Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Musician MARCH 1980 - by Robert Fripp

MOVING OFF CENTER: NEW CONCEPTS IN STEREO MIXING

Ever notice that when you listen to stereo you are subjected to a discreet tyranny that glues you to a spot midway between the speakers? Ever wonder who put you there and why you don't feel free to move?

As a means of presenting on record the perspectives of the symphony orchestra in the concert hall, stereo was a highly successful translation of terms between the media of live and recorded performance. But it didn't work with rock music. The weight of the drums, bass, et al, coming straight down the middle as in early mono recordings, was dispersed in the early '60s by their rather arbitrary placement in the remote corners of the stereo mix. The price for clarity and ease of identification was reduction of poke (punch). Neither did recorded perspective reflect performance perspectives.

During the later '60s, greater sophistication and experience increasingly filled the space from left to right, at best using stereo to convey a sense of three dimensional space and geometries unique to the medium of recording. At that time rock in the auditorium was still mainly a monaural experience amplified. Middle-left and middle-right were discovered as respectable resting places for instruments, although problems of comparative size remained (and remain): flying tom-toms and giant drum kits straddling the stereo conform to no performance reality and are irksome.

Increasingly sophisticated technology (4 to 8 to 16 track recording) made it possible once more to place the rhythm section heftily in the middle while still using the stereo fully to graft the impression of size onto solid rock. Over a period of one minute, the lead guitar would creep eastward while Young Muscles on rhythm flexed without compromise. For small combinations of, say, guitar, bass, drums and voice (now fashionably minimalist but out of favor during the leap to Gothic extravagance in the '60s) stereo continued to be a problem not fully solved by ADT (analog delay) or DDL (digital delay), techniques developed since circa 1970. If the bass, drums and vocal were in the middle, then guitar flapped solitary and uncomfortable off to one side. Hence the "back to mono" campaign to reintegrate the divergences and recapture the strength of rock in its straightforward two-dimensional aspect.

For those remaining committed to movement between speakers, to finding a compromise between earthy solidity and the vast, multi- directional vacuity that characterized the worst of (so-called and ill-named) English art rock, there emerged a new version of an old tyranny: the Tyranny of the Producer; Big Ears, who would sit dead between the speakers and impose his own perspectives onto recorded music It was a tyranny that rivalled that of the enthusiastic art-rock space cadets whose sudden success seemed to validate pretensions on all levels; they huddled in unholy quorum with pliant engineers to generate excess everywhere.

The Producer's perspective implied that the home listener would ideally also sit in center mode. Although people continued to hear records in an off-center location, often through the inconvenient design of small rooms or careless placing of furniture, this began necessarily to assume the status of audio heresy or social disadvantage.

This I term the Tyranny of the Center.

From the producer's perspective, only one location is permissible. But should the producer abandon this tyranny, the listener's audio perspective, and hence his experience of music, is liberated: any of the infinite number of points along a line from left to right are equally valid, and produce an equally valid perspective.

This became clear to me while I was producing The Roches and trying to convey the essence of three idiosyncratic women working outside stereotypes, translating from performance to record (something like putting Goethe into English or Shakespeare into German and expressing the implicit rather than the literal sense). How to paraphrase on record the mobile geometry of their work?

My solution was to not impose one interpretation by mixing to a fixed center, in this case technically easier in the absence of a rhythm section. The clue to this is given during the first song, We, as voices and guitar sharply jump positions in a seemingly crass procession: the performers move about for one song, the audience by implication for the remainder of the album.

This does not, however, solve the problem of accurately and interestingly recording the rhythm section. If you wish to keep its full weight, the rhythm section has to be in the middle. What most people do is put the rhythm section pretty well in the center but with tom-toms and so forth still flapping about here and there. My personal solution is to translate the rhythm section into mono, in other words straight down the middle or so close that it's virtually the same, while the stereo works three- dimensionally around it. That was the approach I used on mixing The Zero Of The Signified, a track on the forthcoming album Under Heavy Manners. Essentially, the rhythm section was in mono, while the Frippertronics and solo guitar worked around it.

In general, my approach to mixing is to view the stereo as a three-dimensional field in which geometric patterns are created by sound. Simply expressed, volume determines proximity, frequency range determines the height, and left/right panning the width. Probably there are geometric patterns that are naturally consonant and reflect the proportions of sacred geometry, but in the absence of accurate information and an established tradition, one must work intuitively. I have listened to mixes in which the stereo placement (rather than the performance, music, or relative levels) made me feel profoundly uncomfortable.

Some people are able to translate music into abstract visual terms; the translation of music into stereo is the challenge of mixing.