This post will be short... it's just a little tutorial on how to make a track you recorded in mono (with 1 microphone) sound like stereo.
This is great for lots of things, especially those backgroundy tracks... you know...
- Guitars
- Drum Overhead mics
- Backup vocals
- Piano
Since the best sound comes from near the sound hole, there isn't a lot of space to put the mics. And even when you do get two mics in there, they generally sound the same... making it really hard to get a good stereo sound! Welcome Haas effect!
The Haas effect is the official name of the trick I'm about to explain... whatever. If you're feeling nerdy, just hit the wikipedia link (while you're at it why don't you build a robot and start a podcast too?)
There are a few times you should not do this trick:
- Main melodic track - needs to be mono, and panned close to center
- Lead vocals
- Lead guitar
- Lead anything really
- Anything with a lot of bass... (Haas effect doesn't play nice with low frequencies)
- Bass guitar
- Upright Bass
- Bass Drum
- Bass anything really
- Snare drum - I guess it's too important to be stereo, who knows?
Here's how to do it in 3 easy steps:
- You make a copy of you mono track (so now you have 2 of the same thing).
- You pan one track all the way left, and the other all the way right. Now you have the same mono signal... just louder (since it's the same signal coming out of both speakers)
- Put a delay on one of the tracks, with a delay time somewhere in the range of 10ms - 25ms.
Happy stereoizing mike!
20 comments:
Won't this cause phasing issues and/or cause your stereo correlation meter to go crazy?
wouldn't this possibly create some sort of phase cancellation?
You can also do the samething but put a chorus on one track with a delay greater then 20ms or so a very low rate and a slight modulation. I like this becaue not only do get the variation in delay but you also get a slight pitch variation.
"Won't this cause phasing issues and/or cause your stereo correlation meter to go crazy?"
"wouldn't this possibly create some sort of phase cancellation?"
Nope! as long as one is panned all the way left and the other all the way right... it'll just sound like stereo. No Phase issues unless you sum the channels to mono.
Luckily... nobody really does that any more. Even on crappy club PA, it's usually just the left channel, not both summed to mono.
Thank you for the mega-propz, Jim!
I actually knew this trick already, but I had sorta found out my own way. But I never knew when to set the delay time so I gave up on doing that. But neat! One more trick to add to my make-shift arsenal of sorta-half decent recording techniques of mine.
- Mike
You could always try a fake MS setup just copy the mono signal three times pan one hard left one hard right and one in the middle then reverse the phase on one of the panned ones taadaa works okay not as good as the real thing but whateva... haha makes your head kinda feel stretched out if you take out the center one too kinda neat if your bored
You can't make ms with mono. MS needs 2 signals.
You can only make the S part. Otherwise the center copy gets cancelled out on one side and boosted on the other. That's no good.
Problem with ms is (like you said) it sounds weird on headphones. Also... if you do sum to mono... you end up with nothing. At least with Haas effect, you end up with phasy whatever... but it's better than having your rhythm guitar disappear, right?
or you could just record two takes and pan them... you'll get a more "natural" delay that way...
Agree with The Revelator... if you do two takes of the same part in quick succession, you'll find you play the parts almost exactly, with some very subtle diffs, and can sound more natural.
don't get me wrong... I absolutely agree with both of you... and it's my recommended method of producing stereo guitar.
It just that doesn't start out as a mono signal. It starts out as 2 mono signals. Otherwise known as a stereo signal ;)
Therefore not covered by this little article
why not just shift the copied track 10-15 ms on the timeline instead of using a plug-in?
@anonymous it doesn't really matter how you do it... cubase has delay functionality built in to the application... so you can just duplicate the track and type in a shift of 17ms
And it does just like you said... shift the track 17ms with no plug-in overhead.
The reason I didn't specify is that there are lots of ways to get the desired goal and it really doesn't matter much how you go about it
say, what if I recorded a mono guitar (one mic) onto a stereo track, left has guitar, right has nothing. how do I remove the side that hasd nothing and get it on moth channels?
sorry, both channels. that is, just a regular mono track coming out of both sides
thanks
@Anonymous what recording software are you using? in cubase you just have to right-click the track and find it in the context menus
in Pro Tools you can use the 'split to mono' function.
Let me know which (or other) and I'll try to give you a more complete answer ;)
THx, split to mono worked although the first time it seemed not to. Odd.
Works for me I've done this many times
anybody know if it's possible to route the track signal to a duplicate without copying entire track? you know like it won't have to process the sample twice, saving cpu. referring to pro tools.
@Paul Sure, just make some Aux tracks and send to both of them... they will each get a copy of the signal routed to them (after inserts I believe)
generally, with short delays you will always get some phasing issues, but these can be minimized so that it will have little effect, even when monoed in software.
you take the lowest frequency your instrument plays, say 60 Hz. 60Hz so to avoid phase difference effects you must choose your delay to be long enough so that the period of the wave can pass before the next comes at you, while still maintaining an illusion of being the same signal (sound fusion effect) so to get a nice figure we calculate the period of the wave, 1/60Hz = 0.0166666666667 seconds, or 16.7 ms roughly. this method is scientificaly unsound, because high frequencies has a much smaller period, and therefore will phase out some when summed to mono. but this method seems to work for me. and sound nice.
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