Coney Island Steeplechase remix

[Mark]

This is just a little experiment that I thought some of you might enjoy hearing...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_H6sxPwdFo

The mix of Coney Island Steeplechase on the 2014 3rd album box is, of course, vastly superior to what originally came out on Another View, but for me personally still doesn't quite hit the mark. It's not their greatest song by any stretch of the imagination, but one of the things going for it is the interplay between the two scratchy guitars. This is the almost lost due to the odd decision to mix one of the guitars (presumably Sterling) way into the background. letting the Lou's part dominate.

What I've tried to do here is produce a more balanced mix which evens out the two guitars somewhat. I did this by using mid-side processing, which is a technique that involves summing the left and right channels out of phase to produce two new mono channels: the mid channel (ie all the audio that's mixed to the centre of the stereo picture), and the side channel (all the audio that's mixed to the left and right, excluding anything that's dead centre).

This gave me a centre channel with Lou's guitar, bass and lead vocal, and a side channel with Sterling's guitar, bass and backing vocals. Panning the centre channel slightly to the left and the side channel almost all the way to the right has resulted in a mix where both guitars can be heard clearly and nothing is dominating.

It's still not perfect - the bass is a bit heavy (due to appearing in both channels somehow), Sterling's guitar sounds a bit 'thin', and it would have been nice to separate the two guitars entirely and pan them hard left and right, but the eccentric way the track was mixed in the first place has made this impossible. I think it's an improvement though.

If anyone else wants to have a go, I'd be very interested to hear the results...

[Driven Insane]

I like it. Thank you.

After so many years of listening to the "Another View" mix, I still don't get used to that clear presence in Lou's voice.

What's the story behind that "radio" sound we hear on the "AV" mix ?

[Mark]

I don't know. My guess is that it was originally recorded that way for some reason, and by the time of the 2015 remix they had the technology to reverse the effect somewhat (you'll notice there's still a little distortion).

[iaredatsun]

@Mark

thanks for posting this I enjoyed it. I think you did a good job. With regards the bass, I think it's a bit over-accentuated on many of the '69 remixes/remasters anyway.

My theory is that the vocal effect was added in the 60s, but that they kept the raw vocal, too. I can't see that they would have added such an arbitrary effect in the 1980s. And if baked in back then, I do not think the effect could have been removed when they did the clean 2014 remix version.

One slight bugbear I have about those 45th anniversary remixes is I Guess I'm Falling In Love. It's great to have the more powerful version, but for some unfathomable reason, they made Sterling Morrsion's guitar sound like a tiny fly trapped on the left-hand tweeter. I wonder whether anything could be done about that with your techniques, or with these amazing new demix technologies.

[simonm]

maybe there were 2 vocal takes? one with the phone effect and one clean. I really like the song and had it on a mixtape that I listened to a lot - I haven't listened to the '1969' comp version much, but the phrasing on Mark's version sounds slightly different to the AV version in my memory...

[Driven Insane]

maybe there were 2 vocal takes? one with the phone effect and one clean. I really like the song and had it on a mixtape that I listened to a lot - I haven't listened to the '1969' comp version much, but the phrasing on Mark's version sounds slightly different to the AV version in my memory...

That's a very good guess. I had to check it out, so I played both tracks in parallel, taking a five second segment of one and then immediately the same segment of the other, until the end of the track, and all the vocal inflections sound exactly the same to me. The second part of the track, where they start naming the days of the week, etc., is a bit trickier, as there's more than one voice involved, but I would say it's the same too, just mixed differently. At the start of that second part there's a small "howl" in the new mix that I can't hear in the old one, though.

I'm sure there are better ways of doing this, but anyway...