Why is earlier Beatles material in Stereo separated terribly?

I think GM felt at liberty to do those 'Help!' remixes as he only did (IIRC) eight of the original ones, Norman Smith having done the rest of them. I really do dislike those remixes; the excessive reverb on Lennon's lead vocal on 'Dizzy Miss Lizzy' in particular.

 

Fake stereo was new, cool and exciting? I suppose it might have sounded so, with wording like "electronically reprocessed for stereo." That sounds pretty high tech. Too bad the result was decidedly low tech.

 

A lot of the early stereo mixes weren't that great in any genre. You can hear Stax songs that sound a bit weak in their stereo form. Motown's mono songs often sounded better and had more punch than their stereo counterparts. And since people became stereo crazy, labels had to resort to fake stereo like what Tom Dowd did at Atlantic and of course the Duophonic stuff. This isn't a Beatles related phenomena, most acts and labels at the time had stereo issues.

 

Not just The Beatles, some tracks by John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers have (e.g.) drums in the left channel and guitars in the right, etc...

 

EPS was not what I was referring to...I'm sure you were aware that that wasn't the norm. Glorious stereo was...

 

OK! let the stereo bashing bandwagon begin! LOL!

 

They didn't remix them, they used a true stereo source.

 

George Martin goes into detail in that interview that has been quoted on this site many times. The pre-"I Want to Hold Your Hand"/4 track Beatle recordings were recorded on 1 or 2 track machines. The only goal was to record vocals and backing separately so that the vocals could be blended with the backing track. Most were recorded live and overdubs were accomplished with tape edits.

After IWTHYH and 4 track, Martin's team used the technology to delay final mixing decisions, but at every step of the process, most of the serious decisions about mixing were being made as the songs were being recorded. Many times they didn't even use 4 tracks.. often using just 2 or 3. Creating an ambient stereo recording was NEVER a goal of the Beatles engineers. Even to this day... technologically sophisticated studio rats like Lindsey Buckingham still prefer that the elements in their mix be multitrack mono panned across a stereo soundstage for the clarity this creates rather than trying to combine a bunch of stereo soundfields.

George Martin in his explanation said that he always realized that stereo was growing as the dominant format and as time went on he mixed with it more in mind.. but in the first years of the Beatles he was mixing for a young British youth market for whom mono recordings and radio were the only format they would experience. His job was to make effective records that would cut through on the equipment they had. In America, mono was also dominant but you had several major labels making serious attempts to market stereo and a rapidly growing industry of stereo products as well as the late 60s emergence of FM radio... America's relative wealth and hi-fi stereo market created the demand that was eventually satisfied by the overwhelming embrace of stereo in the mid to late 60s. By the time of Sgt. Pepper, Martin says, he was trying to create a "stereo picture" ... a soundstage. It was NEVER ambient and always primitive. You just didn't have serious backing of stereo or QUAD by EMI or Capitol (OK OK.. well they had FULL DIMENSIONAL STEREO!) nor was Abbey Road, despite the technical acumen of it's staff, particularly involved during the sixties in surround products(yes there were Ambisonics or Ambiphonics but no one was trying to stuff all that into someone's home stereo!). You'll find that most of those sort of techno geeks were working out of independent American studios or at RCA or something!

Geoff Emerick's redesign and building of APPLE STUDIOS promised some amazing things in the future had the Beatles ever survived to record in such a facility. They never did. We'll always be the poorer for it. To sum up.. George Martin and team recorded the Beatles as one would have sensibly recorded such a band at the facilities they had. Rock and roll combos were NOT considered serious recording subjects. You put them in the corner of the room.. came up with a decent sound with some reverb and punch and tried to get a decent sounding record out of it. As Martin's work with the Beatles progressed... he brought to them the excellence of Abbey Road's classical recordings for the overdubs of strings and horns that were featured in their work. Meanwhile the engineers, some younger, some more familiar with rock than Martin pushed to record their rock combo instruments in deeper, more powerful ways. The advent of stereo was slowly included in this... the albums from Revolver to the White Album show an experimental use of stereo while maintaining the high technical standards of the mono recordings and products. Still, without specialized mixing boards, more tracks, OR what would have seemed to Abbey Road's staff(in postwar Britain as opposed to postwar America) as wasteful and unnecessarily complicated overuse of technology, there is no way to get ambient stereo with deep bass and high resolution(in a record being mixed at that time in THAT studio) as maybe we would prefer(i.e. some Anthology remixes and the controversial Yellow Submarine Songtrack, the Help, Hard Day's Night and Magical Mystery Tour DVD's) ... they had their limitations.

 

You say it so correctly.. "wasn't the NORM!!!" just last night I was looking to replace my little voice recorder I use to take notes. It's a cheap sony I got at Best Buy.. when I went I was in a hurry.. they had a mono digital recorder for 49 bucks and a stereo one with a nice stereo mic for 79 dollars.. I just needed it to record a meeting so I bought the mono one! As I looked for the replacement I saw the stereo model with two nice mics on either side and I got to looking for one of sony's compact external mics because my sister used to make such great stereo recordings of live music with these tiny sony mics. So in my own way.. I'm like the President of EMI records and the chief of Abbey Road studios.. I'm deciding not to break the bank just to record relatively simple sounding stuff in stereo when MONO will do just fine! Even if I had a 4 channel digital recorder it would make no sense to record the meeting that way and then to go home and start fiddling around on my computer and making the sound of the guest speaker rotate around the room and make a 5.1 mix with lots of echo and reverb. Just as they wouldn't have thought The Beatles or The Hollies warranted the same level of equipment or attention as the London Symphony Orchestra or an experimental recording by a modern classical composer of the time.

 

We keep hoping the remastering people will get their even bigger and better computer and do the honors for the Beatles in Surround boxed set

 

And yet there are plenty of well-balanced, lush, punchy stereo mixes from 1959~through to the arrival of The Beatles.

Stereo mixes released by Dion and The Belmonts, The Everly Brothers (WB), The Fleetwoods, Roy Orbison, The Shadows, The Ventures...I have original stereo pressings of those and many more from the era where the stereo mix is actually better. Yes, it's counter-intuitive, but it's there.

Ever hear the stereo press of Manfred Mann's 1965 UK LP Mann Made? It's exceptional, wonderful and I dare say I prefer it to the mono.

 

But the beatles didn't do anything live. Even their first album had many overdubs. And George Martin wanted to have as much mix flexibility as possible when he did the mono mix. And that meant seperating vocals from instruments. And we can argue over wattage and spl but the fact remains that it would still make the vocals too loud on the mono or too soft on the stereo. End of story.

 

It is important to note that few people in the UK who bought Beatles and other pop music had stereo. The Beatles' early albums were recorded to make the best Mono mix. Stereo was less important and vocals and instruments panned hard right and left was perfectly acceptable if you hadn't had access to Classical recordings. At the time this is what most people would expect from stereo. Stereo (in the form of the stereogram) only really took off from the mid sixties. Granted most UK pop stereo recording was technically a year or two behind the US up till 1968 when mono records started to be phased out. Stereo seperates really only reached the UK mass market around 69/70.

 

this is absolutely correct, what's more stereo was very much a fad in the early 60's and as has been said nearly all units in the UK were in the form of stereograms..hard panned sounds made stereo more noticeably different on such reproducers, records with more subtle stereo separation on a stereogram would sound little different to mono, not exactly a good sales tool for your new 89 guinea stereogram !!

 

"I don't know why the hell we did that. I'll have to ask George Martin." -- John Lennon on WNEW, NY; 1974.

 

I have a feeling that if Lennon were still with us, we would probably have had official remixes of at least some of the material- the sound of some of those Beatles records drove John bugs--t it seems, calling the stereo "Revolution" 'ice cream' and whatnot...he might not have been able to make good on his threat to 'rerecord' all those songs but I'm sure he'd jump at the chance to remix 'em to his satisfaction. He probably woulda dug the Mono LP set.

 

Not at all.

Some stereo mixes are great, I hope no one thought I was complaining about stereo. Why would I? I was just saying a lot of the Beatles early work didn't sound great in stereo because of the times and because of things like duophonic, etc.

 

Most of this has already been covered, but to touch on a few things:

Well, yes, but what's your point? Things by other EMI artists *were* recorded directly to stereo, with mics panned to places other than hard left and hard right. But twin-track was specifically used to allow more flexibility after the fact. The concern was not stereo, the concern was creating a good mono mix. Could a "nice" stereo mix have been made live, with a live delta mono mix? Yes. But 1) creating a "nice" stereo mix wasn't a concern, and 2) if overdubs were necessary (and they often were), the stereo recording of the basic track would have to be used to overdub too, meaning the subsequent balance wouldn't be quite correct in mono.

Completely incorrect. There was no difference in creating a stereo mix from a 4-track source after the fact and creating a live stereo mix from multiple microphones. They simply chose not to in the case of The Beatles, for the reasons listed above.

They were definitely overdubbing early on, but to say they didn't do anything live, without any overdubs, is incorrect.

 

Actually I remember being a child in the early 70s and being amazed at hearing some instruments and/or vocals in one speaker but not the other.

Nowadays, I obviously find it annoying.

 

You are right. I have no idea how on earth i could make that statement. Must have been tired of someone not understanding the process of twin track recording. What i meant was that often what you hear on the record had an overdub. But many many basic takes were live. And always in their first years.

 

I remember reading about the controversy at that time (along with CDs being based on the U.K. albums, resulting in many hits not being released on CD until after the albums had been released). My understanding is that the original CDs were based the U.K. albums and the early albums were released on LP in mono.

As far as horrible stereo separation goes, I've noticed this on many songs (such as those from The Mamas & The Papas and Gary Lewis & the Playboys) where the vocals are greatly separated or the vocals are on one side and the instruments are on the other. I do agree that it is a bit distracting when listening to a song.

With The Beatles, on the early albums when they were recording on two-track it wasn't for stereo. Instead they would record the instruments on one track and the vocals on another and then combine them into one mono track. It allows for independent adjustment to the levels of the vocals and instruments and I remember reading that it would give a better sound in mono. Plus, if a mistake was made in the vocals they could just re-record the vocals. With one of the German-language records they did just that, they used the same instrument track but re-recorded the vocals.

 

You might have misunderstood what I meant, or maybe I worded it wrong. I didn't necessarily mean that they couldn't do a live stereo mix on 2 track, but that George Martin never chose to do so as it was more flexible the other way for overdubs and balancing. Correct me if I'm wrong.

 

You're correct that it was a choice/working method, not a technical limitation.

 

and they were so wrong!

 

was minimal and the Beatles in Stereo was a glorious thing back in the 60's!