I would go back and change the masters to early Van Halen recordings. That Ted Templeman style of “vocals and drums in your left ear, guitars and bass in your right” was always kinda…off to me.
I agree with this. VH’s recordings are pure and pristine in tone, but the separation is static and simplistic. IMO it sounds great on a loud room-filling speaker system, but is noticeably distracting to me when listened to on headphones.
Another album that occurred to me…Primus, Frizzle Fry is also poorly done with respect to the drums. They sound like Folgers coffee cans rather than an actual drum set.
They sure did some strange things in the 60s. On the album Good Times by Sonny & Cher, some tracks have all the vocals in the left channel and all the instrumentation in the right. What were they thinking!?
Conversely it would have been nice if almost every ZZ top album hadn’t been destroyed by horrid reverb and drum machines when they produced the CD.
I can say that there are many albums that could have used better recordings but it is rare for a production to “improve” the great albums.
I would love to go back to pre-loudness days.
I would disagree on the drums on Frizzle Fry too, they sit well in the mix in the original and really sound bad in the re-mastered release. Hi-Fi is not always ideal.
That’s better said than I. Van Halen’s sound is great. Their separation sucks. I prefer most everything to come from the center, as it were, particularly for a mostly sonically straightforward rock band like VH (not so much for a band like Pink Floyd).
And its funny you mention Frizzle Fry…I just listened to “John The Fisherman” not too long ago and thought the same thing…“damn, that drummer can really play but his drums sound like shit!”.
Yes.
Also, the Foo Fighters first, eponymous album. Great music, but the mix is so flat, it sounds like I have a copy of a copy that was ran over by a dump truck.
I *think *stereo was new, and they wanted to make sure you could hear that it was stereo.
Go listen to Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver and note how the drums are stomping all over the bass though.
Same reason you end up using the bridge pickup in guitars with “harder” music, it tends to have a less pleasing sound but it sits in the mix.
I doubt Frizzle Fry would have been a success with hi-fi drums, the hook on most of the popular songs would have been lost in the mix.
Not that it was a perfect recording job but their later material with “better” recordings were less accessible.
No, that wasn’t it. The first stereophonic records were released in 1957, and there was a rash of “stereo demonstration” records in the late 50s and maybe into the early 60s to sell the concept. But by the time of Good Times (1967), stereo was so well established that the record companies were about to stop pressing mono LPs altogether.
The production is piss-poor, but I think the cheesy 80s arrangements on that album, are what almost ruin it, with tinny synths and cardboard box drum machines. The whole of I’m Your Man is a tribute to how good Cohen’s songs are that they aren’t actually ruined by their awful execution, but the whole album really needs to be redone with a sparse, bare, stripped-back sound like early Cowboy Junkies or the Civil Wars.
Joni Mitchell’s first album, Song to a Seagull sounds like it was recorded over the phone.
Hüsker Dü was the first band I thought of, as well. And Warehouse and Candy Apple Grey had better production than the SST stuff. They really need to get their shit sorted out and remaster that catalog.
I’m a Kiss fan, and I think the album “Music From The Elder” would have benefitted by never having been produced at all.