Few would disagree that 1964's "Downtown" by Petula Clark is one of the most iconic British pop singles of the 1960's. It was written by Tony Hatch, staff producer at Pye, before carving a songwriting partnership with the rich-voiced Jackie Trent (she would enjoy success, including a number 1 the following year with "Where Are You Now, My Love"). "Downtown" is a great 45 mono mix but as a decent wide-expanse stereo mix exists, why am I visiting a remix on it?
Well, it's like this. Mono mixed singles sounded pretty powerful. Their counterpart stereo versions released on LP often sounded weaker with less punch. Many reasons exist for this. At the time, mono was the dominant, de facto format, having been the ONLY recording format for many decades since the invention of disc recording, before developing wire recording and others before finally tape recording arrived. Band and singer turn up. engineer balances the microphones and ensures no overloading takes place to ruin everything. Performed and recorded live onto mono tape. That's your master tape, there and then. That's it.
Multiple takes can be done until you get the best possible in the short time available. BUT once the session is over, there's no second chances unless you reconvene and do it all over again at great expense. A tape-to-tape recording could be done to add or 'overdub' something, add echo, or boost EQ here and there (just treble, middle, and bass in an advanced studio). A tape dub meant losing a little fidelity whereas you'd rather preserve as much of the original performance as possible. Anything reducing the quality might adversely affect everything downstream - mastering, copies for stamping, the resultant vinyl copies, everything. Still, if you had no option to rescue a poor recording worth money, that's what you did.
Multitrack tape was a development of stereo tape recording, usually of a studio full of a symphonic orchestra. Live performances might also capture the audience applause, adding to the live atmosphere - but these were rare to begin with. All would still be recorded at once, but now the engineer could position instruments anywhere across a stereo image - strings to the left, cello on the right, trumpets blaring through the middle - you get the idea. A lot of work, but once a successful plan worked, a template could be efficiently re-used when setting the studio up.
Using the stereo machine as a dedicated twin-track recorder allowed a basic separating of elements, i.e. band on the left and singers on the right, allowing an engineer to record 2-track-to-mono master tape, with a lot of control as to what goes into the final mix, by independently balancing each track and adding EQ and reverb as needed to create a polished mono master. The 2-track tape could be used as a very basic stereo version, or when funds permitted, purchasing a second 2-track machine to record onto, but that would have been a luxury.
Why am I telling you al that? Well, even after 4-track came in, mono was still king and so less time and thought went into a stereo mix to begin with. Panning pop instruments left and right and having vocals in the middle was a fast and satisfactory solution for the few well-off enough to buy a stereo reproducer to play a stereo album. Yes, the stereo spread allows you to make out the instrumentation clearly, but the power in the performance loses something when the band is perceptively lower in the mix.
"Downtown" is one of those - one of many such stereo mixes at the time that are satisfactory but needs a boost. My remixing the stereo track has pulled the drums and bass over from hard-left, more into the centre of the image and given a volume boost using a little compression. This leaves guitar, piano, strings and brass with less competition at each side, and I think each comes through that little bit clearer. It's a punchier sound overall and although this deviates from my original mission to create stereo from mono, there are other 'stereo' mixes I might like to 'fix' - in time.
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