Guitar tracks no good in mono

R

rp3703

New member
Ok, I’ve been battling this all week now and I’ve tried everything I can think of to fix it but nothing seems to work. To start at the beginning, I’m tracking heavy distorted rock guitars. I started out recording two passes direct(actually, it was more like 800 passes comped down to two), then re-amped them through a dual miked 4x12 (57/421). Both mikes are about the same distance off one of the speakers. Nothing was changed for each pass. This gives me two tracks of one pass and two tracks of the other. Panning both sets right and left sounds great(or good enough) but collapsing them to mono sounds like a flanger with the volume dropped. Obviously, this is comb filtering but when I zoom in on the tracks, everything looks to be in phase. What am I missing? Is it possible to have comb filtering occur when the signals look to be in phase? If the signals where not perfectly lined up, would it not be possible to just move one of the tracks and line them up manually? I do that with drums and it seems to work great. I still have the DI tracks so I can re-amp them as many times as it takes but I would like to know what I’m doing wrong before I try it again. Thanks.
 
Why are you collapsing it to mono?

Mute each mic one at a time and see what happens. That could isolate where your goofiness is. But if it sounds good spread out, just leave it that way.
 
Greg_L said:
Why are you collapsing it to mono?

Mute each mic one at a time and see what happens. That could isolate where your goofiness is. But if it sounds good spread out, just leave it that way.
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I know not everyone feels that mono compatibility is important but I do. If you listen to pretty much any newer rock recording, almost all of them work in mono. A lot of them are even mixed in mono. I have also heard plenty of songs on a crappy radio that did not work in mono and sound ridiculous when one of the guitars disappears.
 
I can understand listening in mono if you're anticipating playing this through a PA system or house system. Do what Greg says - mute a mic at a time and see if you can isolate the source of the problem. What DAW are you using? I suspect when you say 'things line up' you are lookng a the amplitude waveform, not the phase.
 
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Two mics equidistant from the same source with different frequency responses is always going to combine in odd ways. Maybe the smart approach is to ask yourself, what am I trying to accomplish? The typical reason to double track a guitar part is to put that subtle variation so that instead of some fake stereo you have two sources varying slightly. But if you double track and double mic, and spread each guitar in stereo it just turns into one sort of mushy thing where your ear can't identify point-sources. If you like the tracks, why not put pass one with the 57 hard left, pass two with the 421 hard right, you get variation of tone on the same part, and that extra edge of interest. Once you combine them, as in part one, 57 L, 421 R, part two, 57 R, 421 L, your ear can't discern where any guitar is coming from. Lots of times you will see studio pics of more than one mic on a cabinet, that doesn't necessarily mean that all the mics will be present at mixdown, it just gives options tonally. As long as you have the re-amping set up, do some extra passes with the amp set OBNOXIOUSLY clean and rough and offensive and loud. Take the pedals off, let the output stage of the amp do the work. Usually what sounds good to your ear in the room ends up sounding like Boston in the monitors, way too saturated and smooth to actually rock. You feel me?????
 
I am looking at the waveform. It sounds like my understanding of phase may be incorrect. I have always associated phase in a DAW environment as the peaks and troughs of the waveform as it appears on the screen. A snare hit being recorded through two mikes can be lined up by moving one of the waveforms in line with the other and therefore in phase. I have done this on drum recordings and it has worked every time. The drums end up sounding tighter. Is my understanding wrong? I am using Logic 9, recording through M Audio DMP3 and A/D converted through an Echo Audiofire 12. I have tried muting two of the recorded mikes on each pass and I get the same combined result. To me this if I stick both tracks recorded with the same mic 100% L and R then there should be no way for them to be out of phase since the mikes were never moved. The best combo I could make work in mono was to make a copy of the tracks and pan one 100% to one side and the copy 50% to the other but then I end up loosing some of the stereo image. It is sounding like I need to try tracking again and spend more time phase aligning before I hit record and probably cut a bit of the distortion as well. Fixing it in the box may not be an option here.
 
If you think you are having phase issues, you could try and either one, use a utility to change the phase or, take one of the tracks and "nudge it" one way or another to move the phase.

I have to agree with some of the posts here, unless you need mono, not sure why you are fixated on this. To each his own I guess, but it does sound like you have some phasing issues.
 
I use mono mixing a lot - but it's a contentious issue around here.

Looking at the waveforms (presumably you are zooming in) and seeing them look lined up by eye does not guarantee they are 100% 'in phase' with each other. Using two mics with different frequency responses is going to give you differences that you can't just 'line up' by eye. Use your ears to tell you what is and is not in phase, and wether that is a problem for your mix.

Have you bussed each set of mics and tried phase reversing one of the busses? It can make all the difference if mono 'compatability' is what you want.
 
Dude, you have 4 "heavy distorted" tracks, which could be out of phase and comb filtered from the source, which could also be a shit sound from the source, being crammed into mono for no reason other than you just want to. No wonder it sounds bad.

When you're recording one take with two mics, obviously phase is important. I do it all the time. Mine don't disappear in mono, but I also don't even think about mono. But it's also not that important unless you're using both mic tracks at 100%. The beauty of two mics on one cab is the blend. Pick one as your main sound and supplement with the other. They don't all have to be 100% full up. When you're not using both tracks at max capacity, the phase problems become much less significant.

And stop mixing by what the waveforms look like.
 
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When you comped the two tracks, are you sure you didn't reuse some of the same takes for both? It's easy to do if you're not careful. I usually figure it out when I hear phase cancellation popping up suddenly in my tracks.
 
Ok, so Donsolo from gearslutz actually came up with a workable solution to my problem which did not involve re-recording the guitars. What he suggested and what I did was to take the 421 miked track from one guitar pass and leave it mono then take the 57 miked track from the second guitar pass and copy it to another track, invert phase on one of them and pan them far left and right. The panned guitars sound messed up by themselves, almost painful to listen to but combined with the mono, it all sounds huge. Plus it spreads the stereo image, still somewhat sounds like a single guitar player and collapses to mono. You do have to keep the mono guitar kind of even with the bass so that it doesn't drop too much in volume when collapsed to mono and mix the panned guitars to fit. Some of the weirdness can be alleviated by delaying one of the panned guitars but either way, it sounds good to my ears even if I was not concerned with mono compatibility. Far more professional sounding than generic L and R panning double tracks. If you are mixing a three piece G, B and D, I would highly suggest you use this method every time. The only issue with it is, with every instrument in the center, you do need to work a bit harder to make room but it's worth the effort.
Like Miroslav said earlier, don't get offended when people give advice that goes against your thoughts so at the same time, don't get offended if I don't use that advice. I'm sure the best solution would have been to record everything again and pay closer attention to phase but this ended up being the quickest solution. Thanks for all of your suggestions. I'm sure I will look back at this post the next time I go tracking guitars.
 
rp3703 said:
I'm sure the best solution would have been to record everything again and pay closer attention to phase but this ended up being the quickest solution.
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Well...you didn't say you were working against the clock or had some deadline to keep.... :D ;)

Band-Aids are the only option when you don't have the time to re-record it properly.
 
Well glad you got it figured out and donsolo came to the rescue. Next time, record it right from the get go.
:D
 
Reminds me of the guitar [player that came into the studio with a stereo rig, we paned it left and right, sounded great, we monoed it and no guitar at all. The stereo rig was completely out of phase, possibly to give it a wide stereo effect. We had to flip on track to bring them back in phase or no guitar when played on everything mono. I have also had this happen with stereo keys.

Alan.
 
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