Beatles in Mono

I've been listening to the Beatles recordings lately. Everyone is familiar with their musical genius, but few people have heard them the way THEY wanted to be heard. Luckily that's changing with the release of the Beatles Mono Box Set. Most of the mixes that everyone listens to today are the stereo mixes, but back when the Beatles mixed their albums the time and effort was spent on the mono mixes, with the stereo mixes as an afterthought.

Imagine this: the Beatles themselves, when recording in the studio, were listening on their headphones to a mono mix. When they went into the control to listen back to their masterpieces, they listened in mono. So the band and the engineer and producer all made their tonal adjustments based on mono.

For example, lets take a song that has two electric guitars. If you mixed that in a stereo environment a logical and common technique is to pan one guitar hard left, and the other to the right, creating a very stereo sound and also giving each guitar the space they need to be heard easily, simply by the distance between them in the mix. But in mono, both guitars need to be heard in the same aural space, so they would use different techniques to achieve this goal such as different guitars, different amps, and EQ'ing and compressing each guitar in a different way, thereby giving each guitar its own voice in the mix.

It had never occurred to me before that the Beatles were listening to their mixes in MONO in their headphones when they were recording. It's an obvious fact, but I simply had never thought about it. Try putting your stereo mixes in mono and listen to see if each instrument has it's own space. If it sounds great in mono, it will sound amazing in stereo.

Cheers to mono!