... that makes it so hard to pick it out?
Beatles, Beach Boys, Bee Gees, Eagles, Andrews Sisters, ... if there's a three part harmony, I can pick out the high and low just like that, but so often it seems that the middle one is "invisible" to me, no matter how hard I try to pick it out. So often the only way I hear it on any one of a number of records is when I go to the piano and pick out what the middle harmony WOULD be to fit the song, then I go back and listen to the record and say, "Oh, THERE it is!". There have been times that I didn't even know George was singing a 3rd harmony until I saw a youtube clip of a performance. Those usually had a different balance to the microphones than the records did, so I would hear George on youtube, go back to the record and listen to the song again, and say (you guessed it) "Oh, THERE it is!".
Is there something inherently different about the typical middle harmony, musically speaking, that would make it hard to hear? I know it's often the 3rd position of a chord, is there some psychoacoustic explanation related to that? Or is it just that my brain is wired weird? I might blame it on George Martin's mixing George Harrison's harmony vocals low all the time, but that wouldn't explain why I have a hard time hearing it in other vocal groups (or other instruments, like horns or violins, for that matter). Maybe it's because the first music I really listened hard to was the Beatles, and that part of my brain stayed vestigial (** shakes fist at sky and says "Why, George Martin, why?**).
Thanks for any help fellow musicians, vocalists, or Beatles fans in general!