In the sixties, it was common for stereo records to have certain instruments only on one stereo channel. The most famous is probably “Satisfaction”, where the stereo mix has only vocals, acoustic guitar, and piano on one channel. That means you don’t hear the famous electric riff at all but you do hear instruments you probably didn’t even know were on the record. I used to work at a store whose radio only played one channel, and I’d always root to hear “Satisfaction” because it was so weird! Can you name any others? Why did they stop doing this, and have all instruments on both channels?
Perhaps because the 60s albums weren’t originally recorded in stereo, but were later made stereo-like by separating instruments onto separate channels?
This is called rechanneled stereo. It had a trade name of Duophonic.
Stereo was a fairly rare process well into the 1960s. The vast majority of people had record players with one speaker, monophonic systems, so there was no purpose to spending the money to engineer stereo records, some of which didn’t play that well on mono systems. Most of the early British Invasion records were in mono.
Halfway through the 60s, stereo gear came down in price. Suddenly everybody was clamoring for stereo records. And not just new stereo records but stereo versions of The Beatles and the other acts.
So they came up with this artificially processed sound that would strike the ear differently from different speakers. As the link describes, what results is not really stereo but more like two half-recordings. Purists went apoplectic. (Dave Marsh, the famed idiot rock critic, is more laughable on this subject even than usual.) Most people didn’t care that much and true stereo predominated after a couple of years.
When stereo first came out, it was novel and people wanted to hear the difference, so some early albums dramatically separated the instruments like that. But fairly soon thereafter it was realized that the real purpose of stereo is to re-create the soundstage so it sounds ‘real’. Any time an instrument comes through one speaker only, it sounds like you’re listening to a speaker, and not to the instrument.
That said… If you have a proper stereo setup in a good room, you can still hear dramatic separation between the instruments. I’ve got lots of music where you can hear the sax center-left, the keyboard far right, the singer in the middle, the guitarist on the far left, etc. You just don’t hear that artificial, collapsed ‘instrument in a speaker’ sound you get when it’s 100% mapped to one channel.
With the advent of multi-channel audio formats, you hear even more separation. I’ve got Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” in SACD (or DVD-A - can’t remember) and it’s very, very cool. When the clocks start ringing at the beginning of ‘Time’, they are very precisely placed in space around the room. You hear a chime over your left shoulder, a bell ringing on the wall to the right, etc. Even more pronounced, on one track there’s the sound of footsteps running - and they circle the room. If you close you eyes, you would honestly swear you’re sitting in a chair and someone is running in a circle around you. It’s pretty neat.
Back in the early 1970’s, a friend of mine was a DJ at a local FM station. One night he made me a tape off of some of the master tapes the station had.
One of the songs was “Time Won’t Let Me” by the Outsiders. One channel was all music and instrumental with no vocals. Although it is a great song, I had him record me just the instrumental track just because it sounded so good. If you listened real carefully, you could just make out a little bit of the vocals, but it was very faint and muddy. Could have been merely a little cross-over from the tape or record it came from.
I have since heard this song on the radio that was similarly separated, but none quite as completely.
I remember back in the day when some records were made that emphasized the whole stereo effect–my favorite was the soundtrack for the movie “Grand Prix” which started out with F1 cars starting at one side and zooming past to the other speaker. My dad was one of those “What Kind of Man Reads Playboy” kind of guys who fancied himself the audiophile so he had the bigass speakers mounted on each side of the room and if you really cranked that record and sat in the middle it sounded GREAT!
I just recently acquired a FLAC copy made from a set of the original masters of The Hollies Greatest (1968.) The tracks were originally recorded in mono but had that fake stereo-ization done on them. It was really amazing how much better those tracks sounded in the original form–I’d only ever heard the stereo’ed tracks before and I have to say the recordings lost a lot from the treatment.
The Beatles’ stereo LPs are full of stuff like this - specifically, I remember “Drive My Car” as having really wide separation with no vocals in one of the channels. (I used to have a car stereo with just one channel. And, uh, I was playing cassettes made from records, I didn’t have a turntable in the car.)
John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” and “My Favorite Things” have the sax in just one channel.
A few points:
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Probably the song that does it for me is **The Super-Natural ** by John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers featuring Peter Green, off the album A Hard Road. Green coaxes operatically-long, sustained notes of feedback that pan liquidly from one ear to the other. Like, cool, dude.
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It is my understanding the Jimmy Page innovated the truly hard-pan mix with the Zep albums. The way I have heard it discussed was that Page was trying to fit more signal into the vinyl and so try to isolate each instrument so it would have its own space. But it set the blue print for a lot of rock recordings to come. Kinda the opposite of, say, Exile on Main Street which is a subterranean garble (which I happen to love hard, btw).
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When it comes to mono vs. stereo, I guess what matters to me is whether the producer used whichever approach to its best advantage. Listening to Phil Spector, Brian Wilson and the Beatles, there are clearly advantages to working with a full, unseparated canvas. Perhaps because the ears needn’t expend effort processing separation, they can handle a more fully loaded single channel - I don’t know, but it sounds epic when handled appropriately. And then, constrast that with, say, The Super-Natural, or the big Whoosh in the middle of, what is it, Free Ride? Sounds cool. And with Zep, being able to dial in so hard on the guitar because it is carved out and in its own space is probably a major factor in Page’s Guitar God status - you could really pick him out and study him…
All I got for now.
Pink Floyd did lots of experimentation with Quadraphonic sound - it’s taken till now with multispeaker home theatre systems for average home setups to catch up. I saw Pink Floyd live in 1987 - when they kicked off with Money, the coin/cash register sound moved round the stadium - absolutely awesome. I’m glad that the four-track material is now available - maybe there will be more bands that use the technology.
Si
Not exactly what you’re looking for, but Nine Inch Nails’ “Happiness in Slavery” was the first song I’d ever heard that specifically had rhythms that switched channels and then worked together to create a stereo noise rhythm. It impressed the hell out of me at the time and still sounds pretty cool.
Is this what Les Paul is considered responsible for making mainstream?
I think it was partly because they could, and the novelty wore off. Styles change in mixing as well as hair and clothes.
With today’s multitracking, it’s easier to put voices or instruments all on one side or the other than it used to be. It just isn’t the fad at the moment.
Nevertheless, the stereo effect is alive and kicking. It may sound to you like all instruments are on all channels, but if your sound system has a mono button, press it and see how different things sound. Then go back to stereo and see how the sound “spreads out.”
Many instruments are now being recorded in stereo even if they don’t seem to lend themselves to it. That allows a more effective stereo mix to be created. Like a single sax, for example. If stereo miking is used, the mixing engineer has more options.
In the early days of multitracking, tracks were few and at a premium, so instruments were often combined to save tracks. Now, digital recording allows an almost unlimited number.
Les Paul is credited with much experimentation with multi-takes of the same instruments or voices. At first, he combined an existing recording with a new live one, then repeated the process, building up layers, but he couldn’t separate them later. He had to mix “on the fly”. Then, when true multitracking became available, the mix could be done later as each take was preserved and separate.
Les Paul said that he recorded voices “backwards” – Mary Ford did the least significant part first and the most significant part (melody) last. Since each time a new voice was added, the previous ones degraded slightly, the ones that degraded the most were of least importance! It must have been a lot of time and work.
Well explained Musicat. I think of Les Paul as inventing multi-track overdubbing, as well as countless other innovations. The recent documentary, Les Paul: Chasing Sound does a great job on telling Rhubarb Red’s/Lester William Polfus’ story…
The Beatles, during the Revolver and Rubber Soul period, did some interesting stuff with separation. I don’t have anything to listen to here at work, but I believe I remember that the vocals could be isolated from the musical tracks fairly completely by panning from one channel to the other. One song that I find particularly striking is In My Life. If you listen to the side which has most (if not all) of the instruments on it, it sounds amazingly sparse. There’s bass, drums and a little bit of guitar, and it sounds pretty dead. When you listen to the vocal side, you hear nice voices in harmony, but it also sounds pretty empty. When you listen to the balanced mix after that, it comes to life. It doesn’t seem possible, to my ears, that those two sparse tracks could possibly add up to the beauty of the full mix, but they do. Genius at work.
A surprising amount of songs on your typical classic rock station have different parts in one channel only. I was in a band a few years ago and we had a 14 hour drive to a show with only local radio in the van to keep us entertained. When we found a song with seperate parts in different channels, we’d switch the balance to just one side and try to sing the missing instrument parts or vocals.
The funny thing was that we were an improvisational electronic music band and didn’t play anything remotely like the music we were singing to.
Nice to know that I’m not the only one who noticed.
Its something I find missing from a lot of modern music’s production. Ok, so its would probably be tedious if its was done too much…
However, if you listen to any of the early Dave Lee Roth solo albums, his guitars and drums are constantly switching speakers as if they are on opposite sides of the room. You don’t tend to notice it so much unless you have headphones. Or at least I didn’t.
Dude, listen to Pink Floyd with headphones.
The Broken EP came with a disclaimer in the liner notes that it was not be played on mono equipment:
Two different things are being confused here.
The OP is asking about stereo mixes where vocals are heard in one track, and instruments are heard in the other. That is not “Duophonic” sound, where a monophonic recording is processed with a sound delay between one track and another to create fake stereo.
Virtually all major record labels, American as well as British, recorded onto multi-track systems after 1958, when the first commercial stereo records were released. Most studios used three tracks (RCA in 1957). Four-track systems were introduced in 1966, and eight-track in 1968.
All were mixed down to a two-track stereo master. Sometimes the mix would be very unimaginative: vocals on one side, instruments on the other, as with a lot of early Beatles songs and the Stones’ Satisfaction. Other times the instruments would be distributed left and right, with vocals mixed into the middle.