Beatles and panning question

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JerryD

JerryD

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Today I was listening to different bands from the Beatles to matchbox 20 trying to get an idea of good panning and mixing.

Question:

On the Beatles earlier stuff like "Daytripper" all the vocals are panned to the right. The bass, snare, and toms are panned left.

Obvisouly they got the sound they were looking for. My question is why didn't George center the vocals?

Were they trying to get more of a stereo effect doing all of this?

Yes I'm new to recording.

Any response would be appreciated. Thanks.
 
stereo was pretty new back then, so they never really figured out the "best" place for stuff....also I think at some point you could only pan left or right, or was it left ,right, and center with no "in-between"...(someone help me out here, I wasnt even born yet).....
 
I dont know why they didnt put the vocals in the center but it shure is annoying to listen to.
 
Stereo was new, subtle use of it would have been too much like mono, I bet a whole lot of jaws hit the floor the first time people heard it.
 
One more thing

On Eleanor Rigby, or whatever, the vocals are panned right except on the chorus where they are center.

On my software I can pan once for each track. How can you pan back and forth with one track throughout the song. Or is that even a good idea?
 
What software are you using....on N-Track, you can draw a pan envelope or you could actually pan it with the onscreen mixer controls.....
 
OK

OK thanks.

I'm using samplitude, cooledit pro, and Vegas.

Trying to figure out which one I like. I will try N-Tracks also.

Thanks.
 
Mono was king in the days of "Day Tripper." George Martin and Geoff Emerick spent a week doing the mono mix of "Sgt. Pepper," and only a day or so doing the stereo mix. Also, a lot of what we heard in America was NOT how George Martin intended it...Capitol records would remaster his tapes. I would love to hear all Beatles material from 1965 through 1967 in mono (Rubber Soul, Revolver, Pepper), as nature intended. I know that a vinyl copy of the mono Sgt. Pepper fetches big bucks nowadays. I haven't been lucky enought to hear it yet!
 
I don't think it was that they didn't know where to pan stuff as some above posts imply ... cause other recordings of the time, were panned properly.... I believe it was more of a experimentation...thing the beatles did.

Joe
 
I guess that it's all of the above. Limited options (panning L,R, and center, stuff recorded on the same track), plus experimenting with the new stereo concept, plus the fake stereo sometimes created by Capitol on the earlier recordings.

It must have been great when all the rules of recording in pop music were just being figured out. I think it's really cool the way they would not pan stuff "properly", properly being what is accepted now.

Would love to have been a fly on the wall,
Macle
 
REM's Automatic for the People is one record that comes to mind for using the same kind of panning techniques even after the rules were set.

Check out the Revolver-era panning on "Drive."
 
Actually I like the radical/dramatic effects that hard panning does to a song...well, at least on the Beatles' music anyway. The Righteous Brothers also had a lot of interesting stereo arrangements, but their vocals were always centered.

Isaiah
 
Everything the Beatles recorded up to and including Pepper was recorded on 4 track machines. They would record 4 tracks, then bounce them to two tracks of another 4-track, and then record the next two tracks. (sound familiar, 4-trackers?) This accounts for much of the panning.
And yes, when true stereo came out it was a mind-blower!

Bob
 
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