The Smiley Smile Message Board

Hello,

Is there a way to adjust the settings to only hear the low bass vocals? When I first bought my first Beach Boys cassette a few years ago I remember messing around with the bass/treble and it got rid of all the lyrics except Mike's low parts on "Don't Worry Baby". It was really incredible. I feel like I can't hear most of his low parts except in obvious spots where it's just him (Getcha Back, Dance Dance Dance....many more) Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

If it's the old Chuck Britz stereo mix of Don't Worry Baby, what you probably did was turn the balance knob. The lead vocals were panned one side, the backing vox the other.

Regarding cutting out voices using eq, impossible. You can highlight certain frequencies, but in the case of bass vocals, turning up the bass eq will make everything sound muddy. You can Oops some stereo recordings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_Of_Phase_Stereo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_Of_Phase_Stereo), and this may isolate some vocals, depends how they were mixed.

Your best bet for what you are asking though is a program called Melodyne. This breaks up a recording into seperate frequencies. You can then delete parts as you wish. It doesn't sound perfect though, but as a research tool it can be pretty cool.

Hope this helps. I'm sure more technically minded folks can add to this

thanks for the response. I certainly did mess with the balance. So cool to know somebody actually knew exactly why I was able to hear that. It was on a cassette (2 sides) maybe 8 songs total. Surfin' was definitely on there and All Summer Long.