--- In [email protected], TurquoiseB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Really. Far too much treble, not enough bass, bad > balance between the instruments. All George Martin's > fault.
If you want an idea of what I'm talking about, listen to "Rain" and try to imagine it the way it would have been mixed with someone with an appreciation for the bass as not only rhythm but as melody line and driving force. Paul was *not* a half-bad bassist, but they buried the bass line of this song way down in the mix, and it's one of the niftiest and more creative bass lines one can find in pop music of the time. I guess I'm coming from a kind of pseudo- audiophile point of view. One listens to music on a fairly good, near-audiophile-quality system, and one listens to it *flat*, man. No added or lessened bass, no added or les- sened treble, *flat*. If it sounds "wrong" somehow, not the way live music sounds when played live, then someone along the way had a somewhat distorted idea of what music is "supposed" to sound like. The Beatles' music, as wonderful as many of the melodies and lyrics are, were forced into a "sound bag" prevalent in recording at the time they "came up." That "bag" depended on heavy compression (that is, little to no dynamic range), a dependence on treble (because that's all that the crappy speakers in most music systems of the time could reproduce), and almost no bass (ditto). These days, with another three or four decades of audio engineering under our belts, it just sounds passé to me. It's tough for me to "suspend disbelief" and enjoy it the way I might have back at the time it came out. Duh. A lot like the dogma I bought without reservation back then, and now look upon with wonder...that I ever believed that it could be true.
