It may be that somewhere in the radio station’s or programming source’s hardware/software, the functional equivalent of that is happenning to the information in the recording. And yes, Musicat, I only get this OP phenomenon on radio broadcasts. Seems someone at the station is not monitoring the actual air signal and taking on faith that what s/he sends into the box is what is coming out the tower…
That’s a novel theory, but I’ve been in many studios and hung around many performers, producers and engineers, and I’ve never heard that. And it doesn’t make sense. First, it will only work if you have a multi-track master (more than 2), which wasn’t common until the 1960’s (rumor has it that Sgt. Pepper was recorded on a 4 track machine with copious overdubs).
In the 1950’s, the recording industry was realizing that many mono recordings would have to be redone in stereo. While professional studio desks has multiple mic inputs, a 2-track master was the ultimate unless you were Les Paul (and even some of his experiments were not true multitrack until later).
I don’t understand. Are you saying that a left channel signal played to both speakers sounds more like stereo than a mono playback? Just how does that work? Is it like putting a colored filter in front of a TV and calling it “color”?
Then, when I made my phone calls and talked to the techs, don’t you think they could have fixed it? Consider this:[ol][li]All the playbacks from multiple radio stations in different parts of the country, over several decades, but of the same song, exhibit the same characteristics, and []No other song, played immediately before or after that recording, exhibited the lack-of-channel characteristic, and []Several engineers said their station was wired correctly and hadn’t been altered for a very long time.[/ol]Consider that these radio station engineers and jockeys only play sounds as they are supplied to them, in whatever medium. If you start up a station today, do you go out and purchase 5000 CD’s to digitize? No, you subscribe to a service that feeds you digital conversions either live from a central source or on a compact computer storage device. Long ago, these hits were digitized, and since people want to hear the hits as they remember them, there’s no incentive to re-digitize them even if new, “enhanced” or remixed releases are available.[/li]
I don’t fault the radio stations for this. They’re not expecting problems of this sort (there’s sound on both channels, what could be wrong?), and I imagine if you played this bastard recording to 100 people, not many would tell you that something was wrong with it. There’s no equipment at the station to detect such an error. Only a rabid fan like me would ever call to complain.
But that’s the thing, I only hear the phenomenon on stuff from that “transition period” if you want to call it that. I don’t hear that problem with Houn’ Dog or She Loves You, but I do hear it with California Dreamin’ or Paperback Writer.
No – I’m talking about a cheapotech jerry-rig tactic we’d use when we had to create stereo source → mono endproduct by which we would fake it using just the L channel. Sometimes it worked well enough to trudge through; other times we’d hear the OP phenomenon: whole pieces of the track MIA. Which is why we tried by all means to only use it for spoken-word material.
Still and anyway, back to the OP situation – we’re not talking about audiophile-level differences, we’re talking that what comes out of our radio speakers is audibly missing major pieces of the music: one or more of the singers, or one whole section of instruments or another, has been muted to the point that if you have a moderate degree of background noise, it’s not there… it affects a number of very popular tracks, is evidently prevalent over a wide market and has been over years. And nobody has ever gone to the station with an off-air tape and said: “Guys, THIS is what it sounds like at home”, and the engineer has never asked the company that feeds them what’s the deal with that?
Is this the same phenomenon I’ve run across where the singer can hardly be heard over the instrumentation? It seems to happen on oldies channels more than any other, though I can’t recall if it happens with specific songs.
As I explained, around the time stereo first appeared, ca. 1955-1965, many recordings had exaggerated separation. I have an LP from ca. 1958 with a 4-part male harmony group from South Africa singing pop tunes. On one a cappella track, 2 voices were on one channel, the other 2 on the other channel and no blend. They had been recorded in isolation, so the stereo sep was the max you could get with an LP. I know this because I was grateful for it – it made it much easier to take down the actual voice lines.
Other recordings – Enoch Light comes to mind – were entirely studio based and represented a new concept. No longer did the engineer have to worry about mic leakage since instruments could be recorded individually and at different times. This naturally led to different mixdown practices and what nowadays seems extreme separation.
There were even demonstration recordings of ping-pong games and railroad steam engines passing from right to left illustrating how you could detect movement in the sound field. I had some of those played at my high school at an assembly called just to show what stereo was and how it worked.
Styles in recordings have changed. We’re tired of ping-pong games now; we just want to hear music like it sounds in front of a band.
If you mean trying to get sound out of two speakers, even tho it is the same sound, instead of just one speaker, fine. But that’s not stereo or even pseudo-stereo, it’s dual channel mono. Stereo has different signals sent to each speaker, even if those signals are only slightly different or minimally out of phase.
Piping the same signal to one, two or ten speakers is still just mono. If you take a stereo signal, eliminate one channel and duplicate the other, the amount of information you will lose depends on how different the tracks were in the first place. Most modern stereo recordings, not much. Mono spoken word, none at all.
Basically, what you describe is what I believe happened to the transfer of Monday, Monday, not at the radio station level, but somewhere in the pipeline before it.
First of all, I tried something remarkably like that, and I told you what happened. Do you have any idea how futile it would be to physically show up at a radio station with that kind of claim? Radio stations don’t solder wires together, don’t tinker with components, and at four of the local stations I have been in recently, don’t have a single CD in the entire premises. They are run remotely, with little or no technical personnel, and the ops wouldn’t have the slightest idea what you are talking about or how to fix it. Even the announcers aren’t at the station – they’re sent from thousands of miles away or stored in computer files. Some stations don’t even have any humans at all; they’re entirely automated. They don’t know what’s inside the computers and don’t dare touch anything. They couldn’t fix the problem even if they understood it.
And it’s absurd to think that anyone at a station cares if one song has an odd mix. They’re not music aficionados, but business people. They sell ads and pay the bills; they’re hardly music lovers or historians. If they get a song reported as defective, they will just remove it from the permanent playlist.
The “company that feeds them” is probably long gone, having done the transfer 40 years ago. It’s a little like buying a piece of sheet music of Steven Foster songs. It was engraved over a century ago and just reprinted again and again. No one alters this kind of stuff, they just repeat it, errors, stylistic concepts and all.
Maybe Louie, Louie? As I mentioned in a previous post, mixing styles change.
It’s pretty convenional to have a soloist centered L-R, and the loss of one channel would not lose much of the main singer, so I’m not sure what you’ve been hearing.
As an interesting side note, an artist named Casey Kelly recorded a song in the 1970’s that I liked. He sang a solo for the verse, centered in the stereo mix, but at the chorus, his voice, but only his voice, was placed on both channels, but 180 degrees out of phase. For those of you who know how this sounds, I think you’ll agree it was appropriate for a song called Escaping Reality. It was especially effective if you were wearing headphones, where his voice sounded like it was coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.
Wisely, the album cover advised DJs to NOT play this on the air, since anyone listening in mono would hear no voice at all during the chorus – the phase difference would cancel the voice only, leaving the background sounds unaltered. Needless to say, this song didn’t make the Top 40, but it was a neat effect.
Wiki is my only source, but I love the story that John Sebastian’s false start going into the final verse of “Darlin Be Home Soon”, was done deliberately to make fun of Denny Doherty for his “I Saw Her Again” false start.
Also from Wiki, Paul McCartney’s reaction to the “I Saw Her Again” false start:
No Wiki entry for “I Saw Her Again”, this is all cited on the main Wiki page for The Mamas and the Papas.
