Category: NW Iowa Live Music

Record producer Terry Melcher didn’t believe in stereo, passing it off as a fad. The people listening to pop music were driving cars, and cars only had one speaker.

So, there are subtle differences between his stereo and mono mixes because he left the stereo to an assistant, at least in the case of Paul Revere And The Raiders.

But this is about crowd noise. We’ve been wondering if crowd noise can be suppressed in audience recordings, since our recorder employs at least three microphones while we’re using it and apparently much of the crowd noise is out of phase. That means if we mix the recording down to mono, some of that will get zapped (I can’t remember the correct technical term). Doesn’t it?

While yours truly is convinced, we had a great opportunity tonight to test it. At the beginning of the third set by Nick Dittmeier And The Sawdusters, the band opened with a song named “O’Bannon Woods”, and the crowd was slow to quiet down. At the same time, the house PA was playing music that they play during intermissions, and nobody turned it down. One of those speakers is close to our mic, so we were temporarily recording from two different sources from two different directions at two different volumes.

Here are two versions of an identical track: one stereo as it was recorded, one mixed to mono:

I still do my best listening in my car. It has more than one speaker, but I think I’m gonna like the mono better.

Recording data for nerds:
Zoom H2n, set to auto-gain: concert, side mics set to +3, maybe 8′ up in the air maybe 8′ away, from Bose L1.