Hey, baby, how about some ... "action"? - rants & raves - craigslist (2024)

Various Artists

"Stereo Action Unlimited!"

https://youtu.be/kQ9RxXC308I

(includes vocals)

Ray Martin and His Orchestra – "The Flight Of The Bumble Bee"

Marty Gold and His Orchestra – "Did You Ever See A Dream Walking"

Dick Schory's Percussion and Brass Ensemble – "Runnin' Wild"

Vic Schoen and His Orchestra – "And The Band Played On"

Leo Addeo and His Orchestra – "Dancing Tambourine"

The Chorus and Percussion of Keith Textor – "Lonesome Road"

The Guitars Unlimited Plus 7 – "Expresso"

Bernie Green and His Orchestra – *Kiss of Fire"

Marty Gold and His Orchestra – "The 3rd Man Theme"

Dick Schory's Percussion and Brass Ensemble – "Hernando's Hideaway"

Henri René and His Orchestra – "Swanee River"

Leo Addeo and His Orchestra – "Every Little Movement"

Ray Martin and His Orchestra – "Jericho"

Manny Albam and His Orchestra – "Stompin' At The Savoy / Johnson Rag"

THE advent of stereophonic recordings
for the home and the equipment on
which to play them brought in its wake
a whole specialized repertoire of "sound
demonstration" discs — recordings which
when played on stereo phonographs would
provide the hearer with spectacular sonic
illusions of motion, directionality and depth
(RCA Victor's BOB AND RAY THROW A
STEREO SPECTACULAR, LSP-1773, is a prize
example). The snarl of racing cars whizzing
past the starting line, the New York
City subway, a ping-pong game, the bowling
alley, the zing of a rifle bullet toward
its target, the soft-shoe dance across the
stage these and a host of other novel
effects became showpieces for the home
stereo listener.
Wonderful as these stereo sound effects
may be as aural novelties, they cannot
hold the listener's attention for long or
over many hearings. The substance of
almost all recordings worth living with is
after all — MUSIC.
Stereophonic recordings of symphony
opera, Broadway musicals, jazz and popular
music literally added a new dimension
to home phonograph listening. Such sound
is enhanced not only through being spread
across a broad frontal are covered by the
loudspeakers, as against being "squeezed"
through a single enclosure; but more
especially it is enhanced through the sense
of localization and depth perspective. A
soloist or instrumental choir, recorded in
stereo, can be heard in the living room in
the same relative placement as it would be
in the concert hall, on the opera stage, or
in the night club. The sound of instruments
and singers emerges from the speakers in
genuine aural perspective. In stereo recordings
of opera, Broadway musicals or
drama, movement across or from front to
back of the stage is immediately discernible
as such to the listener. These elements of
directionality, depth illusion and motion
are not to be found on monaural recordings:
they are properties unique to stereo.
This holds true especially for motion.
Though the great classics of the concert
hall and opera remain of necessity inviolate,
beyond a certain point, when it comes
to exploitation of stereo recording tech-
niques, popular entertainment music is
something else again. Such music, after all,
is meant to entertain-to delight and even
surprise the hearer. So it is that record
producers of the stereo era have been in-
dustriously devising ways and means of
bringing the special properties of stereo to
bear on entertainment music, and in a
manner that would add something genuinely
new and exciting to this type of listening
fare. What RCA Victor has chosen
to call STEREO ACTION is its special response
to the fascinating challenge posed
by the new techniques made available
through the development of stereophony
for the home. This has involved much
more than merely exploiting motion and
directionality in terms of shifting instrumental
choirs and soloists from one side of
the listening room to the other. For meaningful
results, it has demanded new concepts
in the art of orchestral arranging
and a large measure of truly imaginative
and creative collaboration between musicians
and recording engineers.
The art of "pop" recording has become
today, more than ever before, an art of
dramatic enhancement through every device
of microphone placement, reverberation
technique, ping-pong stereo, and the
like; but little had been done to develop a
whole repertoire of pop musical arrangements
that would take full advantage of
the complete armory of enhancement
techniques now available to the record
producer. RCA Victor's Stereo Action
series marks a serious and carefully
thought-out step in that direction. The
facts of recording history show that musical
enhancement by way of microphone
and other audio techniques dates back a
surprising number of years.
RCA Victor began experimenting with
multi-track recordings of soloists well before
magnetic tape came into general use
— notably with Jascha Heifetz playing
both solo parts of the Bach Concerto for
Two Violins and Orchestra (c. 1947) and
with the late, great jazz musician, Sidney
Bechet, playing all six instruments of a
New Orleans combo in Blues of Becket
and Sheik of Araby (c. 1940).
After the war came the magnetic tape
revolution in recording technology, and
with it came a greater flexibility than ever
before in using various enhancement de-
vices in the field of popular music recording.
With the coming of stereo and the de-
velopment by RCA Victor and others of
doing master recordings on 3-channel
stereo tapes ("triple-tracking"), special
new techniques became an everyday part
of phonograph record studio production.
Every 3-track original has, of course, to
be blended to a 2-track working master
tape for producing the dise or pre-recorded
tape for use on home 2-channel
stereo phonographs or tape machines. So,
in the process of "blending down," many
things that may not have come off in the
recording session can be set right in the
re-recording. Even before stereo, "post-
equalization" and "post-reverberation"
were commonly applied in instances where
a master tape from a recording session
may have left something to be desired. Of
course, tape editing techniques play a
great part in this, too, so that the combination
of all of these devices and techniques
adds up to a product created as
much by the studio engineers as by the
performing musicians. With this wealth
of knowledge and dramatic device at their
beck and call, it seems only natural that
the art of "musical-dramatic" enhancement,
applied so successfully over the past
decade to monaural entertainment recording,
should begin to turn to stereo, no
longer as just a novelty gimmick, but as
a medium to be used with genuine creative
imagination. It is with this in mind that
RCA Victor has embarked on its Stereo
Action series of recordings that highlight
the special listening dimension provided
by motion-in-stereo. Some of the "stereo.
highlighting" on these recordings will be
apparent at once to the listener-wherein
plectral, percussive, or solo legato elements
in an arrangement are manipulated
in motion and/or in apparent perspective
against a tonal background that shows
them and the stereo medium to the most
striking possible advantage; but this is
merely a first step in the development of a
new dimension in the art of orchestral
arrangement and entertainment presentation
on records, one that should over the
years establish a dimension in home musical
listening that is truly a law unto
itself to be experienced, as on these RCA
Victor recordings, only in stereo and only
through the art of recording as developed
for the 1960s and beyond.
-- DAVID HALL, Music Editor, HIFI/Stereo Review

... Previously on the Great Instrumental Music program:

https://washingtondc.craigslist.org/nva/rnr/d/steve-allen/7753355673.html

https://washingtondc.craigslist.org/nva/rnr/d/is-it-true-yes-back-in-the-olden-times/7753248208.html

https://washingtondc.craigslist.org/nva/rnr/d/costa-eccellente/7753146294.html

https://washingtondc.craigslist.org/nva/rnr/d/brothers/7752974543.html

https://washingtondc.craigslist.org/nva/rnr/d/its-not-elevator-music/7752967839.html

https://washingtondc.craigslist.org/nva/rnr/d/my-guitar/7752875971.html

https://washingtondc.craigslist.org/nva/rnr/d/south-american-holiday/7752816821.html

https://washingtondc.craigslist.org/nva/rnr/d/in-the-gentle-hours/7752656571.html

https://washingtondc.craigslist.org/nva/rnr/d/hot-and-cool/7752650276.html

----

YES, then is MORE Great Instrumental Music for YOU to enjoy ...

https://washingtondc.craigslist.org/search/rnr?query=great%20instrumental%20music#search=1~list~0~0

Our Musical Motto: "Increased Listening leads to Increased Enjoyment"

plectral: related to string instruments