[Angus Kerr]

On Friday, October 2, 2015 at 3:51:32 PM UTC+2, JackA wrote:
-snip-
Not that I'm going to stop you, but I really wonder why.....

-Angus.

Angus, a very fair question to ask. If audio was meant to be heard one way, there would have been no quadraphonic, Surround Sound, Stereo and/or Mono, etc..

My goal was to find something "unusual" about US Top 40 songs, even a simple count-off is welcomed. A co-worker found a Rolling Stones tune on YouTube that he knew I'd be interested in. The next day when I asked for the link, it had been removed from YouTube, since it involved multi-tracks. Later, I track these multi-tracks down and find some of my favorite song, unedited, possibly never to be published. It's the same with Van Halen tunes, the hits fade, but the multi-tracks continue on - just what I was looking for.

Some songs were remixed, like All Right Now, by the group, Free, in 1991, and it recharted, Top 10, in the UK. So, who really says a song should only sound one way? Besides, after I heard (multi-tracks of) Band On The Run (McCartney), I lost all respect for Abbey Road. Obviously, someone there didn't like McCartney or their audio skills were meant to butcher the song.

Finally, I lost interested in stereo sound when man HAD TO have a zillion tracks (staring early 70's) to record with and away went the thrill of Stereophonic Sound.

Jack

ramble

Look, whatever floats your boat, that's fine.

From what I've been told, from the mid sixties till the early seventies, the state of the art tape recorder was a Studer J37, which did a whole 4 tracks. I think they might have been able to sync two together to get 8, but a lot of the early stuff like beatles, doors etc, was in quasi stereo, where the final 2 tracks were separate tracks with no panning in between at all. As I have been told, you recorded 2 tracks or 3 tracks and then bounced them down to 1, even maybe while playing live with the 3 playing leaving 3 free tracks. The limitations of the day means you weren't able to bounce down to a stereo pair, since you could only start with 2 tracks anyway.

I would have thought they monitored in mono when they mixed the final tracks. What amazes me is how well balanced some of that stuff sounds, considering that in some the kit and bass are on one channel and the vocals and guitars are on the other.

I'm sure when 24 track 2" came around in the early seventies, people breathed a sigh of relief, because if you were running 4 or 8 tracks, you really had to plan your production, and you could find later on that the composite track didn't really sit well in the mix, there wasn't much you could do.....I really take my hat off to those early pioneers, because they made great sounding records with gear that is much more limited than the average guy nowadays has in the most basic of systems.

When I started recording, all I had was an 8 track, and if you wanted to record a band, your setup for a fully miked up kit would be kick, snare, 1 for toms, 2 overheads (5 tracks) and 1 more for a mash up for everything else on a mono guide track (bass, guitars, vocals etc). You then bounce the kit to a stereo pair, while eqing, gating and compressing whole shebang (kick drum and snare and overheads for what you hope will work in the final mix), and then cross fingers that you've got the levels and eq good enough that the song works. Once you start recording overdubs over the separate drum tracks, there's no going back. And you've only got 6 tracks left. Bass, guitars and vocals and backing vocals. Maybe another submix, and then a finger riding old school mix with manual 'automations' of reverb sends, muting, etc.

The mix was a performance in itself, I often had all my fingers busy once I had upgraded to 16 tracks, and if you mad a mistake, you started again. Once you were happy with the mix, you reset the desk for the next song. If a remix was required, you would have to set up all the eq, reverbs, compressors and whatever else you had going, and start again.

So that's a small glimpse of what the engineers and producers had to do. No automation, until the late 80's (I think) and even then only the most expensive studios had that.

I started in the late nineties, I was using 2 synchronised 8 track hard disk recorders, each of which had a 500MB hard drive that could do 20 minutes of audio! To back up the sessions, it did this via stereo optical pair 2 tracks at a time to a DAT machine, the 20 minutes of 16 track audio took 160 minutes! Just last night, I transferred 275MB of audio onto a friends cell phone in a matter of seconds.

But, I do think bear in mind what people, particularly in the sixties had to work with and what constituted a 'mix'. It was manual, and extremely limited.

I still think it's much better to develop your skills by taking a multitrack from a band you don't know, recorded in a rubbish space and make it sound amazing.

/ramble

-Angus.