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Recording - stereo signals vs mono signals
I've heard a lot said about recording signals in mono so that they'll be easier/better to mix?
It seems to me that a lot of iOS instruments and fx send out stereo signals. Is there any real disadvantage to the double stereo wave as opposed to the single mono wave when mixing?
Does it create any kind of problem if you pan a stereo wave left or right?
Example of the stereo and mono wave below.
Comments
I'll just repost this here from @theconnactic as he just gave me a great answer on a separate post and I can't delete this now!
You should avoid using stereo tracks in your mix, or approach them with garlic and a crucifix and this have nothing to do with storage economics.
I’ll try to explain with a situation that I experienced in my early days using DAWs: I learn my lesson the hard way!
Let’s say you find a nice synth patch, the most gorgeous sound you’ve ever heard. It has the softness of a flute, but the edginess of a violin, and a glistening echo gives it space and greatness. You decide to use it in your mix, and while tracking you are amazed at how cool it is, making all other instruments, including your live guitars, bass, etc, sound dull.
But when you arrive at the mixing stage, you decide to pan it full left to add some space to your creamy fat distorted guitar rhythm, which doesn’t sound as cool but is necessary to your arrangement. Oops, suddenly you have some wonky, ellefantine sound at the left speaker, and your mix suddenly sucks. You try the opposite, panning left, but the situation is even worse: try have a screaming stuttering cat going randomly up and down in level. If you put it dead center, the wonderful sound is back, but then you have to get rid of the guitar. You bitterly delete the synth from your project.
What happened was the synth sound was a layer of many sounds, already cleverly distribute throughout the stereo range to get that cool sound. When you move the pan, say, to the left, you are not moving the whole sound stereo mix to the left, but rather giving prominence the elements that were mixed in the left field of the original synth sound. By panning full left, only the element that was placed full left in the layered synth would appear; that happens to be the awful, elefantine sound. Same for the right field: the screaming cat was sitting there alone in the full right!
Of course, I could instead have bounced the synth to mono. That could have worked, but that could have altered the sound greatly because of a phenomenon called phase cancelation (many know this effect as “comb filtering”). That happens a lot using bass and kick sounds: generally speaking, low pitched sounds will sound better dead center, and any energy difference between the left and right speakers will result in lost of impact, weight and general punchiness, so they must be monaural sounds. It’s common, after summing a kick or bass to mono, to realize that powerful sound is mostly gone because of phase cancelation.
If you really want to use a stereo sound in your mix, keep it dead centre and build your artangement around it, and don’t test your luck using lots of stereo sounds. Don’t ever use stereo basses and kicks, and don’t use stereophonic effects on basses and kicks. Use only one or two stereo patches if possible. Better using none at all.
The only time you want to record stereo is when you are using some pre-input delay effect and you want it to be scaled properly on your stereo line and you know it won't need adjustements cause your pan will remain on 0 throughout the whole mixing process.
Read my post on that other thread. Also, keep in mind that Bruce Swedien is a huge proponent of using stereo tracks. Seemed to work out for him...
To recap my other post though, the delay plugin with zero delay and 100% wet, can then use the width control to narrow the stereo image, all the way to mono if you choose.
I only use stereo tracks, and pretty much always have. Maybe the odd mono bassline or kick, but others everything is stereo. I don’t at all think that a good mix depends on mono or stereo files personally. Keeping a good stereo image and making sure nothing is getting buried is part and parcel of doing a good mix down regardless.
Thanks all, I'll take all these views on board
One approach to stereo mixing, is taking a bunch of mono sources, and panning them around. Another is "big mono", where you essentially make a mono style mix, everything panned center, but record or effect many of the elements in stereo, so it is close to the same mix coming out of each speaker, but when you hear both speakers together, it sounds extra big.
Big Mono is really good for live music, coming out of a PA, where most people are hearing one speaker louder than another, and you don't want key elements to be missing depending on where you are standing, but, for the heads in the middle of the speakers, it sounds extra spatial. Stereo verbs, ping pong delay, stereo synth patches, wide panned double tracked instruments, all help a big mono sound.
Remember, there are many great sounding records that were recorded in mono- this is just making two mono mixes, that do a cool, bonus, spatial thing if you hear it in proper stereo.