is it common to record vocals in stereo?

[banjo71]

I've got somebody's project and they recorded the vocal part in stereo. It sounds ok, but when he sang overdubs he got closer to one mic and farther from the other. It's my job to fix that, as the mixing person. Not only is there a panning difference but a tonal change. So I'm going to simplify and split the stereo into mono tracks, pick the best sounding one, and going mono. It sounds so much better in mono because of the consistency for those overdubs.

I'm not experienced enough to know if this is a common practice, to record vocals in stereo?

 

[sjjohnston]

I'm not sure what you mean by "in stereo."

If you mean he recorded a single performance with two mics with the intention of one being the left channel and one the right, then no, that's not common. The only thing it would accomplish is you'd record the room ambience, which isn't really normal practice in rock/popular music (and doesn't even happen if they're both close). If you were recording an opera singer in a concert hall, maybe. A choir is, I suppose, "vocals" and is often recorded stereo, but that's not what you're talking about here. Typically, for popular music, you'd record the vocal performance with a close mic, dry, and add reverb when mixing, as appropriate to make the mix sound right and fit together.

People do sometimes record a single vocal performance with two mics (or more), but not with the intention of putting them in different stereo channels. Usually, I think, people do this because they aren't sure which mic is going to have a sound they like, so they go ahead and record more than one and pick the one that works best later. It's possible, of course, to combine them if you like the combination better than any one alone. If so, I suspect you'd prefer panning all of them to the same "place," so you wouldn't really be treating them as stereo.

 

[Steenamaroo]

So I'm going to simplify and split the stereo into mono tracks, pick the best sounding one, and going mono. It sounds so much better in mono because of the consistency for those overdubs.

That's exactly what I'd do.
It's very strange that the two tracks are panned apart.
It's not uncommon to record with two different mics and blend the two though, or use one heavily compressed, or just for louder passages or whatever.