1940's hit remixed to stereo... How TF??

[rasputin1963]

Hello Phil,

 

 

For years, one of my favorite WWII recordings has been Johnny Mercer singing his song "Candy" along with the tight 5-piece vocal group, The Pied Pipers. Big orchestra in the BG, too. [Later, Manhattan Transfer did a fab remake of this tune, as only they know how.]

 

It's a gorgeous monophonic recording, and represents the best that the recordists could achieve technically in 1943 or so.

 

But recently, I D/L'd another version of this selfsame record from the 'Net. [i recognize the sound of it, and all the performers are quite dead by now, so it couldn't be a new re-recording.]

 

Only, this time it was dramatically different. Someone-- not sure who-- has done a modern full-stereo remixing of this WWII recording.

 

Now let me hasten to add that this was emphatically NOT a quickie "pseudo-stereo" job, ie., inverting phase and adding chorus, etc.

 

They actually managed to ISOLATE the individual "choirs" of performers within the original mono recording-- ie., Mercer, the Pipers, and the different choirs within the orchestra-- and reassign them with great authenticity within an imagined 3D stereo panorama.

 

Johnny's right up front, panned slightly right; The Pied Pipers panned more left, and sent farther back along the Z-plane (away from the listener), and then-- glory of glories-- the trumpets, strings and saxes are distributed way-y-y far in the background, in a beautiful stereo L-to-R "curtain". The remasterers have also added a pristine, believable hall reverb to the whole thing.

 

How on earth can modern engineers achieve this trickery? How can you isolate and extract individual voices from a mono recording without it sounding harsh or tinny? Whenever I try to do this with a parametric equalizer, I often get an unpleasant quality due to the very tight "Q" that I'm forced to use... That strange "whistling" quality sets in. [Don't misunderstand: I have no intention of publishing my experiments anywhere.... I just do it as a challenging exercise in sound manipulation].

 

Usually, the purist in me would say-- Do not mess with old recordings... If it ain't broke, don't "fix" it. But truly, this recording really did bring new, astonishing magic to this great old record...

 

Comments eagerly sought!

 

ras

[DontLetMeDrown]

Perhaps it was someone who had access to the original tapes?

[Kiwiburger]

A lot is possible now with software. Linear-Phase digital eq's can extract frequency ranges with little artifacts. It's possible they just created a notch on one side and a boost on the other for the isolated instruments. Perhaps they automated the eq, so - for example - with two different lead instruments, occupying basically the same frequency spectrum, they could just reverse the eq settings at the appropriate points to pan the sounds where they want.

 

Adding the reverb is the easy bit. Possibly they expanded the dynamics first, to remove some of the original room sound.

 

Modern noise reduction software can really clean up old tracks too.

[blue2blue]

Originally posted by DontLetMeDrown Perhaps it was someone who had access to the original tapes?

 

 

:D

 

 

Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it.

 

While Americans had crude wire recorders, the Germans were using various types of magnetic tape for recording but I believe it was mostly for technical/military purposes.

 

Tape did not make its way to music recording until after the war -- and it was a few more years before multi-track recorders, often 2 and 3 track machines, began being used for overdub music construction. (Our national hero Les Paul 'commissioned' the first 8 track recorder, IIRC.)

 

Even then, recordings were not usually done in stereo as there was no good way of playing back, besides prerecorded magnetic tapes, which started showing up in the mid-50s but which did not make much of a dent outside audiophile circles.

 

(Some of the very first stereo broadcasts in the US were "hybrid" affairs where one channel would be on the TV soundtrack and the other would be on an affiliated radio station. The listener was encouraged to put his radio a few feet from the TV to get the "stereophonic effect.")

 

 

All that said, there WERE some binaural and early stereo recordings made in the 30s. (Although I think binaural was more about live transmission by wire or occasionally yoked radio stations in those days.)

 

And there WERE some overdub musical constructions (including everyone's fave: the singer duetting with himself), often as part of movie bits. In fact, these early overdubs were typically created using pingponging from the audio track of film to the audio track of film, since, noisy as it was, it still had a better s/n than the phonographs of the day.

 

PS... the Vocoder as we know it also dates back to the pre-WWII period. The 1940 Kay Kayser band vehicle, "You'll Find Out," had a singing machine called The Sonovox that was, for most purposes, a vocoder that they used to dynamically filter sections of the band (the horns sounded pretty cool) into clearly identifiable singing... The movie features Karloff, Lugosi, and Lorre, so it's a lot of fun. Turner Classic Movies plays it from time to time. Watch for it at Halloween.

[rasputin1963]

A great discussion, fellas, thanks.

 

Now this brings me to an EQ question which has been much on my mind:

 

We here all know that, scientifically, every solo note of a voice is comprised of a fundamental with an array of overtones, ascending in pitch. It has become quite easy in recent years to tweak these overtones with great precision, to subtly or dramatically change the sound of this solo note.

 

But is it possible to alter any frequencies located BELOW THE FUNDAMENTAL to alter the same sound in a useful, musical way?

 

It seems to me that a fundamental can always be thought of as an overtone of an (inaudible ghost) LOWER frequency, correct?

 

As you can see, I'm trying to expand my understanding of EQ and sensitize myself to all of its possibilities. Especially now that, with home recording, DAWs and VST's, the sky's the limit.

 

Also: blue2blue, I appreciate your erudition. Is there a good book you could recommend which describes the history of musical recording apparatus between say, 1940 and 1980? Why were the 1960's such a pivotal decade in improving music recording... we went from some fairly limited-- even sometimes crappy-- recordings in the early 60's, to 24-track by 1970. Who were the enlightened souls who envisioned a much more sophisticated way of recording music-- and had the wherewithal to implement it?

 

And you bring up early Vocoding: What did Frampton and Aerosmith use on their famous mid-70's hits? I seem to recall that Frampton actually had a tube in his mouth which captured the formants: "Ooo you eel? Ike we ooooo." How did those 1970's vocoders differ from the computer stuff we use today?

 

Thanks, ras

[scarecrowbob]

What did Frampton and Aerosmith use on their famous mid-70's hits? I seem to recall that Frampton actually had a tube in his mouth which captured the formants: "Ooo you eel? Ike we ooooo." How did those 1970's vocoders differ from the computer stuff we use today?

 

That's not a vocoder, it is a talk box.

 

It is a kind of way of eqing a non-vocal signal, but is accomplished in a completely different manner.

 

Here is a wikified quotiferous discussion to dissimulate the similar technologies

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_box

 

The talk box works by producing an amplified sound with a horn driver, directing the sound through a tube. The tube is typically taped to the side of a microphone, extending enough to be placed in or near the performer's mouth. The performer then "shapes" the sound by opening or closing their mouth. The performer can also mouth words, with the resulting effect sounding as though the instrument is speaking. This "shaped" sound exits the performer's mouth, and when it enters a microphone, the instrument/voice hybrid is heard. Although the talk box is not as popular today as it once was, many companies still manufacture it.

 

A vocoder operates much differently, though it has a several differnt implementations and uses:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocoder

 

Most analog vocoder systems use a number of frequency channels, all tuned to different frequencies (using band-pass filters). The various values of these filters are stored not as the raw numbers, which are all based on the original fundamental frequency, but as a series of modifications to that fundamental needed to modify it into the signal seen in the output of that filter. During playback these settings are sent back into the filters and then added together, modified with the knowledge that speech typically varies between these frequencies in a fairly linear way. The result is recognizable speech, although somewhat "mechanical" sounding. Vocoders also often include a second system for generating unvoiced sounds, using a noise generator instead of the fundamental frequency.

 

And

 

In 1970, electronic music pioneers Wendy Carlos and Robert Moog developed one of the first truly musical vocoders. A 10-band device inspired by the vocoder designs of Homer Dudley, it was originally called a spectrum encoder-decoder, and later referred to simply as a vocoder. The carrier signal came from a Moog modular synthesizer, and the modulator from a microphone input. The output of the 10-band vocoder was fairly intelligible, but relied on specially articulated speech. Later improved vocoders use a high-pass filter to let some sibilance through from the microphone; this ruins the device for its original speech-coding application, but it makes the "talking synthesizer" effect much more intelligible.

[rhythminmind]

My work does allot of mono to surround/stereo remixing. The System 6000 is a great tool for this. There is also a custom hardware box made by the guy that now is responsible for that crappy SRS crap in allot of consumer gear. But this box is really good.. Cant buy them tho..

[rasputin1963]

 

Originally posted by blue2blue (Some of the very first stereo broadcasts in the US were "hybrid" affairs where one channel would be on the TV soundtrack and the other would be on an affiliated radio station. The listener was encouraged to put his radio a few feet from the TV to get the "stereophonic effect.")

 

 

 

I seem to recall that Burt Sugarman's MIDNIGHT SPECIAL hosted by Wolfman Jack did this very thing, circa 1973 or so?

[blue2blue]

I think they used a more straightforward FM multiplex (stereo) simulcast, since FM stereo was pretty common by then... but, yeah, it's only a jump away.

 

It wasn't too many more years, though, before stereo broadcast came to TV, if I'm remembering my TV history correctly.

 

My grasp on this is based on remembering the "Presented in STEREO" legend at the bottom of Cheers episodes... that said, I don't think Cheers was stereo from the beginning.

 

But I'm pretty sure that by the mid-80s, there was a fair bit of stereo TV.

 

 

None of it has ever seemed as cool, though, as taking the family superheterodyne AM radio (it was one of those bitchen 7 tube superhets... late at night, hooked up to a long antenna [the TV antenna, actually] I could pull in upstate New York) and putting it a precise 6 feet away from the TV... it was only the third time, or so, I'd heard stereo... stereo LPs were a couple years off and only rich audiophiles could afford stereo tape. I'm trying to remember what some of the shows were that I watched that way. I don't remember any of the biggies doing it but I think Lawrence Welk (of all people) may have done one or two... and maybe Spade Cooley? Or was he already in jail?

[IsildursBane]

 

Originally posted by blue2blue (it was one of those bitchen 7 tube superhets... late at night, hooked up to a long antenna [the TV antenna, actually] I could pull in upstate New York)

 

 

On that subject, when I was a kid, my dad wired his AM radio to the tv antenna on the roof and could occassionally get a station in the Netherlands Antilles (off the coast of Venezuela).

 

-Dan.