Stereo field, wideness

I'm have a difficult time understanding how to harness the stereo field, specifically wideness of sound. I just created a small mix in garageband (where i doodle ideas, its faster than loading up LP). a few guitar layers, some synth rock bass and a rock drum set. it sounded pretty good coming out of GB, and loading it up into itunes it didnt sound so bad.
i decided to master it in LP, just for kicks. i loaded the mp3 into LP and suddenly it sounded much much different. the stereo field was different somehow. and the volume a bit too... then i mastered the mix in logic and bounced back to my HD, and listening to the bounce in itunes the mix doesnt have much stereo wideness.... instead of sounding like a full rock set, wide and warm, it had a coldness to it because the stereo wideness wasnt there.... it sounded like the sound was coming from directly in front of me, and the wideness of the sound was almost lost in fuzz.
it almost hurt my ears to listen to. all I'd done in LP was throw an EQ and multipresser on it, an adaptive limiter as well. and listening to the bounce was almost straining on the ears because it felt like they were trying to focus on the direction of the sound, rather than bask in what should've been a warm, smooth stereo wideness (I cant think of better ways to describe this...)
can someone explain to me wideness, and ways to regain it, or give songs a pleasant, commercial stereo wideness?
thanks!
chris

Hi Chris,
You may find it useful to try importing a commercial tune into LP, then on that track, switch on logics multimeter (set to 'goniometer') - this will give you a visual representation of stereo width (while you get the hang of using your ears!). You'll generally find if you switch the 'hold' funtion on the goniometer on you'll see a rather pretty diamond shape form.
To get width across your own mix, I'd avoid actually rating the whole mix (ie output 1&2) but instead focus on pulling mids & high frequencies of individual tracks wider across the stereo field. I've generally found, at least in the dance genres I do stuff for) that if bass frequencies/parts are wide in the mix it can sound uncomfortable & a little wierd, especially on headphones.
As a rule I'll always keep bass sounds & Kick drum VERY central. conversely I've found a nice wide snare usually works great in getting a wider percieved width. (at least in dance genres) - Being aware of the stereo width of backing vox can have a massive impact on an overall sound.
Good ways to get extra stereo width on an individual track can include
1) using stereo reverb or delay
2) use a logic 'sample delay' with a really short setting on one side, ie 100 ms (I personally avoid this on heavily percussive sounds but is great for chords/pads etc)
3) use LP's stereo widener or direction meter - be extra careful not to overdo as can sound very artificial, & again focus on mid & high freqs in the stereo widener. If you find you have sounds that are 'too stereo' in some freqs - say like a synth bass, some 3rd party plugs like ozone's widener can be set to 'pull in' width - so you can dial in negative stereo width on certain (ie low) freqs . if this probem isnt freq dependant then Logic's direction meter can work (or as an extreme, a 'gain' plug at the end of the effects chain with 'mono' switched on)
As you're going along, it's good practise to keep checking the whole mix in mono as well to make sure it'll translate onto different (ok, crappy!) sound systems
It's also reading up on the forum about experimenting with Logic's 'Pan law' (somewhere in 'song settings') - This is a new one to me but have just started working with a different panlaw (-3db compensated) to the default 0db & like it so far.....
Hope some of that rambling was useful!....
Cheers
Adam

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What do the bouncing bars in the iTunes display window represent when music is playing? Volume of particular frequencies in a stereo field maybe?

I've noticed that songs that I think are recorded really well, as far as good and clear instrument or voice placement in the stereo field, have all the bars bouncing like one big happy family. I'd like to learn what they are showing so that I can replicate that same kind of bounce in the songs I write, mix and master. I think that it would be a great reference tool for me as I develop a song.
It's seems clear that the two sets of bars ( 20 bars each ) are the left and right stereo fields, and I've assumed that bars rising vertically represent the volume of an instrument at that particular pan of the stereo field. But, I've been unsuccessful in being able to control which bars bounce with songs I've recorded and played through iTunes. I've tried panning both mono and stereo tracks.
Can anyone help me here? Thanks!

Do the following two things:
In the left-hand pane, right-click the name of the playlist, choose Edit Smart Playlist, and make sure that "Live Updating" is checked.
In the list itself, click the column header for "Last Played" so that the list will sort according to when it was played, with most recent on top.

I'm using GarageBand 10.0.1. Do the built-in drum tracks only come in mono format, or is it possible to make them true stereo (i.e. Left and Right channels outputing different signals, to sound like the kit has been panned across the stereo field)?

I'm using GarageBand 10.0.1. Do the built-in drum tracks only come in mono format, or is it possible to make them true stereo (i.e. Left and Right channels putting out different signals, to sound like the kit has been panned across the stereo field)?

All the Drum Kits available for GarageBand are mixed in stereo.
Logic provides the same 18 Drum Kits also as "Producer Kits", which are multi-track outputs,. Each Drum Kit Piece (Kick, Snare, HH, etc) and also room mice and overheads are routed to individual channel strips.
Here is a screenshot of one Drum Kit in Logic Pro X with individual Channels Strips. Each Channel Strip can be loaded with individual effects (compressor) and adduced with individual sends, etc.
What that means is that all the Drummers are professionally recorded and sampled with individual mics. The Stereo Drums Kits are just "stereo mix-downs" for easier handling and less CPU demand. I explain all the details about the Drummer ecosystem in my graphically enhanced manual "GarageBand X - How it Works"
Hope that helps
Edgar Rothermich
http://DingDingMusic.com/Manuals/
'I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.'

Mono/stereo field in iTunes view options

How do I add a mono/stereo field to the view options in iTunes?
I have over 20 years experience working with professional bands but am now deaf in 1 ear so I understand what mono is.
This would help sort a 128 kbs stereo copy of a song that is about half the quality of a 128 kbs mono copy of the same song.

Dot-Khan wrote:
How do I add a mono/stereo field to the view options in iTunes?
If Apple's iTunes software engineers did not design-in a particular feature or function, you can't add one yourself, unless you are a skilled programmer or hire one to do it for you. Even then, I expect that modifying the code is a violation of the end-user license agreement (EULA).
If I understand your motive, you could rename mono files to distinguish them from others, or perhaps use an existing field - there are quite a few sort fields not typically used - and place an 'M' there to easily sort those tunes.

Restricting stereo field in audio material

Hi,
I have an older Roland XP-30 which has some really great bass patches. What I don't like about it is that it spreads the sounds of the basses from left to right along a the keyboard where the lower, and most used notes, wind up on the left and the higher notes on right. Of course these being bass sounds I'm primarily interested on the low end. When I record these parts off the synth and turn them into audio files I get an uneven stereo recording that pans the low notes pretty hard left. The actual wave files show a much stronger recording on the left than on the right. I'd prefer my bass much more centered but if I use the pan control to pan right then I seem to lose some of the character of the original sound. Is there a way that I can compress the stereo field to make it much narrower without using the pan control? Thanks

Use the directional Mixer frome the imaging folder and narrow the stereo field down to mono or anything in between full stereo and mono.
Or switch you Stereo track to Stereo-Left by long clicking onto the two interleaved circles at bottom of the channelstrip and pan the channel to the middle with the pan knob.
Message was edited by: Sampleconstruct

Bounce DOESN'T sound like Mix Playback, Mid boost, stereo field smaller

Anyone had this one happen yet? Your mix is rockin along, client is happy, you hit bounce and it sounds like someone just threw a comforter over your speakers and cut your low end at 100 during playback?
Freaking out. Never had this happen in years of use. No plugs on Master, bounce Interleaved, AIFF, 48k 24 bit.
Help!
Thanks

I've struggled with a similar problem i.e my mix will sound awesome and perfect when I play it back through Logic and my (pretty decent) monitors. I will bounce the mix and say, bring it into WaveBurner. When I play the mix in WaveBurner is sounds a little different. This makes since as the file has to be dummied down a bit to fit on a CD. The real shock comes when I play the song in say, my car. I expect it to sound little different (different speakers) but what I find is the bass is gone...Or way too loud. Or the vocals are completely soft. Or (I work with bagpipers) the pipes will be so loud you can't hear anything else! This drove me nuts and wasted tons of blank CD's and time running back and forth, re-mixing this or that.
After some discussion with other groups it occured to me that maybe it's my audio interface. If you have a cheap AD/DA converter in your interface then your mixes will not be true. I used a Mackie 400F then upgraded to an Apogee Ensemble. The Apogee doesn't sound as good as the Mackie but I think the output is more true to what you hear on the final product.
I don't know if this helps (and I may be completely off about cheap converters!). I wanted to share my experience with a similar problem. -T

Stereo miking two actors

I have 2 mics and was wondering how best to place them so as to get a realistic stereo field from recording 2, maybe 3 actors, as live. My first thought was to treat them as one big acoustic guitar and place the capsules close together and at 90 degrees.
Maybe I should put them up as if I were recording them mono, one for each voice, and cheat each one round to catch some of the other voice. Obviously I don't want phase to be a huge issue in mono though.

christianobermaier wrote:
I just learned something.
Ok, so now you owe me one, too. Here goes:
The Little Labs plug actually allows you to dial up the phase of your strip to ANY angle you want, not just phase in or out'.
I have never really understood this. Well, 180 degrees phase is inversed polarity of the signal, obviously.
But how can I shift a signal by 33 degrees ? 33 degrees of what ? The fundamental ? Which one ? And, as it is an octave higher, wouldn't a 2nd harmonic then get shifted by, uh, 66 degrees ? And what if I have more than one fundamental going on ?
Christian
I dunno. All i know is that I have wished that I could phase something in between in and out when neither of those options sounded any good. But like auto tune in its day, and the latest melodyne where you really can tune a single note in an polyphonic recording, we thought it could be dun but they dun it.
http://www.uaudio.com/products/software/ibp/index.html
I understand your questions, and I guess a specific phase "angle" would suit a specific miking situation. You can just tune it til you like it. It totally saved me where I had too much drums in the piano mics. I dialled the phase on the piano pair til the kick suddenly got clean, which was about 100 degrees. Go figure. Maybe there's illusion and voodoo going on under the hood, but it works, so what do I care?
And I guess I had lots of fundamentals going on in the piano, as well as numerous mics on the kit, but this gadget really did clean things up.
While we continue to have unresolved audio dilemmas, there will be wizzkids somewhere working on solutions to sell us. e.g. www.airwindows.com. Show me a guy who thinks his rig is complete...
btw, speaking of which, I suppose I'd better get a matching omni and fig 8 to fully try your previous suggestion. sigh

How to play back one channel of the stereo track in both headphone cans?

I recorded two microphones in one stereo track. Is there some way I could listen to the left channel and then to the right channel in both cans in my headphones, like a mono track? Panning moves all sound to the left can or the right one in my headphones. But I'd like to listed Left channel as mono channel in both headphone cans, and then press some button and listen to the right channel in both cans. How can I do it?

No problem. By the way, there is a wrinkle in Logic that you may not be aware of.
When dealing with a stereo track, the knob in the channel strip that you may think of as a Pan knob is not. It's a Balance knob. What is does is to change the level of what's in either left or right channel but does NOT move the left signal to the right or vice versa.
To prove this:
* Create a project with two mono audio tracks
* Put different files on each track
* Pan one hard left, the other hard right
* Bounce the result
* Create a new project with a stereo audio track
* Import the audio that you exported above
* Use the Balance Knob to bring either up or down
* Note you cannot move one signal from its original position
If you want to pan a stereo signal, you have to use the insert: Imaging > Direction Mixer. Only then can you position a stereo signal in your stereo field. This is documented in the user manual in the section called: "Setting the Pan, Balance, or Surround Position".
Have fun!
Pete

Mono track on boom mike - how to convert to stereo

I actually have another sound question: When we where shooting we the two audio channels as follows: one came from the camera mic and one from a boom mic.
Now I think I only want to use the sound from the boom mic. So what I have then is one mono track of live sound.
What do I do with this? How do I convert it into stereo. The cameraman who shot the stuff for me told me "you just copy the track" - I can do this of course but then I have essentially two mono track as a stereo track. Is that o.k.?

If you are worried that your mono track will sound too "flat," or won't locate properly in a stereo field filled with other sound elements, then here's a tip for you. I use this for voiceovers and on-camera speech when I have wild sound, music, or other sound events happening underneath in the mix.
Add a very small and subtle amount of stereo reverb to the mono V/O or speech track.
Use a short delay or "small room" setting on the reverb. Of course, "season to taste" is the rule for the length of delay with regard to blending the reverb into the rest of the audio. But usually for speech, a short delay works best in my experience.
My method is to add just enough for the reverb to be perceivable, and then dial it back a little.
This will really help place that sound source in a "hard center" position in the stereo field.
Also, if you are mixing speech, dial in about 1 to 2 db boost of 1000hz EQ to aid in speech intelligibility. Again, "season to taste."
Good luck.

Splitting stereo tracks to mono for separate editing?

Does anyone know of a way to split a stereo track into two mono tracks inside of Logic Pro 8?
I'll explain my problem, I have a track made from samples of a song. In the track that I recorded, there is one particular sound that I can't get rid of no matter how hard I try. I recorded the passage with the ESX24 in stereo and I noticed that the noise is only on the left track. My first solution was to pan the track all the way right, create a duplicate of that and pan it hard left. Unfortunately, it loses a lot of clarity and texture when I use this method..
Looking on the forums, all I could find was instructions to bounce the tracks to split stereo, but I need them to form separate tracks within Logic so I can apply a LowPass filter to the problematic left track, then mix them back together as one stereo track later....
Any suggestions?

You guys are talking about different things. The OP says he's using an exs24 instrument with a sample that has a noise on one side of the stereo field of a SAMPLE not an audio region recorded into logic. Samples used by the EXS24 are not added to the audio bin, only into the EXS24's RAM. You could pan the instrument track to the side without the noise, and then output the result to a bus track that is set to MONO. That will pan your one sided sampler back to center. You can also bring the sample into logic (using the browser) and then split it as eriksimon suggested, and then create a new EXS24 instrument using only the good side of the sample.

Can you help with technical problems with the stereo imagry option

can you help with a technical problem with the stereo imagery option ? it won't take out lead vocal in a stereo mp3'

Because this forum software is so absolutely USELESS now, you don't get to see the whole of the question in this view. In the other (non-list) view it says:
"can you help with a technical problem with the stereo imagery option ? it won't take out lead vocal in a stereo mp3"
And the answer is that if you can't isolate the vocal in the stereo field, or it is one of these odd ones where it's used inverted polarity in different parts of the stereo signal for the same vocal, then you won't be able to. But without a sample, it's impossible to tell. If you can post a link to one, that might help. It has to be external to this site though - Adobe in their infinite wisdom don't allow the posting of audio files on their audio U2U forum. Helpful, that, isn't it?

Audition CS6 - Stereo Panning with Mono Content

I'm mixing a stereo soundtrack for a feature film. All dialogue and sound effects content is in mono and the score is in stereo. All of my content is placed in stereo tracks (I learned the hard way that the panning feature doesn't exist in mono tracks), whether it's stereo or mono. Even though Audition isn't a DAW, I assumed it would function just like any other multitrack application for mixing purposes, but it appears I'm wrong unless someone can tell me what I'm missing.
I've gone through and added volume envelopes throughout all of the dialogue tracks, and now I'm trying to start placing them within the stereo field. The pan envelopes are there, but whether I move a clip to a static position in the stereo field (such as 50% Left) or I automate movement through the stereo field (start at 50% Left and move to 50% Right), none of the changes are actually taking place. The panned track is still sitting there right in the middle of the stereo field. Even if I adjust the pan knob on the track itself, the audio is sitting dead center regardless of where it's panned.
So as it stands, I have about thirty tracks of content, where all of the music is in stereo and every bit of dialogue and all sound effects are sitting right in the middle. Needless to say, that's not a good approach for mixing a stereo project.
What am I missing?

Yeah, that's why I'm so confused. Here's how everything is set up:
All of my dialogue and ADR clips are mono, however they have all been placed on stereo tracks. All of my dialogue and ADR tracks are being sent to a Dialogue/ADR Bus (mono). The same with all of my sound effects. Stereo tracks containing mono clips, all being sent to a mono SFX bus. All of my soundtrack/score is being sent to a stereo score bus. The three buses are going to the master stereo out.
When I pan the individual buses, it works fine, regardless of whether they are stereo or mono. But when I work with individual mono clips in my Dialogue/ADR/SFX tracks, none of the pan automation works.
I might've screwed something up, but I originally had all of my mono material set on mono tracks, until I realized later that panning isn't an option with a mono track. (All DAWs I've worked with didn't have this limitation, which is why I set it up that way.) So I created a bunch of stereo tracks, copied/pasted the mono clips into those, then got rid of the mono tracks.
What's goofy is that none of the new stereo tracks I created have "Pan" as an option when I click on the "Read" drop-down and select "Show Envelopes". My score tracks (the original stereo tracks I created when I brought everything in) DO have "Pan" as an option.
So, even though the new tracks are stereo (they have a pan knob on both the mixer view and the track header in the multitrack view) and there are blue pan envelopes on the tracks, there is no pan envelope in the automation lane, so I'm guessing that's why the pan functions aren't working on the individual tracks.
I just don't understand why the pan envelopes don't exist on the stereo tracks I recently created, but they do exist on the stereo tracks I set up from the get-go.

Trying to mixdown 5.1 to stereo doesn't sound the same

I have a 5.1 WAV file that when I load in Audition CC 2014 as an individual file, it sounds perfect through my headphones. The stereo separation is perfect. Now, when I export it to a stereo WAV file, it sounds almost mono, the stereo field is much more reduced. If I do right click in the Files panel and choose "Insert Into Multitrack", it plays back also as bad as exporting the file to stereo, it's not completely mono but the stereo field is very reduced.
I tried playing with the 5.1 pan control, but I can barely tell any difference, even when I widen the stereo field.
How can I export the file to stereo so that it sounds exactly the same as when I play it as an individual file?

I suspect that just Exporting to a stereo file does a rather arbitrary mix of the 5.1 channels. Similarly monitoring the surround file in stereo won't necessarily having the correct mix of channel levels.
So I suggests that you split your multi channel file into separate mono ones using Edit/Extract Channels to Mono Files. Then you can add them to a stereo session in Multitrack view and have better control over how much of and where each channel is mixed to. When satisfied with the results you can mix down your session to a new stereo file which should sound a lot better.

Stereo to individual mono tracks?

GB doesn't seem to be able to split out a stereo sound file to left only mono and right only mono. I've gotten around this issue by creating a copy of the file and panning one track left and the other right. Selecting Mono channel 1 or 2 input in Info just merges the both tracks together into one mono track (for some reason), panning just sends the combined signal to the L or R. This solution is fine while editing in GB, but is bad for the final output where not only would I like to preview the combined audio tracks to set levels, but also export them so that the left channel material is on both tracks of the final stereo file. Here's what I'm dealing with so there is no confusion. I am e-mailed a stereo file with vocals on L and temp music on R. I replace the temp music with several new options. Then I want to export the new mixes back to a stereo file with vocals centered to send for previews. GB does not seem to provide e with a way to do that. In other words, there does not seem to be any way to get the L channel of a stereo file to the center of a new stereo mix without also combining it with the old unwanted R channel material. I'd love to find a way. One solution would be to flip the L/R orientation of the copied track and play the vocals back panned respectively on two tracks, but that's also something that seems beyond GB's capabilities. So there's a new one ... how to flip the stereo field of a track, which would be an easy fix to this problem ... I'll post on a separate thread.

One way to do it would be to
1) pan the stereo track full left, and export.
2) set iTunes' prefs to convert to a MONO AIFF file, do the conversion
3) drag the new file into GB.

Stereo or Mono? Which? And why?

Once again I'm starting a new thread to explain some general audio principles that newbies have trouble with.
There's an issue here that's a bit difficult to explain--the difference between "stereo" and "mono".
You have two ears, so you hear "stereo". Your ears send a left signal and right signal to your brain. Your brain processes the difference between the two signals and gives you a sense of direction. You can figure out where the sound you are hearing is coming from.
Originally, recording technology only permitted mono recording. One microphone, and one speaker to play it back. When you listen to recordings made before about 1962, you are listening to a mono recording. If you have a modern stereo and you are playing back a recording from before 1962, you are getting signals out of your left and right speaker, but the signals are identical. You are just getting mono out of two speakers.
Originally "stereo" meant placing two microphones on something--one to represent what the left ear would hear, and one to represent what the right ear would hear.
However, when you take one microphone and plug it into a recording device, you can only record a mono track. Your recording device might permit you to record what you think is stereo, but in reality you are only recording two identical mono tracks.
A guitar also has a plug that comes out of it that sends a mono signal.
Nowadays we create fake stereo inside the recording device by means of what we call a digital reverb or digital delay. This device takes a mono input (such as from a single microphone or from a single guitar cord) and simulates the sound as if it were playing in a much larger room, with positional information included--placing something in a simulated position in the stereo field and creating a simulated left stereo channel and a simulated right stereo channel.
So if you record one input, and put no effects on it, you get mono. If you run it through a stereo reverb or a stereo delay, you get simulated stereo.
If you put an acoustic guitar in a large, reverberant room, and set up two microphones, one on the left side of the room and one on the right side of the room, and record the two mono mike signals to a stereo track on your digital recorder, then you get real live stereo.
When you play a software instrument in GarageBand, it records it as a stereo signal. What you are usually getting is in fact a monophonic sample that is processed through a stereo reverb, simulating stereo. In some cases, it may actually be a digitally sampled musical instrument that was sampled in stereo, with two microphones, like the example of the guitar in the reverberant room that I mentioned above. Software instruments of drum kits and acoustic pianos are examples of instruments that are usually sampled as real or artificial stereo to begin with.
Beginners think "stereo" is the right way to record, and "mono" is not. But this has nothing to do with the right way to record, and has nothing to do with wheter it's a high quality recording. If you are recording through only one microphone, or only one guitar cord, this is mono, and that's right.

Good points, Wheat. And when you record from several sources, and combine them and mix them, panning things to "set the stage" you get a stereo mix, of mono recordings. SI, the final result is stereo, not necessarily each individual piece of the recording. Of course, a drum kit can be recorded in stereo, as well as some keyboards that are actually stereo. But most things you hear on CDs are a compilation of mono tracks, panned to create the stereo image you hear.

Stereo field, wideness

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