Stereo recording with separate vocal and instrumental channels??

This may be a stupid question, but I just bought a vintage Japanese pressing of Blossom Dearie’s “Once Upon a Summertime” on Verve and even though the record jacket says STEREO, her vocal track is on the left channel and all the instrumentals are on the right. Is this common in older recordings? It sounds great, just...split.

Thanks!

David

 

Yes, in older Stereo mixes (until around the late 60’s), extreme stereo panning was the norm.

 

Yes, quite common in that era.

It IS stereo; different signal in each channel, that's the whole idea...

 

Thank you for responding. I just wanted to ask the group. The more you know....

 

The Velvet Underground - The Gift

 

Isn't there a SH forum member who likes "WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O"? Or is this a different concept?

 

I have a box set of Bob Marley and the Wailers' Scratch Perry recordings that presents a lot of the songs this way. I completely loathe it. There are long instrumental passages where one ear is just completely dead.

I've actually gone into Audacity to fold them down because otherwise I can't listen to them.

On the other hand, "A World Without Love" by Peter and Gordon...

EDIT: Also "Eve of Destruction" by Barry McGuire. more or less.

 

Not very good stereo, it recreates no stereophonic sense of space, especially when there's no crosstalk or actual mixing.
And if you listen with headphones I believe you would have biphonic not stereophonic.
But it is stereo in the sense that you have two separate speakers in your own space.
The early stereo Beatles are separated that way (as most people here will tell you).
The newest album I have that does this type of mix is Aimee Mann's 2005 The Forgotten Arm where the songs That's How I Knew This Story... and I Was Thinking... starts out with piano in the left and voice in in the right only.
And the Indigo Girls 1989 self-titled album had Amy and her guitar on one speaker and Emily and her guitar on the other for the first few songs, until I guess the engineer got tired of that.

Were any Dylan type folk albums this way? It must have seemed crazy even then to have the guitar 12 feet from the singer playing it. Probably why it seemed better faked with echo and maybe the odd tamborine post-recorded for one of the channels.

 

It’s is a commonplace occurrence, yes.

See almost every Beatles stereo recording thread in this forum!

 

ah, just wonderful...there are many excellent examples.
Beatles
Gary Lewis & The Playboys
The Turtles
Hollies
and many others...

 

I have a memory of Bob Dylan's self-titled debut album being mixed this way in stereo. Unfortunately, I can't find any stereo mixes on YouTube. Only mono. And I've long since sold off that album.

Maybe a Dylan expert can chime in here and confirm if my memory serves me well...

 

First 2 Beatles albums are probably the most notorious example of this