Mixing and Production Ideas from Classic Albums of The '70s (YouTube)

duotone

I found this very interesting, especially around the 6.50 Minute mark.

Fretwired

Interesting .. thanks for sharing.

spark240

Thats cool ...

PolarityMan

So obviously frequency masking and hi/low pass filters is well known but his panning thing is a weird theory as obviously the dominant element in the centre for each frequency range by definition clashes with every panned element. Bass is fairly directionless too so I think especially for lsubs and lows panning is fairy unimportant.

domforr

Interesting. I've never really thought much about being super accurate with panning but maybe it's worth looking at a bit more closely.  

Cirrus

Cool video, but I think the panning observation is a bit of a red herring - Sure, you can pan something at 1 o'clock and something that would clash there out to 3 o'clock or whatever, but panning tends to be a poor panacea for producing clarity and dealing with frequency ranges with clashing tracks - as soon as you listen in mono, or even with speakers that aren't very far apart (boom box, laptop, tv etc), everything's back on top of everything else.

The difference, IMO, in the older stuff, is that care was taken in the arrangements to build clarity into the production, and individual instrument sounds didn't occupy as much sonic real estate - he mentions kicks not being as subby, they also weren't as clicky, basses didn't have stuff going on 40hz-8kHz like so many modern punchy bass tones, guitars didn't need to be walls of sound, vocals didn't need to be hypercompressed with 10dB of gain reduction... there was just more *space* for stuff to live together.