True of course but the point is the sound engineer was trying to produce something different from the mono version. Little point being subtle; he would have been encouraged to bring out the stereo effect as the release would have been marketed as a new “improved” version.
Yeah I have a Mamas & Papas CD that does this and I find it horribly distracting.
I really liked the effect on the guitar solo for Boston’s “Peace of Mind”.
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Are modern music producers too lazy to use stereo in a creative way?
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If it helps, I make a lot of nutty stereo effects in my own music when mixing.
I actually think that stereo effects (ping pong type echoes, panning, chopping, off-set double tracking) are far more common today than compared to the 60s, but hard panned left/right separation of all instruments and vocals is far less common. However, I listen to a lot of music in the vein of psychedelic, post-rock, and art rock styles where these effects are likely more common. Nowadays, there are lots of guitar effect pedals with interesting stereo effects for use with two amplifiers or two channels on a mixing board.
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I’ve been listening to a lot of Christmas music recorded in the 50’s & 60’s. I’m loving their use of the stereo effect. They’ll have totally different music in each channel. Chorus might be in the right and the lead in the left. Then they’ll change it up. Or even better the leads will answer each other in each channel.
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I’ve long had the impression that stereo mixes were not common until the mid-60s. What stereo mixes from the 50s are you listening to?
Lots and lots of 60s songs did this. The one I remember best is Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” in which the guitar slides back and forth on one fantastic chord - right through your head on headphones, and still groovy when played loudly on speakers. That’s a **cool **effect that was perfect for the song.
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The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland album has lot of stereo panning, and the Zippo cigarette lighter slide guitar solo in ‘All Along the Watchtower’ (at 2:00) is certainly a fine example.
John Culshaw’s book Ring Resounding describes how they used stereo to record Der Ring Das Neibelugen for an operatic experience at home better than the opera house.
You wanna hear really bad early over-use of stereo? Just listen to The Beatles **Sgt Pepper **or The White Album! They literally, and I mean literally, have all the vocals on one channel and all the instruments on the other! Listening on earbuds is almost impossible!
Funny you should mention this.
I’m not sure how/when/who, but many (all?) tunes from that era have been digitized and made available to modern radio stations. There is at least one M&P song – I think it’s Monday, Monday – that, when transferred, was done with only one channel as the source, spread out to two stereo channels. Most songs, that wouldn’t be noticeable, but due to the separation, the main vocal drops out at spots where it was originally on the other channel. I have heard this several times in public places or over radio stations.
It makes me wonder how many other songs were badly transferred like this and are now frozen in a digital package.
I should imagine that chemicals were involved in recording that album.
Heh. I used to make some wild sound poetry things when I was trying to figure out the basics of recording “in the box” and never got tired of the hard pan “effect” (among others). I don’t listen closely to a lot of contemporary pop today, but I’ll take it under advisement that the hard pan days are pretty much over. It is a pretty obvious gimmick considering all the other immaculate effects out there now at a mixer’s disposal.
I think I remember hearing quite a lot of this in the pretty dense tracks of instrumental groups of the 1970s – Herbie and the Headhunters, among others. Can’t be sure without listening again, though.
One place it’s still used, I know, is where you have two pianos, or two organs – like in a jazz record. It’s kind of cool and it makes perfect sense.
Didn’t know Jimi used a Zippo as a slide (at least that once) – I started using my old Zippo when I took up smoking a pipe, and now I’m proud to do so.
There was an interview in TapeOp (couldn’t find it online, but didn’t look too hard) with Bob Clearmountain where he discusses his use of this effect in his mix for the movie “Shine On Me” (about the Stones) – like, someone walks across the stage, and he’ll pan to follow the performer, bring up the person the camera is on, all that.
What was that movie, a couple of years ago? Pretty recent, but he says he caught hell from armchair critics who thought BC’s own mix was taken out and somebody else’s replaced it – but it’s what “Marty” wanted, and Clearmountain says he’s proud of the work he did and thinks it works awesome in the movie (haven’t seen it, despite being a huge Stones and Scorsese fan). Great interview – maybe it is online at TapeOp’s site somewhere.
“I Saw Her Again” is the same way. In fact, I was going through my Zune last night and noticed a fair number of songs that use dual-channel stereo to varying degrees. Interestingly, the song “Free To Be (You and Me)” was recorded in stereophonic sound, but the spoken-word tracks on that album weren’t, which surprised me because having different characters on different channels would have made those tracks much better.
To answer the OP, the kind of stereo you’re describing actually is lazy, sort of. When you produce an audio track, be it analog or digitally, the last step is to do something called a “mixdown”, which means that you combine both the left and right tracks into a single track that is still in stereo, but has a more blended sound. In the dual-channel stereo that you’re describing, “stereo” albums were created from mono recordings, but these were left alone, with no further mixing. The marketing wizards glommed on to this and promoted this “stereo” as a good thing. Modern audio production software takes no time at all to create the desired effects, and even less time to do the mixdown. (Well, the mixdown still takes time, but you can go to the bathroom, have a cigarette or do something else while the software is doing its thing.)
And, truthfully, some of the changes in technique are reflective of the fact that the way we listen to music has changed. Most of us listen to music through headphones or on a computer or cell phone, where the speakers aren’t really meant for music. Consequently, technique has changed to make music sound better on those devices. Compared to the stereo you’re describing in the OP, the newer stuff sounds flat, but it’s still in stereo and some of it still uses some amazing effects. It’s just that there’s no reason to use the old way for most music, so it isn’t used much anymore.
This may be a considerable hijack, but…
One of the most innovative uses of the stereo mix I’ve ever seen was a song on a 1970-ish Casey Kelly album, Escaping Reality. (Sorry, I can’t find it on YouTube…maybe I should upload it.) It put the main vocal on L & R tracks in mono, but 180 degrees out of phase, just for the chorus.
If you’ve ever heard, with earphones, such an effect, it’s pretty weird. It feels like your ears are pulling in opposite directions and you can’t localize the sound. This was made even more odd since the background instruments were in phase in a normal stereo mix and the main vocal seemed to float above them.
The lyrics said:
You can find me on a tropic island,
Sailing on a crystal sea,
Blue skies above, happy as I can be.
In my own milk and honey pie-land
Sleeping underneath a tree,
Dreaming of love, escaping reality.
So the out-of-phase sensation matched the lyrics. Clever, eh?
But the LP jacket warned radio disk jockeys not to play it for broadcast, since anyone listening to it in mono would lose the entire vocal at the chorus. Two out-of-phase signals exactly cancel each other!
There has been a significant improvement in understanding in how stereophonic sound works, and how imaging and localisation of sound is done. Early stereo recordings were naive in their use of the technique, and this was also reflected in the the likely listening environment.
Two modern examples of well developed, if more subtle use of stereophonic recordings.
Most high quality jazz recordings put a huge emphasis on creating an almost hyper real imaging of instrument location. This works very well for small ensembles, recording of which are loved by a certain subset of audio enthusiasts. On a good quality system the imaging can be unnervingly pinpoint. An individual instrument can appear to come from a well defined spot anywhere in the space between the speakers, and sometimes even from a space wider than the speakers. (Personally I think the people that love this sort of thing need to get out and listen to more live music. In real life it just doesn’t sound like this.)
It isn’t just a matter of panning the instrument. Stereo location may also make use of phase information, and also uses some HRTF (head related transfer function) changes to the frequency response. This leads to the other form of well developed stereo. Binaural, or dummy head recording. Where the recording is done with two microphones embedded in the ears of a precise model of a human head. The industry standard being the Neumann KU100
When listened to on headphones the system can create a sense of space and image location that is quite uncanny. It isn’t perfect - the head is an average, and won’t match your own head characteristics precisely, and when you move your head whilst listening the sound field doesn’t change accordingly. (There are research systems that do try to monitor head movement and compensate, but you need a lot more than two channels of sound input.)
A lot of the stuff done with a binaural setup is rather gimmicky (the classic is the virtual haircut, available here along with some other interesting recordings.) There are serious recordings, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra has a number available for download. The Saint Saëns Organ Symphony is a favourite of mine. The stereo effect is simply a matter of putting you right there. It isn’t over the top, just rather real.
the main reason for the hard panning is simply because the old consoles were limited to 100% left, dead centre or 100% right.
When the stereo effect first came out, there wasn’t a dial where you could set it say 10% to the left- it was either completely on or off.
I suspect once they had the option of applying the stereo effect in smaller increments, the current trend was to go hard left / right, so over the years it would have slowly eased back to being applied more sparingly.
Headphones were not a huge thing back then either; music was played mostly on hifi systems so the balance was not as noticeably fuck-eyed!
There was not a potentiometer that mixed the channels? I had one even on the circuits I did not build.
:dubious:
That’s good because it was (and is, almost fifty years later) a perfect song.
There’s still tons of hard panning in recording, especially with electric guitars. You’ll hear a lot of “layering” of guitar work in rock music. I actually quite like it. Panning two or more (almost) identical rhythm parts hard left and right creates a dissonance because no matter how hard they try, it’s not quite exactly the same.
I agree that panning vocals, drums and bass into one speaker or headphone is past it’s prime. Early Van Halen recordings were like this.
You think correctly, sir.
The thing I always tell people when this subject comes up (and my friends are probably sick of hearing it) is that the word “stereo” comes from a Greek word meaning “solid.” Stereo doesn’t mean “two speakers;” it refers to the spatial illusion created by a stereo recording.
Sharply-defined separation in stereo recordings has always seemed a bit odd and unearthly to me, because we don’t hear things that way in reality. The craziest example I can recall is the Decca Phase 4 series, where it sounds like every instrument in the orchestra has its own channel.
On the other hand, when listening to Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound” mono recordings, I find myself wishing for just a little separation.
If anyone these days, it seems to be film and TV producers who use an exaggerated separation effect. Back when I used a VCR I had my own copy of Star Trek VI, whose initial explosion during the title sequence would just about bowl you over when the sound was run through my stereo system. Even with just the stereo speakers in the TV it was impressive, and that was a 20-inch Panasonic portable which I’d bought back in 1989.
That was also the first TV I owned with which I could be watching any kind of program taking place outdoors, for instance a wildlife documentary, the various sounds and noises might appear to be coming from anywhere between two points well to the right or left of the television. Of course ST:VI is an old film and, now that I come to think of it, I probably haven’t seen enough recent movies to judge whether the producers still favor this style of sound, or rather have dialed it back a bit.
Ironically - or possibly coincidentally, I’m just listening (yet again) to Harvey Mandell’s “Wade In The Water” that employs the exaggerated stereo effect with excellent results, IMO of course.