Why not mix an album in mono?

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curtiswyant

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Lots of "classic" 60s albums were mixed in mono...Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper, Kinks Village Green, etc...everyone seems to want that sound, why not mix it like they intended back in the day?
 
I disagree that they were mixed only in mono... there is definite panning (in some cases, extreme panning - hard left/right/center), so they MUST have been mixed/monitored in stereo at some point in the process.

But there is absolutely nothing wrong with getting a majority of the mix balance done while monitoring on mono, and then switching to stereo later on in the process. It's far more difficult to get tracks to sit properly in a mono mix than in stereo, so it really forces one to pay attention to acoustic space and definition around each track....
 
Sorry, Sgt. Pepper was not mixed in mono. There's panning all over the place. In fact the Beatles were recording in stereo way before that. Many Beatles tunes have vocals and bass in one speaker and the rest of the band in the other speaker (for example).
 
Many of those albums were mixed in mono (such as pet sounds) and later remixed in stereo.

I have actually been wanting to find a band that will let me do a record in mono with no FX
 
curtiswyant said:
everyone seems to want that sound, why not mix it like they intended back in the day?
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I don't think that everyone wants that sound. I think everyone respects how good they got it to sound with what they had to work with. That is a big difference.
 
The stereo mixes for Sgt. Pepper were done as an afterthought. They tracked everything assuming it was just another mono record.
 
curtiswyant said:
They tracked everything assuming it was just another mono record.
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That makes absolutely NO difference... as I said earlier:
Blue Bear Sound said:
...there is absolutely nothing wrong with getting a majority of the mix balance done while monitoring on mono, and then switching to stereo later on in the process. It's far more difficult to get tracks to sit properly in a mono mix than in stereo, so it really forces one to pay attention to acoustic space and definition around each track....
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So whether they originally intended to mix in stereo or not is really pretty much irrelevant....
 
But if you track everything assuming for a mono mix, wouldn't a later decision to mix in stereo only be a mock stereo mix?
 
curtiswyant said:
The stereo mixes for Sgt. Pepper were done as an afterthought. They tracked everything assuming it was just another mono record.
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And your point is??? The album is in stereo. Period.

Next topic.
 
Monkey Allen said:
But if you track everything assuming for a mono mix, wouldn't a later decision to mix in stereo only be a mock stereo mix?
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Uh... no... how do you figure that? You don't get a stereo mix by only using stereo tracks!

Panning is what allows you to place a track somewhere within the field between a pair of speakers!
 
Monkey Allen said:
But if you track everything assuming for a mono mix, wouldn't a later decision to mix in stereo only be a mock stereo mix?
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I track everything in mono and I don't remember ever mixing anything in mono. I don't understand what you think the difference is.
 
Stereo or stereophony generally refers to dual-channel sound recording and sound reproduction – sound that contains data for more than one speaker simultaneously. Compact disc audio and some radio broadcasts are stereo. The purpose of stereo recording is to recreate a more natural listening experience where the spatial location of the source of a sound is, at least in part, reproduced.

Stereo comes from the Greek word for solid, and the term can be applied to any system using more than one channel, such as such as the multichannel audio 5.1- and 6.1-channel systems used on high-end film and television productions. However it is more commonly used to refer exclusively to two-channel systems.

Although stereo can have two independent mono channels, usually the signal on one channel is related to the signal on the other channel. For example, if the same signal is recorded on both channels, then it will appear as a central phantom image when played on loudspeakers. That is, the sound appears to becoming from the center between the loudspeakers.

Many methods for encoding stereo information are backwards compatible, meaning that they can be understood by monaural systems as well. This is most commonly done by including, for example, the sum of the right and left (R+L) signal on the main channel, and the difference (R-L) on a second channel. A monaural system can thus use only the signal on the main channel and to produce a reasonable monaural "translation" of the stereo information, while a stereo system can add and difference the two channels to recover the right and left speaker information. This practice is used in, for example, FM radio; an additional benefit in this situation is that if the signal is too weak for both channels to be received clearly, a stereo receiver can use only the main channel.

Cl魥nt Ader designed the first stereo system in 1881 for theaters.

Stereo recording was introduced in the music business in the fall of 1957, superseding monaural (single-channel) recording.
 
Dogman said:
Stereo or stereophony generally refers to dual-channel sound recording and sound reproduction – sound that contains data for more than one speaker simultaneously. Compact disc audio and some radio broadcasts are stereo. The purpose of stereo recording is to recreate a more natural listening experience where the spatial location of the source of a sound is, at least in part, reproduced.

Stereo comes from the Greek word for solid, and the term can be applied to any system using more than one channel, such as such as the multichannel audio 5.1- and 6.1-channel systems used on high-end film and television productions. However it is more commonly used to refer exclusively to two-channel systems.

Although stereo can have two independent mono channels, usually the signal on one channel is related to the signal on the other channel. For example, if the same signal is recorded on both channels, then it will appear as a central phantom image when played on loudspeakers. That is, the sound appears to becoming from the center between the loudspeakers.

Many methods for encoding stereo information are backwards compatible, meaning that they can be understood by monaural systems as well. This is most commonly done by including, for example, the sum of the right and left (R+L) signal on the main channel, and the difference (R-L) on a second channel. A monaural system can thus use only the signal on the main channel and to produce a reasonable monaural "translation" of the stereo information, while a stereo system can add and difference the two channels to recover the right and left speaker information. This practice is used in, for example, FM radio; an additional benefit in this situation is that if the signal is too weak for both channels to be received clearly, a stereo receiver can use only the main channel.

Cl魥nt Ader designed the first stereo system in 1881 for theaters.

Stereo recording was introduced in the music business in the fall of 1957, superseding monaural (single-channel) recording.
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Who are you and what have you done with Dogman???
 
As for the Beatles and George Martin, I know for a fact that Martin preferred to mix in mono. The stereo mixes were done at the urging of the record company.
 
A band called Starflyer 59 put out a record that was all mono a few years ago. I think it was called leave here a stranger. I would have never thought about it giving it a casual listen. It was a pretty good record.
 
gtar02 said:
A band called Starflyer 59 put out a record that was all mono a few years ago. I think it was called leave here a stranger. I would have never thought about it giving it a casual listen. It was a pretty good record.
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Hmm, never heard of it. I wonder what woulda happened if they put it out in stereo?
 
It got good reviews and sold fairly well, for being something out of the mainstream.
 
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