The Mental Traveler - YouTube

So, yesterday I was watching Revolver (2005) and I noticed the soundtrack used a lot of oldies. And it reminded me that the mix on 60s/70s tunes was really interesting, you could hear every instrument at a given place in the spatial spectrum, and no one was stepping on anyone's toes. Like, you could say, OK, I disctinctly hear the guitar panned at 35L, just sitting there and living in its own acoustic space. I really like the fact that you could hear the instrument timbre and texture very clearly, and I want to apply this to the stuff I produce.

So my questions are:
1) Why did this style of mixing went out of fashion? Is it for "fire power" and loudness reasons? From rock to electronic music it seems everybody is putting all the instruments at the center and just "widening" everything. Right before typing this, I was listening to the new Black Angel LP (retro-rock from California) and even though it was supposed to be 70s inspired, it felt like every instruments came from the center.
2) Do you have any tips for achieving this type of production. For some reason I'm only mentionning the panning, but I guess there are other characteristics like lighter compression and obviously a 100 % out of the box process.
I already experimented with placing sounds in space in the past playing with reverb, volume and panning, but never got satisfying results. Do you think mono-ing all the instruments helps? Kinda slly questions I know, but I never used a real table mixer so far, I don't know how it actually works.

 

One big reason you could hear particular instruments is there werent many elements in the mix to begin with. Now you have layers different sounds to get a wide and full mix, synths and ear candy etc, stuff you cant make out normally unless you eq or listen to stems. Even singular instruments like guitars are quad tracked and panned with the layers having different tones, so you cant pick out one in particular. Its not in the center as you might think, its spanned across spatially and spectrally, giving it a full cohesive sound which sounds like a singular package. It really depends what one might like, i too get sick of the 'fullness' sometimes and go back to raw oldies.

 

Take a look at LCR mixing. Read this :

https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/lcr-panning-pros-and-cons

 

Thanks, it looks like a good starting point, I'll study that later today.

Yes, thanks for pointing that out, aiming for fullness might be one of the main elements that makes the difference, although I think layering was still happening to a lesser extent back in the day.
Like, they often used several guitars playing different variations of the same progression and stacked it, as opposed to the classic double-tracking wall of guitar everybody uses nowadays.