M/S Processing

[dean1964]

Hello all,

what are some strange and unconventional techniques you may have used in conjunction with M/S processing.

For example. ever stuck a reverb on the md or something crazy like that? Maybe routing the side to your toaster? ( I jest....but you get the idea)

dean

[Massive Master]

I know plenty of people that think of M/S as "strange and unconventional" in the first place.

Parallel compression on the mid signal only is - well, I wouldn't really consider that strange or unconventional either...

I'm lost...

[dean1964]

Did i stump the massive master? (kidding)

I guess to a lot it would be. It did not seem so strange to me because I've used the concept in stereo recording and thought ...well hell....why not.

I'm just looking for ways to use it I have yet to think of.

[SouthSIDE Glen]

M/S processing has been a basis for vocal elimination karaoke boxes for many years. Working on the theory that many stereo mixes have centered lead vocals, these boxes use(d) M/S circuits to pull out the centered information and run it through a gain/volume control knob. Turn down the volume on the center channel, and you're turning down the center vocal, allowing you to sing along with your favorite recording without having to compete with the original vocalist.

Of course this is rarely perfect. It only works on mixes where the lead vocal is centered in the mix, plus it also works to reduce the volume of anything else that is centered in the mix. But it is a quick and dirty way to karaoke-ize a commercial mix.

G.

[dean1964]

So i recently was playing around with MS and added just a touch of reverb on the M, and I mean just a touch. the verb out meter shows something like -30, but I really dug the results.

have you guys tried anything like that. How about reverb in mastering in general. for classical? and pop?

[Massive Master]

Reverb in mastering? Very rare... Sometimes on classical if tracked in a very dry room and mixed without verb... Sometimes to fix bad edits & tails... But not much else.

Heh... Sidenote - I can't remember which plug, but someone out there has a plug with a "Mastering Reverb" on it. That cracks me up... I've seen a lot of stuff marketed as "Mastering Quality" and "Mastering grade" - But a Mastering Reverb?!? Too much...

[EDIT] - Ozone. And some people wonder why...

[SouthSIDE Glen]

Originally Posted by dean1964

So i recently was playing around with MS and added just a touch of reverb on the M, and I mean just a touch. the verb out meter shows something like -30, but I really dug the results.

have you guys tried anything like that. How about reverb in mastering in general. for classical? and pop?

For me, personally, while I find M/S decoding to be a very powerful tool in the mastering phase, I find that mostly to be useful for fixing what should have been done right to begin with in mixing.

If I'm going to be adding reverb to a track or group of tracks, I'll add them when they are still tracks. To blend them together into a stereo mix just to synthetically pull them back out again to add more processing seems like putting the roof on a new house just to have to tear it off again to get at the unfinished insides.

Plus - though this can depend upon what I'm looking for in reverb - for me far more often than not I'm looking to use reverb to place an instrument in space rather than make it sound as if I'm adding a reverb effect directly to the instrument (e.g. as if I were using the reverb on a guitar amp, for example.) As such, that reverb is typicllay eather going to be a stereo reverb or a mono reverb panned away from the source. This cannot be achieved by simply adding reverb to the M channel.

Again, mastering is not my specialty, but I'm hard pressed to think of any purely creative purposes for using MS that I wouldn't rather or better handle by working the tracks in mixing instead of performing open-mid surgery on the mixdown. Like surgery, I view M/S processing to the 2mix to be something that's required to fix a sick or dying mix that cannot be redone, not a mixing procedure in and of itself.

G.