I’d like to hear a scientific explanation of this!
[Example song](https://youtu.be/C7HP9Xkim9o)
I have a few questions about this.
I was once told that it’s because multiple vocals of this era were done live through a single mic (rather than overdubbed one at a time), and the layers of harmonies disturb the hair in such a way that it causes this quality. Is this the case? If it is, what exactly is the “disturbance”? Are there other factors, such as the equipment used, the mix of the recording, added reverb, etc?
EDIT: uhhhh well I didn’t expect this to blow up like it did. Thanks for everyone who commented, and thanks for the gold!
In: Physics
Came here knowing the example would be “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”.
Was not disappointed. Thanks OP.
Vocals were often recorded much further off the mic back then 1-2′ rather than 6″.
Also not everything was pitch corrected and an amount of tuning variation between harmonies can make them sound thicker and richer.
Edit: auto correct hates me
Dude. Seriously. These people don’t know what they are talking about. CSN sounds incredible, not because of any recording tricks, it’s because they are incredible together. That’s how and why they got together.
I’m late to the party but something I don’t see mentioned much is that a lot of it is a very clear stylistic trend in arranging music. Big thickly voiced chords with lots of 3rds are not in vogue. The trend by and large across most popular genres is more toward open, powerful, clean chords (or just single note lines) that do not contain a lot of harmonic material. I say this as someone who does it for a living – if I layer up chords with nice fat harmony I get the note “it sounds old” or “cheesy”
Because it’s not popular? Hiphop doesnt have record scratches anymore, rock doesnt use twangy clean guitars, hammond organs aren’t in every rock song, folk doesn’t include mouth harp in every song etc.
It’s just an aesthetic that was really popular in the vocal pop and folk groups in the 50s and 60s, and kept going into the 80s and 90s but kind of died down after that. You still have bands like Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, Beirut, Tindersticks, Elephant Revival, even more popular things like The Dead South and Mumford & Sons do a lot of quite airy harmonies regularly in their music.
There’s a lot of comments here that are technically true, but aren’t really related to the issue OP is asking about. Yes, there’s the loudness war and digital effects and autotune and all that. Those have definitely changed things.
But the main thing is just the style of music. It’s just not as popular as it was 40 years ago. That’s why it doesn’t appear as often in modern music. It’s the same reason you don’t hear a lot of disco on the radio anymore.
There is plenty of music coming out today that still sounds like this that was recorded and mixed digitally on modern equipment.
I see a lot of good info, but I didnt see anyone talk about this. When people sing in the same room the vibrations of their voices actually affect each other. When perfect harmonies are sung there are natural overtones created by the stacking of the sound waves. When voices are autotuned or electronically harmonized you are actually missing a lot of frequencies that natural harmonization would have, making the newer stuff sound flat and robotic.
Modern compression and limiting techniques also tend to kill any sense of natural ambience in music.
If we REALLY want a deep dive into this, the proliferation of digital effects has reshaped sound quality as well. As good as digital reverbs can be, IMO they are still no match for dedicated reverb rooms and huge, real, plate reverbs.
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