Drums In The Center

[blue2blue]

Panning issues must be in the zeitgeist. There's a somewhat similar thread over at the GS place: http://www.gearslutz.com/board/so-much-gear-so-little-time/748571-will-hard-panning-mixing-ever-make-comeback.html

 

As I pointed out in that thread, adult pop and jazz records typically had far better engineering and mixing than teen pop/rock. And then there was the problems of people bonding with the single versions, which would be mono, heavily compressed for juke box competition, and pressed on way-stepped-on vinyl only to later buy the stereo album and find either one of those awkward remixes of a 3 track master never intended for stereo or an often inferior, new perfromance, sometimes tarted up with strings or other unnecessary 'augmentations.'

 

 

Here's a not atypical adult pop recording from Enoch Light's old audiophile label, Command Records... note the stereo ensemble recording, drums in the middle. While Light was famous early for hyped up stereo FX, as stereo became less a novelty for audiophile audiences, Light toned things down.

 

In 1965, he sold the label to ABC Records who pretty much destroyed it. They had no clue. He took the money and started another audiophile/sonics oriented label, Project 3. But by that time, I had returned to listening to rock, because I finally started hearing some songs that weren't the typical teen idiocy that dominated rock radio until '66 or so.

 

Trumpet is Doc Severinsen, Command's house lead horn man. Severinsen fronted up a number of album projects for Command under his own name and was a frequent featured player on other Command releases. (The distortion on his horn apparently is in the masters. My vinyl copy was the same. It used to drive me crazy because I could never adjust my stylus to track that record right. Now I know why.)

 

[video=youtube;uJ-SjZq6KHQ]

[MikeRivers]

I'll definitely talk to them well in advance of the gig that they asked me to record. I may or may not be mixing them.

 

The best they ever sounded, I think, or at least when I enjoyed them the most, was when they had one of two drummers who could bang on a full kit when the tune called for it, but were really more percussionists and played lots of smaller instruments in creative ways. But being a fairly large band that doesn't perform regularly, there are really only three core musicians (the leader/arranger/keyboardist, the singer-guitarist, and bass player. They have preferred fiddlers and drummers, the piper is there sometimes and not others, and there's usually a second singer, but he mostly sings unaccompanied. Sometimes they're a quartet without the drums and pipes but that's a very different sound than the full band. I expect that they'll be as big as they can put together for their upcoming show.

 

When they rehearse, they all crowd in the leader's music room so there really isn't space to try out the arrangement with the drummer in a new position. We'll see what happens.