Mixing in a mono stem of your mixdown with your 2 track...

[illacov]

I read somewhere on here about mixing into song a mono track of your drums to return some of that lost meat that you get when you buss your drums.

Well that worked like a CHARM for me and so on my mixdown I noticed that ya know the drums and all that were definately more present and I had to adjust some of my 2 buss compression settings because it added a slightly noticeable but still there pumping effect which wasnt HORRIBLE just alien at first but after my adjustments its all but gone.....moving on.

I was remarking to myself how the mid range on my mixdown was a little dead, I mean low mids but also that my vocals sounded fine but that they were a bit removed a byproduct of stereo bussing a mono source. So what I did wasss, I made a mono version of my 2 track in Cool Edit, just arbitrarily picking 100 percent of my left side, dont ask why I did that, but anyways I got a mono file complete with my drums and vox, instruments etc in the middle. Also perfectly in sync with the stereo 2 track.

So what I did next was run the mono file thru Waves LinMB mono and drop all the levels on the freqs I didnt want like the highs, and the extreme lows. What I was left with was basically all the snap and the punch of the track but in mono.

Then I went into the multi track part of Cool Edit and inserted the stereo track and the mono track. I lowered the mono track about 7 db and left the stereo track at 0 db. I did have to lower the master level to prevent clipping. I mixed the two down to a stereo track and then compressed the track with Timeworks Mastering Compressor, just enough to touch the mixdown but no real gain reduction, release time was .11 ms and the threshold was about -3 db.

I do have the original track and the finished track.

Now some people might say that because I didnt compress the stereo version the results will be skewed but, whats important to note is the middle of the stereo field which is something the compressor would NOT bring out if there was not much of anything there in the first place.

In fact, Im beginning to wonder if a person should do this will all their stems since SX basically EATS your mono sources if they get bussed to a stereo buss.

Yeah I dont have the latest version of SX, but this is a bit more low end because you could have done the same thing in SX after you mixdown.

But, maybe we should make a mono version of all our stereo tracks, like a mono version of our instrument busses? Vocals? Drums?

Anyways check for yourself, I can tell the difference in headphones and on my monitors.
First mp3 is the stereo mix, second is the stereo mix with the mono version (mids meat) blended in
Let me know what you think!


Oh yeah....Track was done with Rode NT1A for vox into a Rane MS1B into a dbx 163X into a EMU 0404. Guitars and bass were recorded with a DI into EMU 0404.
Drums were RMIV, strings were Edirol Orchestral and piano was mda piano. All tracks were mixed in Cubase SX, then bussed out into a dbx DDP with about 2 db of Gain reduction and recorded back into SX from coax digital. Voxengo Marquis Comp was on the master buss on subtle glue limit. Drum buss was also run thru the ddp and back into cubase, as were the instruments.
Usually I run the 2 track mixdown back into the ddp one more time thru the finalizer preset, but i tried this out and the timeworks master comp was quicker for time sake, but I will be trying this out with the ddp in the loop on the back end next time!


Peace
Illumination