This blogpost is a bit of me being annoyed at my friend for not liking the Beatles album Revolver. You see, I've been listening to loads of the Beatles's music lately, including a full listen of Revolver, which I adore. In my opinion, every track on there is near perfect at least and never fails to put me in a good mood. My friend, on the other hand, disagreed. They especially hated the album's stereo mix, which I found a bit perplexing. Maybe that's a me issue, though.
The technical
To start, let's define some key terms. Mastering refers to how audio is recorded onto vinyl, cassette, streaming, etc. This can include how loud certain tracks in the audio are, as well as how much certain tracks are panned. Humans have two ears, and each ear can receive different tracks depending on how the recording is mastered. We can have one audio channel which will play the same recording to each ear - this is mono - or we can have two separate channels, one going to each ear - stereo. I only know this from the sound tech course I did at Imperial last year!
Revolver was originally recorded in mono, but there were also stereo variants being sold at the time. It's these stereo versions which most people will find first when streaming Revolver on Spotify, and...yeah, they're not popular. Even George Harrison hated stereo and thought the Beatles were best heard in mono.
Take the opening track of Revolver, Taxman. It's a great song, but the stereo mix is iffy. Take a good pair of headphones, but only wear one ear at a time. In your left ear, you'll hear the vocals and guitar; in your right, you'll get drum and bass. There's never a clean mix in the middle of each channel. And now I can get onto the main point of this post.
The personal
You see, I've never really cared about mastering or mixing when listening to a song. My friend, though, will often mention this sort of stuff in his reviews. He'll say "I'm not a fan of the production", for example, like it's staring down his face. I couldn't tell you what makes a song sound muddy instead of clean. Part of this is probably down to me liking all kinds of music, especially lo-fi stuff, so why should I be so hung up on how clean a song sounds?
As a quick example, I'll mention Loveless by My Bloody Valentine, one of my favourite records. It's a very dense, noisy jungle full of guitars and sirenic vocals, all blurred together. When I first heard it, I couldn't understand it, but after a few repeated listens, I adore it. Sometimes I get the songs as earworms. I'm pretty sure if you forced a Victorian kid to listen to it, they'd think you were deranged. That's an album which I wouldn't be shocked if someone said had awful production - after all, isn't the point of music to make something pleasurable? To me, though, that's far more subjective than anything else, which is also why I'd never personally make that criticism.
It's funnier with Revolver, though, because I've literally never noticed any issues with the stereo versions unless they're pointed out to me. I guess part of this might literally just be me focusing on the music. It sounds good, it makes me feel good, so why should I be preoccupied with one ear getting no drums? I'm even a bit surprised my friend noticed immediately, he must have better headphones. I've even gone back to listen to some of Revolver in mono, and it sounds flatter, so I don't get the fuss. Maybe I'm just used to stereo, but it makes me feel like the Beatles are playing around me in a circle, and I'm with them in the studio. Sorry, George.
Part of me now wonders whether my approach to listening to music is strange. I don't tend to over-analyse or hyper-fixate on things like production and mastering when I hear a track, instead my mind tends to latch onto a melody. If it sounds good, I feel good. In fact, the melody comes first to me - I love loads of songs with awful lyrics.
So if you've ever wondered why I like a song which you personally found unlistenable, maybe that helps. Maybe you sat down to listen to Revolver and couldn't even get to the Taxman guitar solo, because the mixing gave you nausea. In which case, I feel sorry for you.
But if you switched to mono, carried on to the end, and still hate Tomorrow Never Knows, then sorry, your music taste needs work.
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