Take Me Back – 2024 Stereo Mixes

However, in Andy’s back-catalogue a total of 22 tracks never received a true stereo mix – being issued in mono alone – and have remained like this for the past 60 years. The original two-track or four-track session tapes are unlikely to have survived, meaning that the finalised “master recordings” have vocals and instrumentation imprinted in a single mono channel making a retrospective stereo mix impossible… until now!

As a by-product of the advances in computer technologies of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine-learning, a new technique has emerged whereby a fully mixed musical track can now be “de-mixed” and split into its individual instrumental and vocal elements. This known as ‘stem separation’.

A typical track could contain drums, guitar, bass, keyboards, vocals, orchestration and more all blended into a single recording. Stem separation extracts each of these elements into distinct audio tracks.

In the past, remixing could only have been done with access to original multi-track session tapes, but AI software can now isolate stems with increasing accuracy allowing a whole new world of remixing opportunities.

So for the first time ever, please enjoy these stereo mixes of 22 Stewart classics only ever previously available in mono.