Topic: Opinions on mixing a recording more mono-ish rather than accurate soundstage?

[achalsey]

I had the opportunity to record a set the other week with basically free reign of where I put my mics.  So I went with sort of like a really amateurish multitrack.  Single mic on piano, another as an overhead on the drums, regular stereo pattern (~NOS) directly in front of guitar/bass, and direct outs from the two vocal mics.  (see rig pic post below).  It was a relatively intimate listening room type show.

I originally made the mix a relatively accurate recreation of the stage layout (like I usually do with all my recordings); piano and drums panned hard left/right respectively, stereo mic pair panned hard left/right, and vocals panned about 30% each way according to where the singers were sat.  I had it rendered and was ready to start tracking when I started to second guess the mix and decided to play with the balance a bit.

I found that I preferred a basically mono piano/main vocals/overhead mix with the stereo pair on the guitar/bass creating the 'openness' of the recording.  I feel like it was much more of a Live CD type mix, than a faithful representation of the stage layout.  What do people think?  Is that blasphemy?

Now, granted, I'm listening solely on headphones, so this obviously has a lot to do with decisions made when mixing, but still.

Pics of the setup: http://taperssection.com/index.php?topic=168339.0

[bombdiggity]

I don't think there's any right or wrong way necessarily...

I like a natural pan sort of soundstage from a stereo pair (basically as it all sounded arriving at the mics if they actually portray the ambient soundstage). 

I tend not to like hard panned multi-point mixes so much since for whatever reason to me it doesn't usually come off sounding natural.  There are exceptions, but for me that sort of approach works best with small bands (trio or quartet).  For me it loses impact if there are too many things being pushed too many directions with a larger band. 

Stereo is a little different than hard pan.  Stereo works best when you have information from each instrument on both sides (the difference in timing gives that impact).  Panning can be a somewhat more brute force principle that can operate more on the absence channel to channel rather than the difference...   I don't like that approach as much when applied through an entire recording, but have heard it used effectively. 

[2manyrocks]

A possible thought is that if you are primarily accustomed to live sound that tends to be mono, a "stereo" mix might sound foreign. 

Aren't studio mixes really an artificial creation of the studio?  What studio album ever sounds like the studio album when played in a live setting? 

[Ultfris101]

Page will probably weigh in here. We did a fair bit of multi-track recording over the past year. He spent a lot more time mixing than I did, but I had fun playing with it and getting the gist.

In the end, do what sounds good to you. It's not necessarily intuitive to what you'd think before you dive in, but I found you'll start thinking about the whole deal differently and start paying more attention to how various recordings are mixed as you're listening. At least that's been my experience and it's exactly why I try new things like this so I can learn and get a deeper understanding of how things work.

When I was doing this, I would start with recreating the stage setup and then would do some of what seemed like typical things like Jon mentions. I got a couple books on mixing and did some reading in the Gearslutz forums that I otherwise never dig into.

To mix a few metaphors, I like looking behind the curtain to see how the sausage is made 

I find I'm more interested in capturing the live presentation with a stereo pair or similar type of array rather than get individual instruments and construct something later, but it's fun to do things like this now and then. And if you're in a situation where you're trying to create a product rather than just document an event, then it's nice to know what you can do to improve the amount of control you have after the fact like you have when you spot mic.

It can also be a lot of time consuming effort to do the mixing...

[acidjack]

I would say that to make something listenable, the image should be tighter than what the "stage plot" would suggest, since the microphones create a more localized soundstage than your actual ears do. When I do multi tracks I try not to pan anything more than 25% one direction or the other.

[Gutbucket]

No blasphemy involved.  It's all an illusion.  Do whatever you find makes for the most enjoyable listening experience.

But its good practice to question yourself about why those choices sound good and if that will translate to other listeners.  Be aware that when mixing using headphones you may tend towards less stereo width than you might if mixing using speakers.  Headphones tend to exagerate playback width compared to speakers since they fully isolate each channel to only one ear or the other without crosstalk.  They also typically allow you to hear subtleties of reverberance more clearly which provide much of the apparent width of the ambience.  A wider mix may sound better over speakers.  Try it both ways and shoot for a good middle ground which benefits both and doesn't compromise either way of listening too much in comparison with the other.

[page]

Do what sounds good before what was accurate. As Lee (and one of his favorite quotes) point out, it's an illusion. You can make that illusion sound approximately what it would have been like, or you can do something different. At the end of the day, most people will grade the end result on how it sounds, not if it was accurate, although there are some glaring inaccuracies that one should avoid. For example, avoid moving musicians around (so if you have 5 people L to R on stage, don't flip 1 and 4), especially if you have an introduction where people say "and to my left is Johnny Two Shoes McGee and to his left is Dingly Dolittle" and they start playing only to be on a different spots in the mix than the vocalist just said. If you really want to move him/them, then eliminate that speech or other traces. This is easier said than done so I try not to do it. Second reason to adhere to a rough approximation is due to the time delay of sounds reaching other mics. For example, if I have a semi-circle, sounds originating from #2 will be heard in bleed sooner and more prominently in 1 and 3 than in 4 or 5. Avoid altering that balance too much. All of this can be minimized via two avenues; first off, use the polar pattern to your benefit. If you have someone in location 3, but you don't want 2 or 4 in that channel, then consider using a hyper which has better side rejection than a card which has excellent rear rejection. Likewise, for 1 and 5, think about using the cards as then you can put that null pointing back across the stage to eliminate as much of that as possible. You'll never get rid of all of the bleed, but that's ok (it helps with a natural reverb, and it's difficult to coherently hear the bleed when you have lots of other sounds in your mix that are at least +15 or 20db louder).

These are guidelines. Some times I've tossed them out the window because I had tiers (so think about 8 mics across 3 rows, the middle rows have both the back row content and the middle row, and the front row has the middle row and the front row). That sort of thing requires a lot of forethought to really do well, and you may or may not have that time to think about it when you're throwing stuff on stage. So the short of it is, if you have the channels and equipment (and you are short on time or planning), spot it. If you have a lot of time to plan and test, then you can get fancy with planning bleed and stuff like that. This is all genre sensitive as well; jazz and classical do better with bleed (and classical almost mandates it) than rock, country or electronica, but it's a sliding scale, not a rule. Also, when in doubt, trend toward mono. There are other tricks you can do to create "stereo spaciousness" without it being flat, even though the same content is basically in both channels.

As Lee also notes, headphones have a different stereo representation than speakers. I'll add that the difference is greatest in panning content over time-delay content (which sounds different but is less likely to move around or get louder than pan/scan).

I'm at work, so I hope my rushing didn't cause this to be too complicated, others covered lots of it so I tried to just add different info. Let me know if there is something I've said that doesn't make sense or needs more explanation.

[achalsey]

Awesome.  Thanks for all the replies.  The headphones alone are not the best for this, but unfortunately its all I've got.  (my walls are really thin so the noise cancelation is nice, but I also just try to be quiet).

Some of the mono vs heavily stereo stuff seemed sort of self explanatory.  I remember a long time ago listening to some of the Beatles comparison tracks of their original stereo recordings vs later released mono mixes and often times preferring the more mono tracks.

That said, the week before was the same band/setup/room but I forgot a mount at home so just had to run a single stereo pair onstage like normal and am perfectly happy with that recording as well (though the instruments could be a little more upfront).

It was fun to play around with though.  Though now its made me think I need a digital preamp to make use of the extra 680 channels and a couple more mics.   

[Gutbucket]

Funny that you both mentioned the early Beatles and Beach Boys stereo recordings while I left this response I started earlier open doing other things.  Btw, at least some of those early stereo hard-panned mixes were due to simple left/center/right channel assignment mix routing without panning.

..headphones have a different stereo representation than speakers. I'll add that the difference is greatest in panning content over time-delay content (which sounds different but is less likely to move around or get louder than pan/scan).

This is an interesting point which I'll call attention to because it might be easily missed in Page's post and is something which is especially interesting to me.

Compare the rather dramatic difference between headphone verses speaker playback of recordings made from straight amplitude-panned mono sources (or recorded using X/Y cardioids) with recordings made from spaced omnis which have a lot of time-delay stereo information.

The classic example the of extreme hard-panned mono stereo-mixing is early stereo Beatles tracks which feature many of the sonic elements placed fully in the left or right channel rather than being more centered in the playback image, including elements which are usually heard from the center like lead vocals and drums.  Although many people prefer the mono mixes of the early Beatles material (and with good reason as the mono mixes were where all the production effort was focused until the last few albums where the production effort switched to mixing for stereo), those hard-panned early stereo mixes work far better over speakers than over headphones.  I actually have a somewhat guilty preference for them over speakers, myself.  On headphones most agree that material sounds uncomfortably over-wide, with John singing all the way over in one ear and Ringo drumming in the other or whatever, and that's where headphone cross-feed circuits which introduce some “managed bleed” between channels in an attempt to emulate a headphone listening experience closer to that of speakers become helpful in compensating for some of that that extreme channel seperation.

Contrast that with listening to a live recording made with A-B spaced-omnis.   Although there will be significant differences between headphone and speaker playback, there isn't the same extreme difference in the apparent playback seperation and width.  Nothing is going to sound oddly and uncomfortably crammed fully into one ear or the other on the 'phones.  In fact, the part I mentioned previously about hearing the reverberant detail more clearly over headphones, in combination with the sort of “pre-existing cross-feed compensation” provided by the spaced omni time-delay-stereo technique, are such a strong factors that listening on headphones can completely compensate for a 'hole-in-the-middle' problem due to an over wide A-B omni microphone spacing which would be clearly apparent if listening over speakers.

That's astounding to me since it is the opposite expected outcome from the over simplified characterization of ‘headphones make things sound wider than speakers’ which more or less holds true with amplitude-panning.

[page]

I may post some other stuff tomorrow, but one thing to point out about mixing with headphones; if your editor supports monitoring VSTs in real time, then you can use something like TB_Isone which will simulate the effect of speakers. It works best with nice headphones, but for checking where things move around when you have headphones vs speakers, it's solid on that front. Just make sure you get a familiarity with the settings before making decisions based on that (use the presets they provide as a starting point and make tweaks).

[bombdiggity]

Not sure why I left it out but one other point highlighted above that shouldn't be lost is to check your mixes on multiple setups (cans, speakers, computer, car, etc).  Things may sound a lot better on one setup and not nearly so good in something else.  Not to mix down to the lowest common denominator but rather to be cognizant of what the impacts are (and to make sure your primary reference point was not wildly divergent from all the others).  If there is some consumer element to the result you don't want something that requires a high end system to realize nor something that sounds like crap on a high end system. 

[page]

Not sure why I left it out but one other point highlighted above that shouldn't be lost is to check your mixes on multiple setups (cans, speakers, computer, car, etc).  Things may sound a lot better on one setup and not nearly so good in something else.  Not to mix down to the lowest common denominator but rather to be cognizant of what the impacts are (and to make sure your primary reference point was not wildly divergent from all the others).  If there is some consumer element to the result you don't want something that requires a high end system to realize nor something that sounds like crap on a high end system.

This. My mixes improved when I went to doing 80% of my mix on my best equipment that I trusted, however, nothing important went out the door until it passed the rest (different set of headphones, monitors, shitty office speakers, and a stock car stereo).

I also picked 3 or 4 albums which I thought were mastered well and survived across all sorts of environments, and I'd use that as a reference whenever entering a new environment (e.g. play a tune or two, and the listen to what I've done. What frequency ranges or instruments fall out in a glaringly bad way?).

[Gutbucket]

That.