MonoMixBio

It was a dark and stormy night at “He’s Dead Jim” Recording Studios. I am sitting in front of my Mackie 24 channel mixing board and looking around at all the equipment I have acquired over the years, all the money I have spent on guitars, amps, microphones, outboard gear, digital recorders, and computer equipment, and wonder what I could do next. Will I record some new hi-tech sounding music, or some finely polished blues, or rock and roll in 5.1 stereo.

I’M GOING TO TAKE SONGS THAT ARE ALREADY FINISHED TRANSFER THEM TO MONO AND MAKE THEM SOUND LIKE WE ARE BACK IN THE EARLY 60’S PLAYING THEM ON A VICTROLA WITH A KNITTING NEEDLE ATTACHED TO IT SCRATCHING ACROSS THE SURFACE OF A VINYL DISC THAT’S BEEN IN THE HANDS OF A TWO YEAR OLD FOR TEN HOURS!!!!!!!

Why “The Mono Mix”? In this day of digital audio, Surround Sound, MP3’s, and iPod’s, why mix in mono. If you listen to just a few of the songs from the “Lee Roy Smilee” web CD, “This Is Where We Get Off”, you will notice that we are influenced generally by two classic Rock and Roll bands. “Queen” and “The Beatles”.

By no means do we try to compare ourselves with these two legendary bands, but instead we used what we have learned through listening to their music for so many years, and incorporated techniques from them into our own music. We tried hard not to copy what “The Beatles” and “Queen” have done, but as you listen to the “Lee Roy Smilee” web CD, you will find that in some cases we have failed. We look at this as inevitable.

Back to the original question, why the mono mix. In the early 1960’s “The Beatles” were signed to “E.M.I”. in England, and “Capital Records” in America. Beatle albums would be released in England first and then later on in the States. The early Beatle albums that were released in England do not match up with the American “Capital” albums as far as their content goes. Capital would take two of the English released albums and make three albums out of that to release in America.

Another feature that Capital Records did was to add some very heavy reverb to some of the Beatles songs. Just listen to the versions of “I Feel Fine”, and “She’s a Woman”, that were released as singles in England, and compare them to the versions that appear on the Capital Records released album “The Beatles 65”.

As we were mixing “This Is Where We Get Off” we had the idea of doing mono mixes of the three most Beatle sounding songs, as a way of paying tribute to the band that had given us the drive to keep going to try and make something out of our music, even though not many people are listening.

Turning a stereo song into a mono one is quite easy to do with a computer. First, decrease the amplitude by 6 db on the stereo mixed file, then copy and paste the left and right tracks from the stereo mix, one at a time, to a new mono formatted file.

After the stereo tracks of “You’ve Got It All”, “Unrequited Love”, and “Tedium” were converted to mono, I sent the mono mixes back through the board, added a little EQ, and some finely tuned reverb from a Lexicon MXP-110 multi-effects processor. What came out the other end was; “Oh Darling You’ve Got It All”, “Unrequited Walrus”, and “Tedium Fields Forever”.