Strange bits of mastering...

Now that I've got a setup that actually images, and a listening position where I'll notice, I've come across a strange bit of mastering in terms of stereo imagery.

It's on Alice in Chains Unplugged, Jerry Cantrell's guitar is over on the right hand side (as he was on stage), but his voice is central, with Layne Staley's... This sounds rather odd once you know that the guitar and that voice belong together.

Why do you think they did this, and has anyone else come across similar things?

 

Great album!

And now you have totally ruined it forever

Bad Isaac! :SWMBO:

 

i think the engineer must have been asleep

i keep things panned to where the guys are on stage, less so with the bass, so things feel a bit more natural.

i've been known to pan everything the wrong way when i'm bored

 

Sorry Chris. It is a superb album, but I just noticed it, and was trying to figure whether it was my hearing, my system or the CD. I'm fairly sure... if you can let me know if you hear the same effect...

 

Oh, I do hear it. I just never realised it was wrong.

 

Knew I shouldn't have bought the DVD...

 

Guys, stop obsessing about things like the mastering, kick back and just enjoy the music. dont go all round earth on us

 

I still enjoy it a lot... but I'm trying to understand the reasoning behind this. Just seems a very odd thing to have done. Perhaps it was to avoid an imbalance in the vocals (as the only vocalists on the album are Cantrell (on the right) and Staley (centre), with the bass and second guitar on the left and drums behind).

 

I'm sure that this sort of thing happens often, it's just that you don't notice it unless you are in the know. I reckon you are right and that is was done to balance out the channels and give that stereo image we all want to hear. If you hadn't seen the DVD would you have been bothered, or would you rather have had the left channel louder than the right?

 

He is right of centre but he certainly isn't where the guitar is. Dammit and my CD player has just packed up again

 

na a slow auto pan on the yammy spx 990 is more fun,or patch 68 on an alesis quadraverb :JOEL:

 

Just hit the "mono" switch on your preamp and enjoy

 

Re: Revealing

That'll be Tori Amos then Especially on "Crucify" and "Precious things"

I hate the way almost every album seems to have a left bias - almost every time I've seen systems running while someone's making a tape or CDR up, the levels often seem to peek 1 LED higher on the left...

Maybe it's just me though!

BTW Isaac - if you want to rid yourself forever of the Alice in chains problem, get a Naim amp and some Mordaunt Short MS25is - problem solved

 

Re: Re: Revealing

:ffrc:

 

Vocals are almost always mixed to the centre, unless there are multiple voices.

I suspect this recording (I'm not familiar with it) would sound very strange with voices comming from the right. Hence the overrated nature of the soundstage.

 

Isaac, that discrepancy probably does not stem from the mastering stage, but from the mixing. Just pretend the bloke's standing in the middle, but his guitar amp is on the right!

One thing that is frequently botched up in mastering is when the first milliseconds (or maybe it's just a tenth of a second) of the track are cut off. I suppose they do it so as not to have any hiss at the beginning, or maybe it's done automatically by a noise gate with too high a threshold setting. It destroys the character of the first note being played or sung and just plain kills the illusion.

 

That just doesn't work with an acoustic guitar...

 

My pet mixing hate is ultra wide stereo panning of single instruments – I was at the Heathrow hi-fi show years back when some exhibiter had a huge system in the massive room downstairs; Rockport deck, Accuphase amps and JM Grand Utopias, all connected up with wires about 5" thick. They played some dodgy Carpenters track that had the kit panned really wide and it just cracked me up completely – there was a tom tom fill in the middle and the only plausible explanation for what I was hearing was that Karen had been shot out of a canon on the far right and hit the drums in a perfect arc as she flew overhead. Either that or the thin one had incredibly long arms, and I'm talking 12 or 14 feet here... maybe she was a really proficient roller skater and could wizz round a huge and totally out of proportion stunt kit. Things got no better, they followed up with a solo piano track with the high notes at least 12' away from the bass ones… now that is a bloody big piano.

Tony.

 

Now that's a recording session I'd have liked to have been at.

Completely agree about image size - I bloody hate enormous pianos, annoys the hell out of me. Why do engineers insist on doing this?

-- Ian

 

Why do engineers insist on doing this?

Probably for the same reason you get to hear Steely Dan's backing singers from behind you at multi-channel dems, even though you see them in front of you ... Most left-right effect sweeps are equally annoying (OK, so you've found the pan control. Hey!)