When out of the sky comes… a cat. Told you the cat was going to be okay. Now for Lily…
Jimi Hendrix – Crosstown Traffic
Ah, the day of the stereo pan pot being used to maximum effect. For those of us just getting our first real stereo units (not “hi-fi” mono), we drooled over songs like “Crosstown Traffic” as we could brag about our stereo separation, or how our “wow & flutter” was really low… low distortion, watts per channel, peak power… oh how I long for those terms of the real audiophile!
Anyway, the engineers on Hendrix albums went nuts and panned the hell out of this song. Makes you almost dizzy on headphones! Get baked and listen to this one late at night… the room really spun around for sure.
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Discussion (18) ¬
one thing i have always loved about this recording, and its something that NO ONE ever really mentions, is the piano backbone/reinforcement part that’s in there to a) supplement and add tone to what was mostly a fairly transparent bass part (which sounds to me like hendrix wrote to more or less double what he was playing on one of the rhythm guitar parts with the exception of little bass fills here and there) and b) provide a nifty, ‘spooky’ effect when not needed for the bass guitar reinforcement (a’la the transitional bridges). you only hear the bass guitar poke through its own mud every now and again on this song (again, he was largely just using it as a body double for his guitar parts — there’s a definite lack of upper mids on the bass guitar parts, which might have just been clobbered by the guitar parts above it), but you sure do notice that piano.
the “piano bass part as bass tone supplement” trick was either used sparingly or used to an extreme when it was employed, and either way, i always thought it added a cool sounding element to bass guitar parts and wondered why more people didn’t do it. either engineers viewed it as a ‘parlour trick’ to help reinforce a very lackluster bass part / tone (which meant something was wrong with the bass guitar or how the bass guitar was being recorded) or just didn’t think of it.
KISS exploited that particular studio trick — one place you can really hear it is “shout it out loud”, where the piano line is mirroring the bassline exactly and helps the bass ‘poke through’ the mix.
i don’t think the panning on this track ‘spins’ so much as it ‘goes across’. i think what they were trying to do was make instruments sound as though they were crossing the stereo field in front of the listener.
while others were busy just pushing instruments into the left/right channels of this wild frontier called ‘stereo’ to give a sense of ‘separation’, hendrix and his camp were busily abusing the new technology as much as they could, obviously with fantastic results. i really wonder if on some of this stuff, hendrix thought “you know, i wanna make the listener of this record seasick”. 😀
And the result of getting seasick or motion sickness? You head spins and you blow lunch. That was my point. To get technical, you could only “spin” a mix in Quad. Stereo was only panning ping-pong.
Great dissertation on the doubling the bass line with a piano. I played in a quartet where the keyboardist’s left hand and I doubled the bass lines for most of the songs we recorded. It did add punch to our muddy little recordings. It is a great technique and allowed me to mess around a bit as he covered the primary bass lines on the piano or synthesizer.
Ah, the good old days…
🙂
That reminds me of the garfield dolls that hung with suction cups on your car.
Yep, I had one of those in my car for a bit… that and Alf hangers from Burger King…
I’m such a geek sometimes…
🙂
whoa whoa… alf hangers? how retro and cool would that be now??? Ebay!
Did you also have the guy who had a wire that ran to the drivers seat and when you squeezed the ball his pants came down mooning the driver behind??
HEH! Imagine if that cat had landed on a runaway Toyota, talk about a messy situation! o.O
I had a runaway Gremlin last fall when the Toyota stuff was breaking out in the news. I did it completely by accident, but still works!
Yep, it would have been “splat” not “whomph!”
🙂
You definitely got the comedic timing down between Panel 2 and 3. That moment of impact when you just sit there trying to rationalize in your brain what just happened, then the screaming starts.
I was travelling home from Austin, Texas to Jefferson, Texas; had been on an interview with Dell Computers. Made this 6 hour drive unscathed in any fashion, and was roughly 10 minutes from the house when I saw shadows of legs in an approaching vehicles headlights, moving towards my lane. I was expecting at the worst a deer, what I found was a cow awaiting my 65mph truck. I had that same reaction, I froze, my brain registered the mayhem that was about to ensue, and then I started screaming and slamming the breaks. I managed to get it down to about 50mph when I sent old Elsie flying up onto my hood, across the passenger side and down into the bar ditch. Every time I see these situations on shows, and now in this strip my mind always goes back to that night. I asked the police officer who came out (after my sobriety test, which I guess is mandatory if you HIT A COW!!!) if I could have the cow to process if no one claimed it. He just laughed and said, No. That the county deals with these types of carcasses, we can’t give them to the public. So I guess that meant that the local school probably had Salisbury steak for a while. 🙂
So why isn’t Bud playing for the Bears with a leg like that? I mean they would win a ton more games in 1977 🙂
I’m from Chicago, living in Wood Dale now. I have to give you enormous props for including the ‘Uncle Lar’ line in the last panel! Larry Lujack and “Li’l Snot nosed” Tommy Edwards! Good times… Good times…
I caught that Animal Stories reference too! I’m so glad to see someone else caught it.
Ah, yes, good Uncle Lar’ and Snot-nosed Little Tommy reached out to a huge audience and I’m glad people remember that segment because it was one of the best things on AM radio back then.
Definitely my favorite Hendrix track (although his theft of Watchtower from Dylan must be noted.) A sonic triumph and I dig the lyrics:
But darlin’ can’t you see my signals turn from green to red
And with you I can see a traffic jam straight up ahead
Indeed.
Yes!
I acutally only just noticed the piano while listening to it, and this landed me here, because I also wanted to know if it has PHASER on it, or perhaps a doubled REVERSE PIANO layer as well?
Listen to the slower seething notes played in the choruses, and it sounds sort of like a forwards, and reverse layer, doubled up. Or perhaps a slower phaser on it. Listen at 0:30 to hear what I’m talking about… What do you think that is on the piano?
I’m gonna try something along those lines some time!
I got a Foxx Fuzz Wah recently, and it broken almost straight away, as the models from 2003 – 2006 seem to be famous for. But once I get it fixed again, I’m gonna wang out some serious Hendrix, and some piano/bass double up action! Maybe try some phaser and/or reverse piano chords, too!
May as well throw in some sea-fully-sick panning on the entire mix while I’m there!!
Wish me luck. 🙂 I may not come back alive.
Actually, it could be done by moving the microphone while recording it. Like, for those slow seething notes, someone could have moved the microphone from “facing away from the piano”, and eased it into each note, moving it in to face the piano, then pull away again, maybe…
I want some of whatever drugs those guys were on in the studios back in the day.
I wanna try some of this stuff on my 4 track cassette recorder. That’s where it’s at!
Perhaps this little article goes some way to explaining it? Perhaps someone is moving one of the microphones, to the phase is being shifted to create a sort of 3D panning effect. but that sounds a bit different I guess. It could be a phasing related technique, though…
http://hendrix.guide.pagesperso-orange.fr/ladyland.htm