What groups had the vocals on one channel only? I can think of the Beatles and Spanky and Our Gang. I wonder why they did this. If it was a mistake due to lack of experience with stereo listening then it was a big mistake for the Beatles since they were so popular. i think I heard a soul group from the 60s did this also but can not remember the song or group.
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Stereo songs with main vocals on one channel only
- Thread starter stevations
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A lot of early stereo records (and some not so early) were mixed in very extreme stereo separation to create the "ping-pong" effect much in demand with stereo fans of the 1960's. You might hear the vocal on one channel and the instruments on the other, or a group divided between two mikes. Some other examples would include the Mamas and the Papas, the 5th Dimension, the Kingston Trio, a lot of the Kasenetz-Katz "bubble gum" productions (Ohio Express, etc,) Peter, Paul, and Mary; David Seville and the Chipmunks, Ray Charles' "Hit The Road Jack," Jane Morgan's "The Day The Rain Came Down," etc. A couple AM oldies stations in my area have problems with broadcasting only one stereo channel in mono. Beatles karaoke, anyone??
At one former station at which I worked (very briefly!), I heard an instrumental version of "Twist and Shout" by the Beatles over our in-studio monitor. Whether or not it went out over the air that way, I do not know. This was a small AM station carrying a satellite feed.
With this sort of "stereo," your choices are karaoke or a capella.
With this sort of "stereo," your choices are karaoke or a capella.
Single-channel lead vocals fell out of favor after the 1960s, but there were a few uses of it more recently: for example, the album version of Del Amitri's 1995 hit "Roll To Me" was mixed with the lead vocals only in one channel. However, the radio version was mixed with the vocals in the center.
For anyone who might be interested, there's a computer program out there called the Musereo Mono To Stereo converter. I've used this program to create fake stereo versions from mono. With a little bit of practice you can move the vocal to the center. In my opinion, many of my "converts" sound better than some of those poor stereo issues from the '60s. There's also a guy on You Tube that does a great job of converting mono to stereo.
http://www.musereo.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/DoctorKmix
http://www.musereo.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/DoctorKmix
So many of the small town AM stations I worked for that were built in the 60's and 70's did not have their satellite feed, automation, CD players, tape decks and turntables wired for mono into the control board.
I remember playing the Beach Boys "Don't Worry Baby" off the LP "Endless Summer" and the lead vocal was missing. My PD heard it and a quick look under the console showed the turntable only had one channel hooked up to the preamp. A quick run to Radio Shack for some Y-adapters fixed that.
I remember playing the Beach Boys "Don't Worry Baby" off the LP "Endless Summer" and the lead vocal was missing. My PD heard it and a quick look under the console showed the turntable only had one channel hooked up to the preamp. A quick run to Radio Shack for some Y-adapters fixed that.
In the early days of stereo, some mixing engineers purposely did not use the "phantom center channel" effect; everything was mixed either hard-left or hard-right. I guess they felt it was too limiting for listeners to need to be in the "sweet spot" exactly between the two speakers in order to hear the center channel imaging correctly, so they decided not to use it at all. And at a time when listeners would place the two speakers at opposite ends of their living room without any concern of where the "sweet spot" would be, I can understand that.
But in terms of pop music placing the vocals only in one channel, that was originally because mixing engineers would take a two-track recording -- originally intended to allow the balance between vocals and instruments to be adjusted when creating a mono mixdown -- and create a "stereo" mix by simply placing one track in the left channel and the other track in the right channel, thus creating the early Beatles stereo effect with the band in one speaker and the vocals in the other speaker.
But in terms of pop music placing the vocals only in one channel, that was originally because mixing engineers would take a two-track recording -- originally intended to allow the balance between vocals and instruments to be adjusted when creating a mono mixdown -- and create a "stereo" mix by simply placing one track in the left channel and the other track in the right channel, thus creating the early Beatles stereo effect with the band in one speaker and the vocals in the other speaker.
WDRC-FM Hartford played a one-channel version of The Mamas and the Papas' "I Saw Her Again" for years. Mama Cass' lead vocal was way off in the distance. I'm not sure they ever corrected the problem before the song "aged out" of the playlist last year.
You're right about the Beach Boys, which reminds me that a lot of Jan and Dean's songs were mixed that way too. (Liberty called it "Visual Sound Stereo.") Another one I remember being in extreme stereo was Joni James' "There Goes My Heart," which according to most sources was the first stereo 45 rpm record. MGM even had a special label and sleeve for the stereo version.
The wackiest was probably RCA Victor's "Stereo Action," easy-listening LPS with various parts of the orchestra being "panned" at random from left to right and back again. On one album, by Esquivel, they went so far as to divide the orchestra between two separate studios, Esquivel conducting in one and Stanley Wilson from Revue TV in the other, connected by headphones! (Now THAT'S stereo separation...)
I have one LP on (I think) Epic called "Voices In Motion" that tried the same trick. The effect is about like putting a 24-voice mixed chorus on roller skates and having them chase one another in a circle...
Couldn't find "Don't Worry Baby", but here's a nice mono to stereo remix of "Wouldn't It Be Nice".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TohJjM8-gb4
Record companies in the 50's and 60's were hyping "the magic of stereo" and asking their engineers to make wide stereo mixes and ping-pong things around to impress shoppers.
I've heard a couple of those "Stereo Action" albums (The Three Suns) and they are crazy, like a little kid messing with the balance control. Just dont try listening to them on headphones!
I have the mono version of "Don't Worry Baby" on this Beach Boys box set that was released in the 1990's. It's a still good box set to get because it has all their big hits in mono. http://www.amazon.com/Good-Vibrations-Thirty-Years-Beach/dp/tracks/B000002UR4 btw the new Beach Boys box set that was released this year has a lot of new stereo remixes.
I hate fake stereo! I've never heard a fake stereo process that sounds like true stereo. A lot of oldies compilations in the seventies used fake stereo. Some fake stereo songs (Roulette Records, Original Sound "Oldies But Goodies" LP's) will sound muddy in mono, or if you played a Capitol "Duophonic" (Beatles, Beach Boys) or an RCA "Electronically Reprocessed" album (the early Elvis albums) the delay between channels creates an really bad phasing effect in mono.
And for many years the only copies of classic oldies on LP were only in fake stereo. I'm just glad when CD's came around there were some smart remastering engineers that dug through the tape vaults and found the mono master tapes to get the best sound. Once they found out how great the pure mono versions sounded, finally record companies realized fake stereo was bad.
I've heard a couple of those "Stereo Action" albums (The Three Suns) and they are crazy, like a little kid messing with the balance control. Just dont try listening to them on headphones!
I have the mono version of "Don't Worry Baby" on this Beach Boys box set that was released in the 1990's. It's a still good box set to get because it has all their big hits in mono. http://www.amazon.com/Good-Vibrations-Thirty-Years-Beach/dp/tracks/B000002UR4 btw the new Beach Boys box set that was released this year has a lot of new stereo remixes.
I hate fake stereo! I've never heard a fake stereo process that sounds like true stereo. A lot of oldies compilations in the seventies used fake stereo. Some fake stereo songs (Roulette Records, Original Sound "Oldies But Goodies" LP's) will sound muddy in mono, or if you played a Capitol "Duophonic" (Beatles, Beach Boys) or an RCA "Electronically Reprocessed" album (the early Elvis albums) the delay between channels creates an really bad phasing effect in mono.
And for many years the only copies of classic oldies on LP were only in fake stereo. I'm just glad when CD's came around there were some smart remastering engineers that dug through the tape vaults and found the mono master tapes to get the best sound. Once they found out how great the pure mono versions sounded, finally record companies realized fake stereo was bad.
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On the other hand, I know record collectors (the same guys I've written about elsewhere...) who claim there hasn't been a "real" stereo record made in over 45 years because that was when the record companies stopped playing "ping-pong." They consider the phantom-center-channel effect just a sort of enhanced mono. You can't please everybody!
Early stereo reminds me a lot of early color TV. It was extreme. You can watch 1967-era footage of performances on Ed Sullivan, and the colors are vivid and vibrant! But as color TV became more mainstream, you saw a lot less use of such vivid and vibrant colors. In other words, we got used to it, so it wasn't "new" anymore. Same with stereo. We got used to it, so a lot less use of the extreme separation of sounds.
Well...this is a little off topic, but... Variety shows always did have the brightest colors, because they were "show biz." You're right about Ed Sullivan; same goes for Dean Martin, Sonny and Cher, and Carol Burnett (before Eunice and her family ate the whole show alive.) The costumes and sets for sketches looked like Saturday Morning cartoons! CBS' engineering department sent a man down to Miami Beach to find out why Jackie Gleason's show had such bright color; he reported back that Gleason was simply ordering the electrician to turn on ALL the lights and really "flood" the stage. That became standard procedure and set the CBS variety show "look" for years to come.
I would rather have a good clean solid MONO copy of any given song, rather than some fake, remixed "stereo" version of it. That said, there have been some cool stereo mixes over the years. But I am assuming that those originated in stereo.
On occasion, when it wasn't laid on too thick, fake stereo wasn't all bad. Recording studios of the 1930's and 40's were designed by telephone engineers, not musicians, and were set up to be as acoustically "dead" as possible. Padded ceilings, heavy draperies, all that. Capitol was the first to build acoustically "live" studios in the 40's, then in the 50's Mitch Miller at Columbia found he could use a seven-story empty stairwell next to the studio as a nifty echo chamber (and, as usual for him, did it to death...)
Point is, some old records like RCA's Glenn Miller hits, can sound better (more lively) with a little reverb added. There are plenty of atrocities of course, like Mercury and Pickwick's fake stereo that sounded like it was recorded inside an empty oil drum, or RCA's Spike Jones reissues that tried to move his sound effects around by alternately cutting out one speaker or the other.
Point is, some old records like RCA's Glenn Miller hits, can sound better (more lively) with a little reverb added. There are plenty of atrocities of course, like Mercury and Pickwick's fake stereo that sounded like it was recorded inside an empty oil drum, or RCA's Spike Jones reissues that tried to move his sound effects around by alternately cutting out one speaker or the other.
I have an LP of Orson Welles' 1938 "War of the Worlds" broadcast that claims to be in "electronically reprocessed STEREO"... but it just sounds like plain mono to me -- thankfully it does not have any reverb or out-of-phase effect.
On the other hand, I have several late '60s LPs where both the jacket and disc label claim it to be the mono version -- yet the LP was pressed in full stereo. I guess by then, it was cheaper to press only the stereo version, and label and sell it as a mono release for those who wanted to save $1 off the price of the stereo release.
On the other hand, I have several late '60s LPs where both the jacket and disc label claim it to be the mono version -- yet the LP was pressed in full stereo. I guess by then, it was cheaper to press only the stereo version, and label and sell it as a mono release for those who wanted to save $1 off the price of the stereo release.
Or perhaps the record company was using up their inventory of mono labels and jackets. By the same token, around that time some hot-shot huckster bought all of Warner Bros' obsolescent mono LPS for peanuts and sold them on the cut-out market adding a sticker to the shrink wrap reading "This Record Playable on All STEREO Phonographs!" (Well, duh...)
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