Kinks Deluxe editions available for pre-order

Donovan seems to have fared pretty well.

 

Yeah. That's why I ommited him (ruins the premise)...

 

Talmy is talking about the first couple of singles, not albums, here: the flops that preceded "You Really Got Me."

I have not read Hinman's book. I would love to.

It would not be the first time that an engineer has mis-remembered how something went down 40+ years before, so you may be correct that this article is wrong.

On the other hand, it does seem plausible to me that Pye would have agreed to pick up the studio costs after the Kinks turned out to be money makers.

The finished mixes _are_ mono only....but still, I have a hard time believing that a mono-->mono--> mono process could have produced some of these recordings. I'd think you'd end up with something closer to the sound of the Beatle's BBC recordings that way.

I admit I may just be having a hard time adjusting my assumptions to the facts. But I wanna see more documentation of these facts. It's too easy for some of these things to turn into a game of "Operator", where a couple generations of misinterpretation get turned into "fact."

Matthew B.....know that I have tremendous respect for your Kinks postings! We've been posting in the same Kinks threads for a while now, and you always write smartly and with an excellent critical ear. Please know there's a lot of inherent respect in my skepticism on this point....and I'm just waiting for conclusive proof that I'm wrong here.

 

Most took over Donovan when he finally accepted stereo recordings. Honestly I like most of what Most did. Although I understand certain groups and sessions were more important than others. I also think the bands had a lot to do with how they sounded. Donovan had a very ecclectic bunch of sounds on his records.

The Animals always sounded good to me because of their sound and instruments. I'd rather have the Most productions than what they did with Tom Wilson in '66.

 

I'm not really convinced by the 'mono-to-mono' stories. If it was really about recording for cheap then using a 3 or 4-track is actually cheaper. You record all the parts to the multi then mix down to master and re-use the multi. Mono-to-mono means using another machine plus another reel.
I suspect it's more likely that maybe a 2-track or 3 track was used and any additional overdubs done as a superimposition to another mono track, similar to the Zombies recording process at Decca. It may be this aspect that Talmy is remembering?

 

I have the Hinman "sessions" book, and while he does certainly make the occasional error, he generally seems to know what he's talking about. He clearly has access to recording documentation that nobody else has. They appear to have gone with 1 track mono recording as not just a money saver, but an artistic choice to make things more "raw".

Ray appears to have had a severe aversion to multitrack recording, until it became an absolute necessity. And then, right around the same time they start using the three track machine, he starts to go to the extreme in the other direction (beginning his habit of endlessly re-recording things - which, ultimately, drove Quaife to simply quit the band out of tedium). And this is also when he starts acting really weird with Talmy (waiting for Talmy to leave before finishing "special" recordings/recording without telling him/etc).

The Kinks/Ray just weren't normal, so I'm not that surprised they recorded in such a strange way for the first few years...

 

Here's how the transition in the British label credits went. You can see a lot of the labels here.

"Waterloo Sunset"/"Act Nice and Gentle" — "Produced by Shel Talmy"

"Death of a Clown"/"Love Me Till the Sun Shines" — no credit

Something Else by the Kinks — no credit

"Autumn Almanac"/"Mister Pleasant" — A: "Produced by Ray Davies"; B: "Produced by Ray Davies & Shel Talmy"

"Susannah's Still Alive"/"Funny Face" — A: "Produced by Ray Davies"; B: no credit

Live at Kelvin Hall — no label credit; sleeve credits Ray Davies with "Musical Direction"

"Wonderboy"/"Polly" — "Produced by Ray Davies"

 

Stereo "You Really Got Me"

So is there no true stereo version of "You Really Got Me"? I notice on the stereo version of the album the song is listed as Mono w/ reverb. I would assume this new deluxe edition would issue a true stereo version if one were available.

Thanks

 

Correct. No true stereo version.

I asked this many pages back... was the mono reverb technique used on other Kinks recordings to 'simulate' stereo. I don't really mean the electronic reprocessed stuff, but stuff more along the lines of the version of YRGM on the deluxe. I recall hearing a very reverby version of "I've Got That Feeling."

 

Matthew, are they the EXACT same CDs as the individual releases, with the individual OBI's, clear sleeves, etc.

Does DiskUnion only create the outside box, and sell them as one package?

Thanks.

 

I have not heard that version so I'm not sure. But some of the tracks on the stereo "Face to Face" are panned to near mono, with the reverb on the different tracks panned wide right and left. (So, say, vocal reverb left, instrument reverb right, vocals and instruments 11:00 and 1:00 from the middle.)

 

Really an awful mix. I wonder how it ended up like that?

 

I will go on record as saying the stereo mix of Face to Face doesn't bother me. I find it charming in it's own way.

 

Some of those mixes do not bother me either. I haven't given it a good listen in awhile, but I recall liking "Fancy." That song needs to be spread out a bit. I'll wait to listen again when the deluxe comes out. I almost wish they could've done a brand new stereo mix. Not sure what good that might do anyways. We'll see what they've done with the tracks that are newly remixed.

 

Well, it was generated from a tape that had most of the instruments on a single track, the vocals on a second track, and a third track for occasional solos or double tracked vocals. Not much there to create a good stereo mix with!

In addition, it appears the sound effects were added "wild" during the mixes, and some extra vocals were added during the mono mixes (esp on "Rainy Day in June.") It is possible the Kinks weren't even around to add those same vocals during the stereo mix!

"Little Miss Queen of Darkness" is especially lacking in subtlety in its stereo mix.

 

I just mean it was the mid sixties (with hard panned, completely unbalanced stereo everywhere), and they decide to mix a stereo album to practically mono with stereo reverb. It just seems a strange decision

 

IMO, there really was/is no "stereo" version of 'Face To Face' -

1. It wasn't released in the UK (it was just thrown together at the last minute for the US/"international" markets).

2. As Steve E. said, a decent stereo mix back then was not really possible using three tracks (even the new remixes they've created won't be that good, unless they have access to the pre-bounced multis that Shel Talmy never believed were "worth" saving).

3. Three of the tracks were left in mono

4. Ray had no input nor interest in it (I'd be shocked if he even heard it, prior to the tapes being mailed off)...

 

This discography website claims there was a UK stereo LP released in 1966 (with 3 songs left in mono as you say above).
http://www.kindakinks.net/discography/showrelease.php?release=69

 

Okay, some stuff I meant to get around to earlier .... Here are a few sound samples for Kinda Kinks, taken from the UK PRT, the Rhino, the Victor Japan K2, the 1998 (which is the in-print one-disc mastering), the new Deluxe Edition, and the MFSL You Really Got Me/Kinda Kinks two-fer: intros from "Tired of Waiting for You," "Nothin' in the World Can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout That Girl," and "Dancing in the Street." For "Tired of Waiting" I've also included the intros from the "ugly pink" PRT Greatest Hits and the PRT UK Hit Singles.

These samples cover all the CD masterings of Kinda Kinks except for Teichiku's, which was essentially the PRT mastering with some extra noise reduction.

Also, the most problematic section of "A Well Respected Man"; the samples here are from the original PRT The Kinks Are Well Respected Men, the Castle re-issue of The Kinks Are Well Respected Men (mostly the same mastering, but with the drop-out tweaked), Rhino's Kink-Size Kinkdom, the two-disc The Ultimate Collection set, the 1998 Kinda Kinks, the new Deluxe Kinda Kinks, and a needledrop from 1970's The Kinks (the "black album").

All samples are in WAV format and volume-adjusted to matching levels.

"Tired of Waiting for You"
"Nothin' in the World Can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout That Girl"
"Dancing in the Street"
"A Well Respected Man"

 

Yes. See the label photo here. Also, the multis were Pye's responsibility, not Shel Talmy's, and Talmy has complained about Pye's recklessness in losing them.

 

Yeah, they're just packaging the SHM-CD mini-LPs from Universal Japan in their own box.

Disk Union also does some releasing and distributing on their own in a small way, but never with major-label product like this.

 

The only other option would have been to put instruments on one side and vocals on the other, which would have been even worse. I'm not actually offended by the panning choices they made. They were more or less intelligent given the options (if they HAD to do stereo at all).

The real problem is that they didn't take care with the levels, left things in the mix that shouldn't have been there, and did stereo mixes of songs that were missing elements. So it is upsetting that at times, this was the only available mix, and the first/only version of the album that people heard.

Interestingly, the 2 non-hit songs picked from this album for "Kronikles" sound quite decent in stereo: "Holiday in Waikiki" and "Fancy." I wonder if that was a factor in their being picked.

 

So anyway, I've been looking through Dave's Kink and Ray's X-Ray for more insight into the multi-track recording issue.

Dave doesn't comment on the number of tracks except for "See My Friends"; he says the instrumental backing was recorded on 4-track, then fed into two compressors before the vocals were added. Ray says that before the vocals were laid down a compressor was thrown on "the whole track," singular. Neither mentions the engineer, though Ray says that it wasn't Bob Auger. Doug Hinman's book says that "See My Friends" was recorded 1-track to 1-track with Alan MacKenzie engineering.

Something I should point out here: Hinman is naturally aware of these autobiographies. He occasionally quotes from both. So if he contradicts their details, there must be some other testimony or some scrap of tape log or the like that has led him to a different conclusion. It doesn't seem likely to begin with that they were using 4-track at this point; Face to Face came later, and it's plainly 3-track. And of course "See My Friends" is hissy as all hell.

Back to Ray. "You Really Got Me" is described, as in other accounts, as 1-track. He's vaguer on "All Day and All of the Night," but does say that the instrumental backing track was recorded in the same style as "You Really Got Me," piano and all. Kwyet Kinks "was made so quickly that nearly all the songs were recorded in the first take, with the vocal put on at the same time as the back track." And there's nothing much on the early days more specific than that.

Talmy's wording is ambiguous, but if you take him to be talking about singles then it makes no sense at all — their first two singles were recorded at the same session, as Ray and Dave confirm, and that session was on 3-track. There's a stereo mix of "I Took My Baby Home" on Kinks.

And remember that Talmy says he shifted to multi-track when Pye's president decided that "stereo was necessary." If Kinda Kinks and The Kink Kontroversy were on multi-track, then where's the stereo mix? (For Kinda Kinks there's even a surviving session reel. It's the source of the alternate "Come On Now" vocals on the new mastering and the box set.)

Which songs are you thinking of? In most cases only mono -> mono would have been necessary (instrumental track, vocal/backing vocal overdub), though sometimes there's a double-tracked vocal or something like that. I can't think of anything that sounds dramatically better than "You Really Got Me."

This assumes that the multis are being wiped, but that wasn't Talmy's practice.

 

This is going to apply to "Sunny Afternoon" too, by the by — the stereo mix won't have Nicky Hopkins's melodica.

Edit: Or maybe it will. Now that I check the unreleased backing track, the melodica's there. Weird, since it's not on the circulating stereo mix.

 

Sorry for the bad info, and thanks for the corrections guys!