Mono, Stereo, or Double?

L

Lancep

New member
So I’m finishing up the mix of a song I’ve been playing acoustically for years (actually, I should just put it down and walk away because at this point I can only jack it up) and it got me curious. I tracked the acoustic with a m/s configuration. I did this because I wanted it to anchor the chord but I also wanted to leave the center open for the vocal as well as kick, bass, and snare. I wanted it to fill both sides so mono was out. I could have doubled it but my thought was that if it collapsed to mono, I would want it to sit back and allow the lead instruments to, well, take the lead. I also didn’t want to pan too wide because I wanted to reinforce it with two separate instruments panned to the outside.

I’m also tracking another song I usually perform solo that has a ragtime style guitar part. For this one, I chose to track in mono. My reasoning is that I wanted that ragtime feel prominent in the mix and stereo or doubled would feel disjointed, to me.

Anyway, this all got me curious about how y’all might approach these decisions and your logic or reasoning behind what you do. I guess if I was adding an acoustic sound to pump up a chorus (electric too, for that matter) I would probably double track. I’m interested to hear y’all’s take.
 
I've tracked both in mono and with 2 mics. Both will work. I use the reverb to give things a bit of space, especially if I have things mixed essentially in mono. The IRs that I use have both left, right and M/S models, and I tend to favor the M/S.

At one point, I did a guitar track in M/S with my Studio Projects B3s. I really like the sound. It sounds spacious, and leaves a nice place for the vocal to sit. That's one reason I picked up the Warm 47jr, and now the MK300. Both are multipattern mics, and I want to try them in that config. I still have 2 matched SDC pairs ( Lauten and Rode) plus two AKGs that I can use for duel micing the guitar. Whatever fits my fancy, I guess.

This is when I do the guitar/singer stuff. For rock stuff with bass, drums, etc. I have doubled acoustics for fill, and used the electrics as well.
 
Personally, I've never tracked in a room that I thought was acoustically attractive enough to track in actual stereo. I always end up with a tight mono mic and either double track it or some reverb fuckery.
 
I would experiment with duplicating the side track, then reversing phase on it. Pan the original Left and the dupe Right, leaving the mid track up the middle. Then just add in as much of the two side tracks as you like for stereo.
 
I really like the sound of a mono guitar, I don't really have any problem with there being no hole in the middle anymore, it's pretty easy to push the guitar back and pull the melody/vocal forward. Some songs just sound better mono to me, it's an artistic choice and not a limitation or lack of knowledge. I'm personally getting sick and tired of hearing people say (It's not very wide) on mix critiques. as if everything needs to be hard stereo.

I do double track most of the time though as this really fills out the stereo image. Its way harder to mix. (acoustic guitars) because of the annoying high frequency flamming, Panning 3 and 9 o clock helps a lot. CLA and Dan Worral do this so I gave it a try and it makes the job a lot easier (Shoutout to Joey Preston for recommending that to me in the other thread). Keep the reverb hard left and Right though, it will reduce in volume more when summed to mono but this is actually a good thing because the more center panned guitars will drop in volume less but where the volume drops on the verb more it helps to keep the center panned guitars a little more up front regardless of that drop in mono. Much better mono compatibility, plus it just sounds a bit sweeter with the verb swimming on the outside and the dry guitars more focused. You still get width at 9-3 o clock, probably way more than a 100% hard L/R panned X-Y, not in the sense of the sound being inside the speakers themselves(the reverb helps take care of that), but with the hole in the middle because of the 2 seperate takes.

The more I mix acoustic stuff and get better at it the less I care about mic placement. I don't think much about it now, 4-5 inches away from either 12th fret, or where the cutaway would be on a guitar, I don't really think about it anymore. (Unless a solo arrangmenet) Then I'll stereo mic, probably X-Y, probably shove a stereo room up out in hallway aswel. Or I'll experiment with Over the shoulder, maybe even try M/S out. I prefer to stay away from miking techniques that favour low end on 1 side though. I know a guy who swears by the 57/421 combo pointing at 12th fret of acoustic guitar around 8 inches away, I'll admit he gets some pretty sweet results, so I may even do that. (Hard panned in this case though if solo arrangement)

I have lately tracked the 2 standard 6 string guitars twice, and then track a nashville tuned acoustic guitar twice so that's 4 seperate takes, no duplicating. 9 and 3 o clock panned on all 4 guitar takes, then the other 2 reverb tracks hard Left/Right. This gives you a nice bed of strummed acoustic guitars to mix your melody/vocal into. I sometimes high pass the nashvilles at around 500-600hz to de-clutter the low mids a bit but sometimes I like the clutter and leave it just high passed at the standard place best for the mix. Somewhere between 40-140 depending on if there is bass kick... etc.etcc All of those 6 tracks get sent to a bus and are treated like I had just recorded 4 guitarists with a stereo mic setup. So all EQ and Compression etc will happen on the buss only. With the exception of the reverb having been high passed at 200, and probably low passed at 5khz for more of an invisible reverb.

Mixing acoustic is so brutal difficult in the beginning. The 1-5khz can trash your ears in 2 minutes flat if there is too much and with acoustic guitar you can lose perspective quite quickly. I'll always try to mix too warm if I can, and even sometimes that is not enough!
 
I just can’t accept there is any point whatsoever in using stereo techniques on a guitar. When you listen to a recording, it has a perspective. Are you listening to the subject from a foot away? Almost certainly not. How about ten feet? That might make sense? Twenty feet? That would be a bit like being on the front few rows in the audience. Your monitors could be in a big room what? Fifteen feet apart, but for most of us using mid or near fields, much closer together. Sit at your mix position and poin5bto the place the guitar should be. with one mic, where do you pan it? Quite easy, where you finger is. Too narrow? You have a guitar left and right (not that guitars have a left and right, just a body and neck sound). So you pull them away from each other. How far? A guitar as wide as your speakers is silly, so it’s a gentle left and right separation.

M/S on a guitar strikes me as a mistake. Where does your mid mic point? Probably somewhere between sound hole and the start of the neck? What comes out of the guitar body to the players right of the sound hole? Nothing! So your side channel just has the neck sound? So all one side? If you want stereo room sound, in a church or cathedral type building, I get that. A mono guitar, stereo huge space, and a bit of string and finger noise on one side only? Would the neck not be very, very long?

guitars have two sounds mainly, the deeper, rounder sound hole component and the tinny stuff from the player’s left hand. Two mics, balanced to give the blend, and the. Maybe panned very gently apart is in my view the most natural.

M/S is an effect, it’s unreal for a guitar and if you then narrow it by lowering the side component, you remove the finger noise. If you forget the matrixing, then you’ve just got two mics, and the fig 8 is probably the wrong mic for that job.

stereo techniques are well established and proven, but we insist on using them in inappropriate ways, when they simpl6 do not work in the way designed. Properly used, the popular techniques for stereo fold down to mono fine, but this fails when used close in with other mics live. They fight dreadfully. I sort of get this idea to have one guitar with little in the centre so yo7 can pop in a vocal, but you can do that just as nicely with the same single mic panned hard left and right, with them slightly displaced in time, with slightly different EQ. That’s an old trick discovered I think in the 70s when the first digital delays popped up. It sounds slightly weird in mono, but how many people now actually listen in real mono any more?

In my unofficial personal rule book. An instrument counts as ‘stereo’ when you must use two mics or lose some of it. So that’s pianos, drums, marimbas, percussionists, harps but I’m struggling with others. In my head, my test is to stand ten feet away and point at the instrument. If a finger point is solid, they’re mono. If you need to point in an arc, they’re stereo. Then, a stereo mic technique is right. Otherwise, it’s a dual mic balance of different sounds from the same instrument.
 
I'm a fan of stereo micing ac guitar. I just love the live vibe I get from it.
But sometimes if the song is busy with a lot of tracks that stereo track may be reduced to mono.
This tune I posted has stereo ac guitars but it's pretty simple track-wise.
This one in progress does too.
Sorry for the shameless spamming, but examples help I think.
 
I really like that - both the song and the recording. The guitars and the solo section sound great and are totally not stereo.
The processing and mix is giving a really wide soundfield with loads of activity and it sounds really good, but a guitar recorded in stereo does not sound like that at all.

Maybe we're using the word 'stereo' differently? Eyes closed, point at the guy playing the trumpet, and where is the guy playing the guitar? You can point to them and can probably also determine how far they are away and what kind of room it is. That's stereo. If you popped it into some kind of stereo visual display you'd see the screen show the trumpet and guitar in different places. If you then do interesting stuff with processing, reverbs, and gizmos that change the phase/timing, the sound field, left to right starts to fill up with great stuff - but that is not what stereo is. It's spread out mono in many cases - the location - the key feature of stereo reproduction, has gone.

Here are a couple of visuals of a solo guitar in the stereo field and the other is your recording. The off-centre location is evident in one - the stereo information providing our brain with the location. There is still some width to it, it's not mega narrow, like a synth tone recorded in mono and panned would be, but it's got a direction. Yours is just full of very evenly distributed sound.
 

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spantini said:
I would experiment with duplicating the side track, then reversing phase on it. Pan the original Left and the dupe Right, leaving the mid track up the middle. Then just add in as much of the two side tracks as you like for stereo.
Click to expand...
So...you would do MS.

My recordings tend to go for the "larger than life" thing. So if the acoustic guitar is the main instrument driving the song, I double it. If it is more of a percussion instrument in a sparse mix, I will use a stereo technique. If it is a percussive instrument in a dense mix, it will be mono, but it will probably be balanced by something else on the other side doing a similar thing.
 
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rob aylestone said:
guitars have two sounds mainly, the deeper, rounder sound hole component and the tinny stuff from the player’s left hand. Two mics, balanced to give the blend, and the. Maybe panned very gently apart is in my view the most natural.
Click to expand...
That's my thought. If the acoustic guitar is going to be the main instrument in the mix, I use 2 mics, one aimed at the 12th fret, and another at the lower bout/behind the bridge position. I then balance them, and pan them anywhere from 5-20% apart, depending on what else is in the mix.
Doubling and reversing the phase and panning left and right sounds real wide but will result in a drop out of the instrument when listening in mono.
Tracking the exact same guitar part on same acoustic guitar can lead to some phasey-sounding issues from any differences in strumming unless you pan each one far to opposite sides.
Although I've got a multi-pattern mic, I have yet to try M/S - because I'm happy with my technique, the guitars sound like I want them to sound.
 
Farview said:
So...you would do MS.

My recordings tend to go for the "larger than life" thing. So if the acoustic guitar is the main instrument driving the song, I double it. If it is more of a percussion instrument in a sparse mix, I will use a stereo technique. If it is a percussive instrument in a dense mix, it will be mono, but it will probably be balanced by something else on the other side doing a similar thing.
Click to expand...
I would experiment with the M/S technique I mentioned. See what comes of it. Might sound good.. might not.

I've always liked the "wall of sound" I heard from Motown as I was growing up. It's not good for everything, but ya never know..
 
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Last attempt - then I'm giving up. If you are recording a drum kit and want it to sound real, you'd individually mic it up and pan accordingly to get a drum kit of appropriate width, and any treatment and processing to make it at the back and not the solo performer at the front. That's normal and common. What you wouldn't do is use a stereo microphone techniques to do it with two mics - you could, but the mics would probably be where the lead singer is standing and of course spill would kill it. You cannot use a stereo technique to record the sound of a guitar in a heavily sound treated room where there are no reflections, because all the usual techniques with letters - are NOT close mic techniques, they are mid to far field ones. I'm totally mystified by this notion of M/S on a guitar. What is the point? The mid signal is the guitar, what part of the guitar gets recorded by the side mic? The neck? nut to what? 12th fret? If you want to capture that, then the side mic in the M/S pair just grazes the neck. Why not just use a mic that captures all that, if you want to hear it - why waste a fig 8 and use half of it, and have it not pointing at the source, but instead, parallel with the neck.

If you are recording a source with a real, natural stereo field of it's own - so the pianos, marimbas, zylos, drums (maybe), or a group of percussionists or a steel band, or string quartet or orchestra - then a stereo mic technique is the go to one - simple, mono compatible if that is important and capture the realism.

Virtually all the other instruments are mono, or virtually mono - so you would be recording the instrument central and then the ambience of the space.

Once we move in close - let's say 3ft or less, then the so called stereo is all effect, and the real stereo mic techniques cease to work in their designed mode and just become two mics, close together, hearing different things. It has nothing to do with stereo.
 
I use two different acoustic guitars. Track them in the same room, mic positioned to get the best sound of each. Play the same part. Tonal and slight timing differences added together create a full stereo field. A bit of eq and reverb and done.
 
rob aylestone said:
Last attempt - then I'm giving up. If you are recording a drum kit and want it to sound real, you'd individually mic it up and pan accordingly to get a drum kit of appropriate width, and any treatment and processing to make it at the back and not the solo performer at the front. That's normal and common. What you wouldn't do is use a stereo microphone techniques to do it with two mics - you could, but the mics would probably be where the lead singer is standing and of course spill would kill it. You cannot use a stereo technique to record the sound of a guitar in a heavily sound treated room where there are no reflections, because all the usual techniques with letters - are NOT close mic techniques, they are mid to far field ones. I'm totally mystified by this notion of M/S on a guitar. What is the point? The mid signal is the guitar, what part of the guitar gets recorded by the side mic? The neck? nut to what? 12th fret? If you want to capture that, then the side mic in the M/S pair just grazes the neck. Why not just use a mic that captures all that, if you want to hear it - why waste a fig 8 and use half of it, and have it not pointing at the source, but instead, parallel with the neck.

If you are recording a source with a real, natural stereo field of it's own - so the pianos, marimbas, zylos, drums (maybe), or a group of percussionists or a steel band, or string quartet or orchestra - then a stereo mic technique is the go to one - simple, mono compatible if that is important and capture the realism.

Virtually all the other instruments are mono, or virtually mono - so you would be recording the instrument central and then the ambience of the space.

Once we move in close - let's say 3ft or less, then the so called stereo is all effect, and the real stereo mic techniques cease to work in their designed mode and just become two mics, close together, hearing different things. It has nothing to do with stereo.
Click to expand...
A drum set captured with a spaced pair (and a kick mic) was exactly how the coveted John Bonham sound was captured on every Led Zeppelin album.

Your position assumes that you wish to capture the reality of all the instruments. That isn't always the goal. When you are creating a sonic landscape, you can use any technique that gives you what you need for your mix and your vision.

Just because you like making documentaries doesn't mean that super hero movies are incorrect or an abuse of tools and techniques meant to be used for their one 'proper' purpose.
 
No - I totally understand but the concern I have is that we describe the techniques talked about - like close miking instruments as stereo. Not in this topic, but in quite a few on the net, we read about people doing ORTF, or other esoteric techniques - then you read and they've bastardised an ambient recording technique into something new - that is not designed to record 'stereo' - they just use it as a multiple mic technique - which often works, but it just isn't stereo, just two channels of mics. The Binham example is a great one - but it's a studio technique, but I wonder how many people might try to use it with guitars and bass in the room - that would be a mess, wouldn't it! I am indeed talking about capturing reality - if you want to create a sonic landscape (which I rather like the idea of) then it's not stereo. Manslick's recording has a great openness and the sound field is totally full - but I can't locate anything.

To manslick - the depth thing is a bit simple really. Left Right panning is understood pretty well, but depth is a time alignment, with careful control of the levels - sometimes deliberately mixing the further instruments quieter. It's the opposite I suppose of when you put loads of spot mics out and have to delay the front mics to get the rear ones to align - the depth thing actually makes the distant source just a tad late on purpose, and the Haas effect means that as long as these sources are quieter than the close ones, your brain sort of processes out the delay - but it knows it was delayed so must be further away. You can also slightly roll off the HF, as this happens with distance too. If you record orchestras where at one point you know there will be just one person playing an important bit, the spot mic can let it be heard, but as this is artificial the time alignment is very critical. 15mS delay isn't much but can bring the quiet clarinet back in sync and then you can shove the fader a bit. Pushing the fader without the delay brings it up, but it sounds as if it's an overdub - not real.
 
rob aylestone said:
Last attempt - then I'm giving up. If you are recording a drum kit and want it to sound real, you'd individually mic it up and pan accordingly to get a drum kit of appropriate width, and any treatment and processing to make it at the back and not the solo performer at the front. That's normal and common. What you wouldn't do is use a stereo microphone techniques to do it with two mics - you could, but the mics would probably be where the lead singer is standing and of course spill would kill it. You cannot use a stereo technique to record the sound of a guitar in a heavily sound treated room where there are no reflections, because all the usual techniques with letters - are NOT close mic techniques, they are mid to far field ones. I'm totally mystified by this notion of M/S on a guitar. What is the point? The mid signal is the guitar, what part of the guitar gets recorded by the side mic? The neck? nut to what? 12th fret? If you want to capture that, then the side mic in the M/S pair just grazes the neck. Why not just use a mic that captures all that, if you want to hear it - why waste a fig 8 and use half of it, and have it not pointing at the source, but instead, parallel with the neck.

If you are recording a source with a real, natural stereo field of it's own - so the pianos, marimbas, zylos, drums (maybe), or a group of percussionists or a steel band, or string quartet or orchestra - then a stereo mic technique is the go to one - simple, mono compatible if that is important and capture the realism.

Virtually all the other instruments are mono, or virtually mono - so you would be recording the instrument central and then the ambience of the space.

Once we move in close - let's say 3ft or less, then the so called stereo is all effect, and the real stereo mic techniques cease to work in their designed mode and just become two mics, close together, hearing different things. It has nothing to do with stereo.
Click to expand...
No need to give up. The question asked was what choice would you make, in what situation and why. I think you have provided a detailed and knowledgeable answer and I, for one, have learned a great deal. To clarify, although I used an acoustic guitar from a specific song as an example, the question was not limited to a guitar. It could also be when to mic a Leslie in mono or stereo. Or a horn section?

As to the guitar in question, it was in fact done for effect with a very specific goal in mind. The mics were set about 1.5-2’ out in a room that is not exactly dead. The effect was exactly what I was looking for. Once I adjusted the width to a point that felt natural, the track sat right in the mix where I wanted it to and when I hit the mono button it tucked right back behind the lead instruments. Now, in the end, it may be a crap song with an unimaginative arrangement and a mediocre performance, but I’ll leave that up to the listener. Thank you agin for contributing your knowledge and experience to this topic.
 
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