Strings lose their energy in mono

P

psihobambi

New member
So, I've been mixing and after a while I wanted to check my mix in mono.. well.. almost every problematic instrument is from the Sampletank library.
Let's take plucked strings as an example.
It's got 2 channels (left and right) and the whole instrument sounds right for the song.. atleast in stereo..
When I mono it, the sound just kind of dies.
Reverb is turned of in VST.
Is it phasing ? I tried playing with Waves InPhase. Didn't get any results..
I don't know if I want to take one side of the stereo field and make it mono, because both are crucial.
Any solutions ?
 
I normally find that when mixing, levelling things in mono then panning afterwards is the way to go.

Are you playing the strings from a VST or are we talking rendered audio files/stems?
 
Thanks for the reply.
I am playing from VST. It's centered on ableton channel. It's centered in vst too to be exact, but the instrument is just like that..
 
If it's from the VST then there probably isnt much you can do without rendering it to audio and changing things then - I'm not all that familiar with Ableton so I'm probably not the one with the answer for this but its worth testing to see if it is a VST issue or something else.
 
Find an orchestral recording and listen to it in mono, see if the same thing happens. The mics on a real orchestra tend to be a spaced pair of some sort, and since an orchestra is big, the mics are pretty far apart. That will cause all sorts of phase silliness.

On the plus side, almost no one will listen to it in actual mono (both sides summed to one speaker). It also isn't your fault someone is listening in a less than optimal environment.
 
This is sometimes due to stereo widening that has been added to the original sound, stereo widening usually uses some phase trickery, so when it's monoed the left and right are not quite in phase and some of the frequencies cancel. Stereo keyboards often do this too.

Alan.
 
Farview said:
On the plus side, almost no one will listen to it in actual mono (both sides summed to one speaker). It also isn't your fault someone is listening in a less than optimal environment.
Click to expand...

If it's played thorugh a mono PA system or a bar's house sound system. Or a phone with a single earbud (but that's probalby only one side - left or right) I guess).
 
Again, it's not his fault that people are playing his stuff on a system that changes his mix.

He is only complaining that it's losing energy, not cancelling g out completely. The rest of the mix isn't going to sound as big either. So the strings losing energy through a club pa system isnt really that big of a deal.

The same thing will happen to any other song played on a compromised system. The only difference is he has control over this mix, so he is thinks he can do something about it. But the only way to make sure your mix doesn't change in mono is to mix it in mono and leave it that way.
 
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