Rolling Stones 40th Anniversary of “TATTOO YOU” Atmos on Tidal & Apple Music

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GOAT'S HEAD SOUP was a disappointment. "Released straight to streaming" has the connotation that "released straight to DVD" has for movies.
You must have meant that Tattoo You was "Released straight to streaming" - which I believe it was, and not GHS.
 
i honestly don't know why they didn't just enlist Bob Clearmountain to remix the entire catalogue in 5.1 & Atmos
Honestly? Because Stones, Inc. probably doesn’t really care.

And while he’s a good mixer, it’s not like the live 5.1 mixes of Stones material have been particularly noteworthy by and large.

I still argue people here are expecting too much from pretty basic recordings.
 
Honestly? Because Stones, Inc. probably doesn’t really care.

And while he’s a good mixer, it’s not like the live 5.1 mixes of Stones material have been particularly noteworthy by and large.

I still argue people here are expecting too much from pretty basic recordings.

Yes, we are definitely a demanding lot by almost anyone's standards. Regardless, I'd still like to hear what can be done with the Stones other albums in 5.1 and Atmos, especially Sticky Fingers. Also, still hoping for a proper mix and physical release of the subject album of this thread.
 
Yes, we are definitely a demanding lot by almost anyone's standards. Regardless, I'd still like to hear what can be done with the Stones other albums in 5.1 and Atmos, especially Sticky Fingers. Also, still hoping for a proper mix and physical release of the subject album of this thread.
Even though they have generally have fewer tracks to work with, I actually think some of their older albums might more potential for interesting surround mixes than with the mid-late 70s LPs (IORR thru Tattoo You).

As I may have already written in this thread, I’d say it’s entirely possible they did what you would call a “proper” mix - and rejected it because it didn’t work.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want...but if you try sometime, you get what need. Apropos for this thread.
 
Even though they have generally have fewer tracks to work with, I actually think some of their older albums might more potential for interesting surround mixes than with the mid-late 70s LPs (IORR thru Tattoo You).
Which older albums, and why potentially more interesting even with fewer tracks to work with?
 
Which older albums, and why potentially more interesting even with fewer tracks to work with?
See the above posts for starters...

So Beggars Banquet.

Satanic would be interesting. Between The Buttons might be interesting but I don’t know what kind of stems they might have for that stuff. The Stones’ tapes aren’t nearly as neat and tidy as The Beatles’.

Sticky Fingers and Exile too, but again who knows what tapes exist. But I really don’t know what’s on the multi’s. It could be hard - with 2022 technology - to make a discrete-ish surround mix if there is lots of bleed, etc.
 
It's my understanding from speaking to someone peripherally involved with Atmos mixing in the US that with the sudden demand for Atmos mixes for streaming services, there's a kind of assembly-line process for creating these mixes for artists who either don't care about surround or don't have provisions in their contracts to approve (or reject) a surround mix. I was told that for these mixes the SOP is to just recall the stereo mix and push a few elements partially into the height speakers, and the same with the surrounds, effectively so that if you put your ear up to the speaker you can verify that it's doing something. To my mind, this accounts for the huge amount of "is it in yet?" surround mixes that have proliferated on Atmos streaming thusfar, and it fills me with dread that the major labels are repeating the same mistakes of the original SACD/DVD-A era all over again. The fact that the Atmos mix of Tattoo You was dumped onto streaming services with little fanfare and not released on Blu-Ray at all should tell you all you need to know about how much faith they have in its quality.

I don't buy the idea that the approach to this mix is a philosophical issue when cheapness or laziness is a much more plausible explanation. It may be two guitars, vocals, bass, drums and keyboards, but there's a reason albums (especially by 1981) were recorded on 16, 24, 36 or 48 tracks and not 8. Bands didn't just go into the studio, play live and then go home - they added all sorts of overdubs, double-tracked guitars, added backing vocals, harmony vocals, percussion and so on. The wiki page for this album lists at least 12 different non-Stones people who contributed other instruments to this album. Additionally, Bob Clearmountain's mixes during this period were a masterclass in making "simple" rock bands, most of which weren't massively different from the Stones in terms of configuration, sound huge, from Roxy Music (Avalon), to Bryan Adams (Cuts Like a Knife, Reckless) to to David Bowie (Let's Dance) to Bruce Springsteen (Born in the USA). In fact, I'd argue that the Stones called in Clearmountain (who was a master of production trickery and was at the forefront of using natural reverb for the "big" sound that defined the '80s) exactly BECAUSE they wanted a fancy mix - if they wanted something that sounded like a bunch of stripped-down demos there were a million Jimmy Nonames they could've used at the time.

I haven't seen them with my own two eyes, but I'm sure there are more than enough elements on these master tapes to make a satisfying surround mix without turning it into ostentatious 4-corner bongo fury - Clearmountain's 5.1 mixes of Roxy Music's Avalon and Bryan Adams Reckless are more than proof of this. There's already a mix of this album with all of the sound coming out of the front of the room, and it's called the stereo mix. Making a surround mix that retains 95% of the stereo mix and then allocates the other 5% between all the other height and surround speakers is either a failure of imagination, a crisis in confidence, or an exercise in cost-savings, and no matter which combination of the three it is, it's a pity. Surround offers an amazing canvas for a mixing engineer to paint on, it's a shame that so few are either unwilling or not allowed to fully utilize it.
Great observations on this really strange Apple Atmos outlier mix.
Curious if anyone has an example of what you hear from the ceiling that downmixes for us floor-level folks.

A lockdown upgrade to my project-studio mixer & $70 HDMI to analog converter has proved interesting as I've started streaming AM iMac to AVR in 5.1.

Enables isolating & monitoring individual channels or pairs from a 5.1 stream (Atmos downmix) in real time.
Interesting to mute the speakers to listen in headphones to rears, center & lfe to reveal how the mixer blended the elements.
Especially in this case, where one feels compelled check his equipment & setup for malfunction. 😱

Center - One might swear this is 4.0, but with enough gain boost, there is a center signal.
So faint it's barely above the noise floor, in the range of -50 dB below the fronts. 🤫😯

Inaudible for all practical purposes, well outside the range of manual adjustment to the average AVR to improve balance.
So what the heck was the point? :confused:

Listening with phones reveals isolated lead vocal, not dry, but "wet" with reverb, as if hearing the recording studio headphone send to the vocal booth.

Rear/surround pair range -20->30 dB down with little content beyond ambience under backing vocals & keys, rendering the mix front-heavy beyond expected norms.
Examples:
  • Hang Fire ~ hammering piano, "doo doo"vocs, seemingly mono?
  • Slave (new extended mix) ~ Sub- audible ambience first 0:27, "do it, do it" vocs, tasty Billy Preston Hammond organ track & sprinklings of electric piano spicing up the extended outro...
LFE non-existent or un-detectable, no great loss with as the fronts are rockin' strongly.

Can only speculate this was a gift to us, so we all can think "heck, I could have done better than that?" 😂
 
Great observations on this really strange Apple Atmos outlier mix.
Curious if anyone has an example of what you hear from the ceiling that downmixes for us floor-level folks.

A lockdown upgrade to my project-studio mixer & $70 HDMI to analog converter has proved interesting as I've started streaming AM iMac to AVR in 5.1.

Enables isolating & monitoring individual channels or pairs from a 5.1 stream (Atmos downmix) in real time.
Interesting to mute the speakers to listen in headphones to rears, center & lfe to reveal how the mixer blended the elements.
Especially in this case, where one feels compelled check his equipment & setup for malfunction. 😱

Center - One might swear this is 4.0, but with enough gain boost, there is a center signal.
So faint it's barely above the noise floor, in the range of -50 dB below the fronts. 🤫😯

Inaudible for all practical purposes, well outside the range of manual adjustment to the average AVR to improve balance.
So what the heck was the point? :confused:

Listening with phones reveals isolated lead vocal, not dry, but "wet" with reverb, as if hearing the recording studio headphone send to the vocal booth.

Rear/surround pair range -20->30 dB down with little content beyond ambience under backing vocals & keys, rendering the mix front-heavy beyond expected norms.
Examples:
  • Hang Fire ~ hammering piano, "doo doo"vocs, seemingly mono?
  • Slave (new extended mix) ~ Sub- audible ambience first 0:27, "do it, do it" vocs, tasty Billy Preston Hammond organ track & sprinklings of electric piano spicing up the extended outro...
LFE non-existent or un-detectable, no great loss with as the fronts are rockin' strongly.

Can only speculate this was a gift to us, so we all can think "heck, I could have done better than that?" 😂
As I wrote earlier in my thoughts on why the mix isn't as adventurous as many think it could or should be, the vocals for Start Me Up were recorded with mic'd bathroom reverb. I would think the same would be true for other Jagger vocal dubs recorded contemporaneously in 1981.
 
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Honestly? Because Stones, Inc. probably doesn’t really care.

And while he’s a good mixer, it’s not like the live 5.1 mixes of Stones material have been particularly noteworthy by and large.

I still argue people here are expecting too much from pretty basic recordings.

Take a listen to Clearmountain's recent Atmos mixes for The Band which are also comprised of relatively simple multitrack sources but rendered to fairly radical and very interesting surround mixes.

Clearmountain seems to go for much less radical live surround mixes than for studio albums so he might well have given us a really interesting Atmos mix for Tattoo 'You' had he been given a chance.
 
Take a listen to Clearmountain's recent Atmos mixes for The Band which are also comprised of relatively simple multitrack sources but rendered to fairly radical and very interesting surround mixes.

Clearmountain seems to go for much less radical live surround mixes than for studio albums so he might well have given us a really interesting Atmos mix for Tattoo 'You' had he been given a chance.
I would point to SW's Jethro Tull's "This Was" also, love that one; they just need some "work" and creative imagination!
 
Take a listen to Clearmountain's recent Atmos mixes for The Band which are also comprised of relatively simple multitrack sources but rendered to fairly radical and very interesting surround mixes.

Clearmountain seems to go for much less radical live surround mixes than for studio albums so he might well have given us a really interesting Atmos mix for Tattoo 'You' had he been given a chance.
You’re comparing apples and oranges. Folks seem to get caught up in the number of tracks and not the nature of the music and instrumentation.

Just listen to the stereo mix of of the opener of Cahoots - Life Is A Carnival - with all of the various little percussion elements, the horn section, the call and repeat of vocals and instruments, the tremolo guitar, etc. Then listen to the opener of Tattoo You - Start Me Up - which basically just two guitars, bass, drums, vocals with some occasional lead guitar.

Are you going to tell me they have remotely similar musical, instrumental and sonic palettes to work with? Plus there are things like...how discretely were the tracks recorded? How much bleed was there on the tracks?

There’s much more to it than just putting a bunch of stuff in the rears. If you want to get an idea of what Tattoo You might sound like if Clearmountain was more aggressive - give Smoke Signal a listen in surround. Maybe folks think that would suit the Stones’ sound, but I think it be the surround equivalent of the wide stereo mix of Satisfaction. Interesting, but the mono mix still kills it.

Clearmountain does, thankfully, treat live surround mixes like they’re a band playing live on a stage in a room to an audience.
 
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You’re comparing apples and oranges. Folks seem to get caught up in the number of tracks and not the nature of the music and instrumentation.

Just listen to the stereo mix of of the opener of Cahoots - Life Is A Carnival - with all of the various little percussion elements, the horn section, the call and repeat of vocals and instruments, the tremolo guitar, etc. Then listen to the opener of Tattoo You - Start Me Up - which basically just two guitars, bass, drums, vocals with some occasional lead guitar.

Are you going to tell me they have remotely similar musical, instrumental and sonic palettes to work with? Plus there are things like...how discretely were the tracks recorded? How much bleed was there on the tracks?

There’s much more to it than just putting a bunch of stuff in the rears. If you want to get an idea of what Tattoo You might sound like if Clearmountain was more aggressive - give Smoke Signal a listen in surround. Maybe folks think that would suit the Stones’ sound, but I think it be the surround equivalent of the wide stereo mix of Satisfaction. Interesting, but the mono mix still kills it.

Clearmountain does, thankfully, treat live surround mixes like they’re a band playing live on a stage in a room to an audience.

All I know is if Bob Clearmountain had mixed 'Tattoo You' in surround it would have killed the version that's out there.
 
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