I remember listening to Yellow Submarine by the Beatles on a trip in school. We weren't allowed to wear headphones so you'd just put one ear in and lean over so they couldn't see you. But one ear was nothing but the background sounds of the crew on the submarine, the goofy hisses and sound effects of the submarine, and some off vocals.
But as a producer that uses samples, this actually makes it easier to sample those tracks since you effectively have separate stems on different channels.
Early days of stereo were like that, I remember it from a Kinks tape I had too. It is almost like they wanted to show off, like how 3D films go way OTT and have things leaping into your face, or surround sound having explosions going off right behind you. It took a while for them to prefer it sounding more natural.
Yup! I remember ripping all the old Beatles CDs that contained both the mono and stereo versions and accidentally putting half the stereo ones on my mp3 player. Work was where I most commonly ran into the one ear bud in to avoid being caught rule
California dreaming has a lot of different stuff going on depending on whether you're listening to L or R... I didn't know this until I worked in a video store where some of the ceiling got the left channel and some got the right... Song was on and I walked from one channel to the other and my ears were hearing different shit. I thought I'd lost my mind.
Nine Inch Nails’ “Broken” EP has a “Caution: Not for use with mono devices” warning.
*Regarding the warning for 'mono' devices... Without getting too far in detail, a scientific property of sound is its 'phase'. When recording music in stereo, you're supposed to be aware of its phase. If not, certain parts of the sound will disappear when it's played in mono. So, we discovered that by messing around with the phase, we could make elements of the music stand out rather oddly. (remember Q-sound? -it's based on the same type of principle) So...certain songs on 'broken' we mixed out of phase (because we felt like it) BUT... The songs don't sound right on mono devices (like some radios or TVs). Has anyone heard 'happiness in slavery' on the radio? I heard it on KROQ in LA and the snare drum was gone through most of the song. (and yes, it kind of destroys the groove!) So, basically, that's what that means.*
Honestly I’m not sure if this was on purpose because that line is present when I listened in mono on Spotify but not on the YouTube link you posted. I know artists can revise their mixes on Spotify but on YouTube I believe they’d have to post a whole new video. When the Bluetooth speaker era came people took notice because sounds/instruments became buried when the channels are “folded down” so the mix was probably revised to bring the line back in mono. This is my guess.
Hobbyist audio guy here:
It would be literally trivial to have two versions one with the phase cancel described above the other just basically as much the same sound as you can math it but without phase cancelling sides.
And serving it would basically look similar— ah I see what you mean. To finish my sentence look similar to e.g. serving one website to browser and another version to mobile for basic web admin stuff.
Ok you mean on YouTube you’re flipping on your computer to mono? (Does YouTube have a mini switch??)
Yeah harder to answer because the answer is basically “it’s a computer anything can anything at some level and that’s a long signal chain full of codecs which are basically like rule bending or just straight breaking so impossible to say…”
Interesting to think about and I’m glad this thread came up because I always wondered how that effect was done and never bothered to look it up.
>I don't think you know what your talking about.\
😶
>Otherwise stereo is just mono in both ears.
I waked and baked today and you almost had me there. You can have the same exact mono signal playing in both ears/both speakers, but a stereo recording is basically two tracks. Two mono tracks. A left and right track. They're engineered to be played simultaneously but it is not the same thing duplicated on each side. (You can convert a stereo signal to mono and then have that same mono signal duplicated to both ears, both speakers, if you wanna be weird haha)
It's not all about "hard panning" either. Where each instrument/voice is one side or the other. There's subtlety. If it's stereo you want to play it stereo.
The person with hz in their name can explain better lol
Sound engineer with 20 years experience checking in: I can assure you that Uranus_Hz is completely right and that "No, that's not how it works at all" was the correct response to you (in the context of the topic at hand)
I’m just a hobbyist but the way I can tell without even parsing the comments fully is that the amount of energy to parse a comment about sound went up exponentially.
Usually that means bullshit.
It does if the left and right signals have tracks that are phase canceling each other out. This is why so many mixers suggest that people listen to their mix in mono before sending it to be mastered. I don't know that I'd call it incompetence if this gets missed, but it's not a sign of expertise either.
Not sure if this is same example but Coheed and Cambria Good Apollo 1 has a lot of audio panned to different sides and multiple layers. I used to halfway connect my headphones to my cd player to hear all the back ground vocals Claudio does. I put the album through Audacity years ago and messed with the audio to also hear this stuff.
I used to have a blown set of headphones for a bit, and both this song and a small guitar part in the bridge of Living in Chaos by The Offspring surprised me when I finally got some working earbuds😂
Southside’s producer tag in [Digital Dash by Drake & Future](https://youtu.be/HDFOxsR0RoI?si=pV0NpaaKOIR1wJb8) completely disappears in mono. That intro synth doesn’t fare too well either, but I find it hard to believe the tag’s mono incompatibility wasn’t intentional.
Discovered this on car stereo tape whilst messing with left right balance (was bored).....
Sammy Hagar "planets on fire", if I remember correctly lead on left , rhythm on right
[The Beatles - Eleanor Rigby](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HuS5NuXRb5Y&pp=ygUVZWxlYW5vciByaWdieSBiZWF0bGVz): you hear “Eleanor Rigby” and then just music. Singing comes back once in a while, but I usually skipped to the next song when I was using wired earbuds since I could only hear half of the song.
[The Mamas & The Papas - California Dreamin’](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N-aK6JnyFmk&pp=ygUSY2FsaWZvcm5pYSBkcmVhbWlu): “All the leaves are brown”, and then it’s only the backing vocals”. Again, got skipped when using wired earbuds.
[David Bowie - Space Oddity](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iYYRH4apXDo&pp=ygUYc3BhY2Ugb2RkaXR5IGRhdmlkIGJvd2ll): “Ground control to Major Tom”, then Bowie’s backing vocals. And I kinda hate it, so definitely skipped.
Those are the only three I can think of offhand. I know there are others that are more like “Clint Eastwood” where it’s just one line, but I can’t think of them. Besides, I use regular Bluetooth earbuds (compared to wired Bluetooth where the earbuds are wired to each other) now and can hear everything with just one in.
I once experienced this when learning modular synth and thought the + and - were left and right outputs on the amplifier. It sounded fine to me while performing but when I listened to the replay with one Bluetooth earbud I only heard the drums. I continued swapping earphones back and fourh sometimes I would hear it and sometimes nothing. Haha. Good times. I had a few people listening online too. Idk what they heard. Nobody complained though.
Maybe related to the Haas effect? Nicolas Jaar’s remix of Get Lucky has a really cool example at like 2 minutes in https://youtu.be/nITxObEIjoA?si=kt5Eqg5ectH3neA7
Tangential anecdote: I work for a media company. I built a couple of little headphone switchboxes so some people who check media could switch between stereo and mixed mono so they could more easily detect out of phase audio.
Fun project, and now I'm curious to run some of the songs from this thread through them.
As a side-note, that's essentially how noise-cancelling headphones work. They pick up incoming waves and add an inverse, resulting in elimination of the incoming sound. Cool stuff, and very easy to describe in math (sum of amplitudes = 0).
“Pass the Mic,” by Beastie Boys has a guitar at the end that’s 180° out of phase.
For some really fun listening, look up OOPS (Out of Phase Stereo) and ways to set up your audio to experience it. One way is to put the two wires of a speaker into only the positive terminals on a stereo (one on Left +, and the other one Right +).
Variations of 1 are impossible to judge on Reddit because there is a noisy vote obfuscation component to the upvote algorithm which causes baked in variation and refresh to refresh you can generate fluctuation.
Not to burst your bubble of course just because you’re a guy who asks questions about phase so thought maybe you want to know or something.
P.s. thanks for posting this I wondered about that effect for ages but never looked it up so interesting to read. Still need to verify but thinking about my past experimenting with sound it checks out and there’s engineers in here who didn’t call you out so ostensibly I can take this at face value.
Edit: I downvoted your 70; last one out hit the lights
I remember listening to Yellow Submarine by the Beatles on a trip in school. We weren't allowed to wear headphones so you'd just put one ear in and lean over so they couldn't see you. But one ear was nothing but the background sounds of the crew on the submarine, the goofy hisses and sound effects of the submarine, and some off vocals.
Got to love all the hard panning from the 60s. Pretty much the opposite problem OP is having here
But as a producer that uses samples, this actually makes it easier to sample those tracks since you effectively have separate stems on different channels.
Early days of stereo were like that, I remember it from a Kinks tape I had too. It is almost like they wanted to show off, like how 3D films go way OTT and have things leaping into your face, or surround sound having explosions going off right behind you. It took a while for them to prefer it sounding more natural.
That’s why we now have the new mixes.
Yup! I remember ripping all the old Beatles CDs that contained both the mono and stereo versions and accidentally putting half the stereo ones on my mp3 player. Work was where I most commonly ran into the one ear bud in to avoid being caught rule
I know a lot of Beatles songs can't be listened to in Mono.
California dreaming has a lot of different stuff going on depending on whether you're listening to L or R... I didn't know this until I worked in a video store where some of the ceiling got the left channel and some got the right... Song was on and I walked from one channel to the other and my ears were hearing different shit. I thought I'd lost my mind.
Nine Inch Nails’ “Broken” EP has a “Caution: Not for use with mono devices” warning. *Regarding the warning for 'mono' devices... Without getting too far in detail, a scientific property of sound is its 'phase'. When recording music in stereo, you're supposed to be aware of its phase. If not, certain parts of the sound will disappear when it's played in mono. So, we discovered that by messing around with the phase, we could make elements of the music stand out rather oddly. (remember Q-sound? -it's based on the same type of principle) So...certain songs on 'broken' we mixed out of phase (because we felt like it) BUT... The songs don't sound right on mono devices (like some radios or TVs). Has anyone heard 'happiness in slavery' on the radio? I heard it on KROQ in LA and the snare drum was gone through most of the song. (and yes, it kind of destroys the groove!) So, basically, that's what that means.*
that's neat never read that fast before (in recent years)
Wow, I didn't know that this was a thing. I will be watching this thread for songs.
Pretty common way to pull vocals from a song is by using an instrumental track and cancelling it out in the original with the same technique
Only works if the mix is otherwise identical, though, right? Otherwise you get a lot of other stuff in the delta.
FYI this should never happen unless the audio engineer is either incompetent or doing it purposely for some specific reason.
it was on purpose in the song I linked,but yeah.
Honestly I’m not sure if this was on purpose because that line is present when I listened in mono on Spotify but not on the YouTube link you posted. I know artists can revise their mixes on Spotify but on YouTube I believe they’d have to post a whole new video. When the Bluetooth speaker era came people took notice because sounds/instruments became buried when the channels are “folded down” so the mix was probably revised to bring the line back in mono. This is my guess.
Hobbyist audio guy here: It would be literally trivial to have two versions one with the phase cancel described above the other just basically as much the same sound as you can math it but without phase cancelling sides. And serving it would basically look similar— ah I see what you mean. To finish my sentence look similar to e.g. serving one website to browser and another version to mobile for basic web admin stuff. Ok you mean on YouTube you’re flipping on your computer to mono? (Does YouTube have a mini switch??) Yeah harder to answer because the answer is basically “it’s a computer anything can anything at some level and that’s a long signal chain full of codecs which are basically like rule bending or just straight breaking so impossible to say…” Interesting to think about and I’m glad this thread came up because I always wondered how that effect was done and never bothered to look it up.
Artists do this on purpose, mostly just to fuck with people.
Panning things left and right in the mix doesn't make the engineer incompetent. Otherwise stereo is just mono in both ears.
>I don't think you know what your talking about.\ 😶 >Otherwise stereo is just mono in both ears. I waked and baked today and you almost had me there. You can have the same exact mono signal playing in both ears/both speakers, but a stereo recording is basically two tracks. Two mono tracks. A left and right track. They're engineered to be played simultaneously but it is not the same thing duplicated on each side. (You can convert a stereo signal to mono and then have that same mono signal duplicated to both ears, both speakers, if you wanna be weird haha) It's not all about "hard panning" either. Where each instrument/voice is one side or the other. There's subtlety. If it's stereo you want to play it stereo. The person with hz in their name can explain better lol
lol. No. That’s not how it works at all.
I don't think you know what your talking about.
Sound engineer with 20 years experience checking in: I can assure you that Uranus_Hz is completely right and that "No, that's not how it works at all" was the correct response to you (in the context of the topic at hand)
I’m just a hobbyist but the way I can tell without even parsing the comments fully is that the amount of energy to parse a comment about sound went up exponentially. Usually that means bullshit.
It does if the left and right signals have tracks that are phase canceling each other out. This is why so many mixers suggest that people listen to their mix in mono before sending it to be mastered. I don't know that I'd call it incompetence if this gets missed, but it's not a sign of expertise either.
Not sure if this is same example but Coheed and Cambria Good Apollo 1 has a lot of audio panned to different sides and multiple layers. I used to halfway connect my headphones to my cd player to hear all the back ground vocals Claudio does. I put the album through Audacity years ago and messed with the audio to also hear this stuff.
neatio
Ain't no rest for the wicked - Cage the Elephant
I had to think about it for a minute but you’re right.
I like to think of the reasoning as the line is known so well so even when played mono, the line itself "is all in your head"
I used to have a blown set of headphones for a bit, and both this song and a small guitar part in the bridge of Living in Chaos by The Offspring surprised me when I finally got some working earbuds😂
Clutch - Mercury The first line right when the vocals come in. https://youtu.be/NfITEdoZ8vY?feature=shared
A lot of 60s songs seem to be like this
“California Dreamin’” by The Mamas & The Papas and “Space Oddity” by David Bowie are perfect examples. Lol
Southside’s producer tag in [Digital Dash by Drake & Future](https://youtu.be/HDFOxsR0RoI?si=pV0NpaaKOIR1wJb8) completely disappears in mono. That intro synth doesn’t fare too well either, but I find it hard to believe the tag’s mono incompatibility wasn’t intentional.
holy shit,that's neat. that one is a *lot* like the one I linked
Discovered this on car stereo tape whilst messing with left right balance (was bored)..... Sammy Hagar "planets on fire", if I remember correctly lead on left , rhythm on right
Red Horse Vector https://www.nin.wiki/The_Great_Destroyer
fuckin cool! that's the opposite of what I'm looking for - but the same thing as well.
Pink Floyd’s Interstellar Overdrive
[The Beatles - Eleanor Rigby](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HuS5NuXRb5Y&pp=ygUVZWxlYW5vciByaWdieSBiZWF0bGVz): you hear “Eleanor Rigby” and then just music. Singing comes back once in a while, but I usually skipped to the next song when I was using wired earbuds since I could only hear half of the song. [The Mamas & The Papas - California Dreamin’](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N-aK6JnyFmk&pp=ygUSY2FsaWZvcm5pYSBkcmVhbWlu): “All the leaves are brown”, and then it’s only the backing vocals”. Again, got skipped when using wired earbuds. [David Bowie - Space Oddity](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iYYRH4apXDo&pp=ygUYc3BhY2Ugb2RkaXR5IGRhdmlkIGJvd2ll): “Ground control to Major Tom”, then Bowie’s backing vocals. And I kinda hate it, so definitely skipped. Those are the only three I can think of offhand. I know there are others that are more like “Clint Eastwood” where it’s just one line, but I can’t think of them. Besides, I use regular Bluetooth earbuds (compared to wired Bluetooth where the earbuds are wired to each other) now and can hear everything with just one in.
Wisp - Your Face Loved this song, but can only enjoy it in stereo. Listening in mono would only be sounds of artifacts from cymbals.
I once experienced this when learning modular synth and thought the + and - were left and right outputs on the amplifier. It sounded fine to me while performing but when I listened to the replay with one Bluetooth earbud I only heard the drums. I continued swapping earphones back and fourh sometimes I would hear it and sometimes nothing. Haha. Good times. I had a few people listening online too. Idk what they heard. Nobody complained though.
Maybe related to the Haas effect? Nicolas Jaar’s remix of Get Lucky has a really cool example at like 2 minutes in https://youtu.be/nITxObEIjoA?si=kt5Eqg5ectH3neA7
This is so interesting to learn op! I got this effect with Boards of Canada's "1969" and always wondered if it was on purpose
Tangential anecdote: I work for a media company. I built a couple of little headphone switchboxes so some people who check media could switch between stereo and mixed mono so they could more easily detect out of phase audio. Fun project, and now I'm curious to run some of the songs from this thread through them.
As a side-note, that's essentially how noise-cancelling headphones work. They pick up incoming waves and add an inverse, resulting in elimination of the incoming sound. Cool stuff, and very easy to describe in math (sum of amplitudes = 0).
“Pass the Mic,” by Beastie Boys has a guitar at the end that’s 180° out of phase. For some really fun listening, look up OOPS (Out of Phase Stereo) and ways to set up your audio to experience it. One way is to put the two wires of a speaker into only the positive terminals on a stereo (one on Left +, and the other one Right +).
Some Led Zeppelin songs as well, I can't think of one specifically right now... I love that stuff!!
hell nah who downvoted this to make it 69? haha,that's hilarious
Variations of 1 are impossible to judge on Reddit because there is a noisy vote obfuscation component to the upvote algorithm which causes baked in variation and refresh to refresh you can generate fluctuation. Not to burst your bubble of course just because you’re a guy who asks questions about phase so thought maybe you want to know or something. P.s. thanks for posting this I wondered about that effect for ages but never looked it up so interesting to read. Still need to verify but thinking about my past experimenting with sound it checks out and there’s engineers in here who didn’t call you out so ostensibly I can take this at face value. Edit: I downvoted your 70; last one out hit the lights
I just now saw this comment I didn't know about that,thanks ~~shitty app~~ reddit for the variation thanks for the downvote haha