Why doesn't modern recorded music use the stereo effect much anymore?

[Learjeff]

@Exapno_Mapcase

I asked this question once at a stereo store. The answer I got was that producers exaggerated the effect when stereo was new and faddish because that’s what customers wanted to hear. Over time they stopped doing it because they felt that less separation was musically better.

Beware anything an audio store salesperson tells you, but no doubt that was one reason. IMHO a bigger reason was that they simply didn’t understand how to use the new tool yet.

@Fiendish_Astronaut

Okay, I have a lot of musician friends and asked this on Facebook. Hence my various replies! I’m told this is generally the case with mono recordings on early 4 tracks that are later remixed into stereo. Because there are only 4 channels they have to be divvied up quite widely to create the stereo effect. With so few tracks to work with, it’s impossible to be subtle and still make something different enough to be worth reselling to people.

While it’s true that having only 4 tracks limits your ability to do stereo imaging, it’s not the reason for hard-panning (one instrument on the left, one on the right). I got a 4-track reel deck back in 1978 and over the decades did a lot of stereo mixes with it, never once using hard panning for a given instrument.

@pianohill

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’d be surprised to learn that early stereo mixing consoles had switches rather than pan knobs, but then again, since they didn’t know how to use the tool, it’s also quite possible that they didn’t know how to build the tool. Regardless, any studio of that day had engineers (back when they were actual engineers) who could whip up something as simple as a pan circuit in a jiffy and add it to the processing chain.

However, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that a lot of early stereo was mixed using equipment built for mono, so they used it in the simplest and most obvious ways, and it’s easy to send a signal left, center, or right, but takes a pan pot to go anywhere else.

But I think the main reason they stopped hard panning was that people don’t like it, not after the first time hearing it. Also, it didn’t take long. The stereo transition period was the late 60’s. Before the mid 60’s, stereo was unusual. By say, '69, stereo was typical, and hard panning was pretty much over. No doubt there are examples where it was used, but for every example where it was I bet we can find 10 that were mixed reasonably.

@jz78817

obviously they aren’t, else this thread wouldn’t exist.

Today’s productions use scads and scads of stereo imaging technique. If you don’t believe me, find some gear that allows you to listen in mono (for example, any Digital Audio Workstation on a computer, or even a simple free program like Audacity) and compare monitoring in stereo versus mono. Huge difference.

Definitely the wild uses of stereo, like the chords zooming left to right (or the footsteps, on Dark Side of the Moon), are unusual today, mostly because it’s been done and isn’t novel and doesn’t really suit the music.

[Musicat]

@pianohill

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!

I call bullshit on this entire post. Do you have any evidence of this claim, like a professional stereo mixing console without pan functions in use at that time?

While I can’t claim to be engineering in studios in the 1950’s or 60’s when stereo first came in, I do recall a presentation ca. 1956 that demonstrated the stereo effect by panning in various degrees between left & right channels. The idea of mixing signals, in different proportions, is an ancient idea, not a modern one. Heck, I built a transistorized 2 channel mixer in 1959 at home. Surely professional engineers could do it as well as I could with a 2N127 transistor (99 cents each).

As far as headphones, I disagree with your claim there, too. Headphones were the ultimate in stereo experience and I had some in the 1950’s, higher-quality ones (Koss) in the 1960’s, and they were definitely not rare, especially when you wanted to listen to sounds in a noisy or crowded environment. Not to mention headphones used in studios all over the place.

If some stereo mixes ca. 1950-1970 appear to have an unnatural hard-left or -right sound, my theory is it was just the musical style those days and served to emphasize the then-new feature. I was glad to have it on some occasions, like when I was doing a takedown on a 4-part vocal South African group, The New Light. When there were only two voices on each channel with near-total separation, it made it much easier to pick out each voice.

[carnivorousplant]

I recall microphones in a headphone “headpiece” mounted on a mannequin to record concerts. It was supposed to produce excellent recordings, particularly when heard through headphones.

There is mixing in the Decca recording of Wagner’s Ring, to indicate the movement of characters.

[Ranger_Jeff]

Except for the last 2 Beatles albums, the rest were released in mono and stereo. So let’s put the cutoff between 68 and 69.

Some producers had artists record a mono AND a stereo version. Some stereo versions were fake stereo made from a mono version. And some were mixed to exaggerate the stereo effect. Double tracking was used since the late 50s. Sgt Pepper was recorded on a 4 track recorder. Some recordings had big budgets. Exmas albums generally, I suspect, were done as cheaply as possible, and perhaps it was an assistant or trainee engineer sitting behind the mixer.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@Ranger_Jeff

Except for the last 2 Beatles albums, the rest were released in mono and stereo. So let’s put the cutoff between 68 and 69.

Some producers had artists record a mono AND a stereo version. Some stereo versions were fake stereo made from a mono version. And some were mixed to exaggerate the stereo effect. Double tracking was used since the late 50s. Sgt Pepper was recorded on a 4 track recorder. Some recordings had big budgets. Exmas albums generally, I suspect, were done as cheaply as possible, and perhaps it was an assistant or trainee engineer sitting behind the mixer.

Many Beatles songs were released in re-channeled stereo.

[dropzone]

Ornette Coleman took it to its logical endpoint on 1961’s Free Jazz. Two jazz quartets, one in each channel, Coleman and Don Cherry leading one and Eric Dolphy and Freddie Hubbard the other, improvising together. Totally awesome, and after that what was the point of stereo tricks? Might as well record everything else with Mr Microphone-Head parked in the money seat.

[installLSC]

@dropzone

Ornette Coleman took it to its logical endpoint on 1961’s Free Jazz. Two jazz quartets, one in each channel, Coleman and Don Cherry leading one and Eric Dolphy and Freddie Hubbard the other, improvising together. Totally awesome, and after that what was the point of stereo tricks? Might as well record everything else with Mr Microphone-Head parked in the money seat.

Most jazz stero of the era used a variant on that: soloist panned to one speaker, rhythm section to the other. Heck, I remember reading interviews where the artist complained when this wasn’t done, thus making you unable to isolate the solo.
Back to the main discussion, let’s not forget how poor stereo equipment in the average home was back then. Most households owned those big cabinets with the built in speakers, with the bare minimum of seperation required for noticeable stereo effects. And a lot of teenager had stuff like this. You almost had to hard pan to get noticeable stereo.

[Asympotically_fat]

In my personal (and therefore anecdotal) experience when creating music, taking advantage of panning or a stereo separator to make it easier for the listener to separate different voices does work to a certain extent (which is often not always desirable), however if you overboard with it the end effect will depend a lot on the set-up what it is played back on (which is highly undesirable).

I suppose it comes down to that if you want to take a piece of music and make it sound better there are a lot easier and more effective tricks to use than panning.

[velomont]

@jz78817

Justin Katy Gaga

A slight hijack. You nailed it! My wife and I call it “ho” music:) and it all sounds the same to us.

[bhamrick57]

I’ve been saying the same thing for awhile and really think that it’s just laziness. Listen to Leslie Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” and still think that hard separation was too harsh? The vocal was center, the string orchestra was off center some, the accent notes and drums were panned almost hard left or right but the reverberation was in the opposing channel. The album was produced by Quincy Jones. He definitely understood the spatial effect of stereo mixing and used it here. The same mixing theory was used on her record of “It’s my party”. I was always amazed that Quincy understood the spatial effect in that era when stereo was becoming more widely produced. I do have to differ with the post that said that live performances are mainly mono because of the distance between your ears. Have you ever listened to a chamber string orchestra live in person? If so, you will hear how the notes and different instruments project their sound in different directions and bounce off the room and return to you especially in a church or concert hall that was designed for this type of performance. Stereo recordings can’t quite replicate the acoustics.

[EMB55]

As the number of tracks a console could record went up, the more sophisticated stereo mixes tended to become. That’s obvious enough, but it was also in who mixed the recording, too, since you can find ‘tighter’ vintage stereo mixes but also some very wide as well, that went beyond the number of tracks available for mixdown. On a twin or two-track recording, obviously not much you could do beyond left-right imaging. But with three or more you could easily center a vocal or instrumentation to give the illusion of a three-track sound. These days, digital technology offers, one assumes, virtually limitless tracks, and the more you keep adding for a two-track stereo mixdown master, it’s understandable you might have less obvious stereo effect.

In any specific time frame, you’ll find a wide array of variables in separation from song to song, artist to artist. I think some of today’s music simply sounds compressed and dense (particularly dance styled music with loud beats and a lot of activity of all sorts), which is on purpose.

Personally, I tend to miss mono mixing, which flattened everything yet when well done was still very vivid and complex. And fun! The recent SGT. PEPPER box set has the original mono, remixed stereo and 5.1 multichannel versions, all worth hearing to understand how different mixing limitations can result in very different mixes. And this was only a four-track recording to start with.

ED

[edwardcoast]

@aceplace57

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.

Its very stimulating and fun listening to music that takes full advantage of stereo.

Why is the modern stuff (1980-) so boring? A lot of times you forget its stereo because the identical stuff is blaring out of each channel.

Are modern music producers too lazy to use stereo in a creative way?

This was done at the time because it was a gimmick to show people it was a stereo recording. Recordings since then after the stereo thing wasn’t a gimmick has a goal to re-create what it sounds like to be center stage listening to the entire ensemble play live. In a live situation like this, you don’t hear hard panned left or right for instruments.

When you sit center in front of a real orchestra, you will hear the violins on the left, basses on the right, and many of the other instruments center, which is the way stereo is used now.

It is considered hockey now to mix modern recordings where the drums only come out of one stereo speaker, and it isn’t a natural sound. If you were in front of a live band, you wouldn’t hear the drums isolated like that where you’d only hear it in one ear. But if you put on stereo headphones and listen to old records when stereo was new, many were done like that. They wanted to ensure the public they were listening to stereo, because those recordings cost more money. Many people bought records they already owned in mono in stereo because it was the new thing.

[edwardcoast]

@Exapno_Mapcase

I asked this question once at a stereo store. The answer I got was that producers exaggerated the effect when stereo was new and faddish because that’s what customers wanted to hear. Over time they stopped doing it because they felt that less separation was musically better.

I think that makes sense. In addition, many early records were recorded in mono. For stereo release they were redone using rechanneled stereo. This artificially separated highs and lows, or put voices on one side and instruments on the other or whatever they could fake. Purists hated it then and it sounds even more phony today.

But I’m old enough to remember the cool effects from 60s stereo and miss them too.

For listening to old jazz recordings when they first started coming out in stereo, that were studio albums, it is interesting to hear the musicians sound more isolate so you can hear just their solos without the rest of the ensemble. But this is really of something of interest. It isn’t the natural way you’d hear them live in-person like at the Blue Note in NYC.

[Channing_Idaho_Banks]

Led Zeppelin features some distinctive stereo separation. I had a car with one channel that didn’t work and I remember thinking how cool the songs sounded with only half of the instruments playing.

[mack]

@carnivorousplant

I recall microphones in a headphone “headpiece” mounted on a mannequin to record concerts. It was supposed to produce excellent recordings, particularly when heard through headphones.

There is mixing in the Decca recording of Wagner’s Ring, to indicate the movement of characters.

Sennheiser Binaural Microphones is one version of that.

Sadly, my mannequin head outlasted the mics. The battery case, more precisely.

https://reverb.com/item/1227796-sennheiser-mke-2002-complete-binaural-recording-microphones-system-very-rare

[Musicat]

@edwardcoast

This was done at the time because it was a gimmick to show people it was a stereo recording. Recordings since then after the stereo thing wasn’t a gimmick has a goal to re-create what it sounds like to be center stage listening to the entire ensemble play live. In a live situation like this, you don’t hear hard panned left or right for instruments.

When I was in Junior High School (now called Middle School), we had an assembly given by Bell Telephone where the presenter showed us how stereophonic sound works. This was before home stereos were commonly available. Even HiFi was unaffordable except to the rich aficionados.

The demonstrator played a ping-pong game and the sound of a train passing by from right to left. The obvious directional signals the entire audience heard were dramatic and impressive. No wonder the home recordings tried to reproduce this phenomenal effect.

40 years later, not so much.

[Weisshund]

Might have been weird or unnatural, but i kind of miss the effect, it kind of suited the material recorded.

You’d kick back, and poof ringo was over behind the couch, you could almost picture him with his kit stuffed in the corner behind it, and johns guitar amp was over on the other wall.

I think it only works well with things that are simpler recordings, not too many tracks/layers

[Munjero]

Found this question as I was asking why this effect is not used anymore. I agree with some of the comments that it was “over exaggerated” in its use, however there are definitely many cases where the song is much richer and enjoyable as a result. Case in point, the song that I was listening to that landed me on this page: “Mrs. Robinson” by Simon and Garfunkle. The left right channels really add to the song.