I also think it was recorded the way you describe it with mono microphones on all the individual instruments hard-panned left or right.
There are these little knobs on the mixer I use now for Zoom musical performances of an Elementary School band, marked "Pan", so that one can move a single microphone or direct input to a position in the soundfield, from hard left continuously through the center all the way to hard right. That's a standard feature on a mixing board. I had an Ampex MX-10, this was pre-phantom power and had switches, left, right or center, for a crude mix of the output. That antique was probably made before 1962 and was used on a lot of recordings as it was designed to be used with Ampex decks, which were the industry standard at the time. I moved very quickly to one of the compact Mackie boards with pan and tone controls. Had the big old 1970's desk from Music from the Hearts of Space, that had controls for panning. So, yeah, panning a mono signal in a stereo soundfield is standard operating procedure and started, as far as I can tell, with Tom Dowd at Atlantic records.
No - not really. I was suggesting that PA systems in many venues - especially those that host classical music performances, tend to be very good. That track reminds me of the sound I remember from performance by the Reuben Gonzalez and his band at the Paramount theater in Oakland, California.
I don't know when you went to Yoshi's. I managed to make a few recordings at the old Yoshi's for the San Francisco Early Music Society in the 1990s and heard Abbey Lincoln at the new Yoshi's near Jack London Square. The old Yoshi's was good enough for recording, I recall some noise from lighting, and that room was acoustically dry, so a little reverb in postproduction could help. Much better to add a little reverb to a dry recording than to have a recording without focus or too much reverb to begin with. I would suspect that the new venue would be better for recording as it's a well-designed smaller venue where acoustics were a major concern, ideal for everything up to a big band. Having a bigger room makes things more difficult for recording a live concert that is also going over a PA at the same time. Those types of recordings tend to be coming more from the direct microphone feeds, which are also used for the PA. The PA itself, the room sound, is mostly avoided as it can cause the kind of sonic confusion heard on the live Buena Vista recording previously cited. This sort of PA/recording was a major concern of Owsley Stanley, and his work on many Grateful Dead concert recordings was a breakthrough in live recording of Rock.
I go there very often.
swear 1 of her CDs sounds like she passed the entire mix thru reverb. intentional or not, made my skin krall.
It will always be a subjective call, but speaking as someone who grew up playing the piano (we had 4 pianos in our house at one point - dad was a music teacher), I've always most loved the sound of a piano while playing it. I loved the vividness of timbre, the nuances I could hear.
There's another YouTube of this, sounds like that one suffers from major data compression. This, the "offical" YouTube, is more in focus. I remember hearing "The in Crowd" when it first managed to sneak over to the top 40 and R & B outlets. The drums sound close and wide [overheads?], the bass is more vague but properly balanced. The piano sits so firmly in the center I'd guess it's got a spot microphone, but capturing the audience involvement requires a stereo pair, so this is a bit of hybrid. And I think the trick with this track was the audience engagement, which is contagious. I think this is a case where vibe and performance make up for slightly less than stellar engineering. Determining how this was miked is conjecture, I'll confess that I don't particularly the piano sound on this, but that really doesn't matter as much as how well the audience is captured, paradoxicaly.
The folks at EMI were late adopters, that was one of the complaints that the Beatles had. And if you got an inventory of device X from 1959 you might not want to replace it with the latest and greatest on account of $. In any case, "Tomorrow Never Knows", recorded earlier, has stuff panned in something other than a left/right/center arrangement. And I can't tell you how they did it, but the rhythm guitar for "I'll Follow the Sun" [1964] is on the left between hard left and center with the same sort of placement in reverse on the right for the lead. "Purple Haze" is left/right/center. The "Are You Expeienced" album sounds pretty crude compared to what was to follow. "Living for the City" is loaded with panning effects but focuses on left/center/right. But listen to those drums, and Stevie, mid-right and mid-left at the same time:
The Beatles regularly did weird stereo stuff. I think it's "The Sun King" where the guitar keeps moving from left to right and back etc. Quite annoying. I guess stereo was a newish toy back then...
1969: a lot of bands went nuts with panning:The Beatles regularly did weird stereo stuff. I think it's "The Sun King" where the guitar keeps moving from left to right and back etc. Quite annoying. I guess stereo was a newish toy back then...
I'm kinda surprised at how many times I've recorded piano. A lot were ORTF. I had a tall stand, a stereo bar, two small diaphragm condenser microphones, cardioid, 7" inches apart, aimed out about 105 degrees, aimed at the event. That was my default for many concerts because there would be only one microphone stand and I was used to recording this way. It usually interfered with the musicians warming up the least of all options. And it was the least messy arrangement. I was told about the "tail shot" technique later on, was told that was Decca's default and found that I liked it much better. A lot of the 30' wide piano can come from ORTF miking of the instrument from the audience's perspective, that will produce a treble left/bass right separation of the keyboard. A tail shot will get more of the sense of physical body of a piano, in large part because there's more bass, but also because it's closer to mono.
Nope, they are about 7ft apart. But they are set up the right way for my listening position, so they do project a stage very nicely - when the recording allows for it. My point is that it is bizarre when there is a stage for all other instruments *except* the piano, which spans the entirety of it. Many others in this thread seem to agree.
By some fluke, had a somewhat damaged Steinway B from the 1930s in my living room for about two years. It was tossed around studios then collected to pay a debt, rolled off the back end of a truck and had spilled coffee damage on the hammers for the penultimate bottom octave. One might say that an aleatory process rendered this instrument into a [somewhat] "prepared piano". Eventually, a pianist bought and refurbished it.
as well as its resident cat, turning it indignant. I can attest to that. :-D
And one of my faves. Curious about her voice, hope I can find that on amazon music playback.