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Check it in mono!
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| Tarpex |
I haven't seen this mentioned before, or at least not much weight was ever given to the subject (or I have blatantly missed it), so nonetheless, here it goes.
After you're done with your killer track, do yourself and other a favor and check how stuff sounds in mono. Last time I played in a very small event, I went on and played some of TA producers tracks which didn't sound horrible on my home system, so I reckoned I'd try them out in a club (which was almost empty, half-private event, nothing to write home about), and my god, except for one, all were horribly mono incompatible.
Club had a mono soundystem, pretty neat sound otherwise.
In most cases, pads were the first to go down the drain, then all the fancy ultra reverbed wide leads got down to some reverbed mud, hard panned drums that dissapeared, worst cases had basses almost entirely gone, and I could go on.
I won't give any names, since it's not the issue, think most will find themselves in the same pot.
My point being, ALWAYS (!!!!) check your mixes in mono. I can't stress this enough. If the ultra-phatt bass that sounds oh-so-great turns into some low end rumbling with no definition in mono, scrap it, redesign your patch, same goes with all sounds that are gone in mono.
Understand that the 'phatter' the sound, the 'tinier' it'll sound in mono. This is usually caused by crazy oscillator panning, stereo / spread knobs on various synths, and last but not least, insane unison settings a'la 4x stereo and such.
Of course if you know what you're doing, that doesn't cause an issue, but I'd bet a leg and an arm that plenty of people aren't aware of the severity of this issue and how to design & tweak their patches to get good mono compatibility.
My advice is simply this; After you're done with your track, render it into a simple mono track in your DAW and play it out. Reverbs will usually be gone for the most part, all the wideness and spaciness of your favourite sounds too, but it's important that the essential core of the overall sound remains, since the mono check won't lie, that's all you'll get out of your track in a mono club!
One has to know that phatt stereo sounds get cancelled out in a mono setting, left-right swooshing fx's / sounds will find themselves firmly on center, use some logic and work from there.
Have your basses in mono first. Pretty simple; just have your stereo / spread / unison settings kept at nil, then check it in mono, you'll hear no difference. Then start 'phattening' it to the point where there's just a slight difference in the ambience of the sound, and try to get that sound to sit in the track, since it's the safe margin. Of course you could phatten it up more, but then the difference between stereo and mono might become way too big (people that would know the track would go "wow, that ain't the bass i know") for track's own good :)
Be very cautious with pads, they're usually sounding retardedly huge in almost all patches in all synths, which rings an alarm right there. Good trick here is to have a mono, dead center pad with another, neatly stereo'd one sitting pretty quietly with it, so on a home system it'll still sound good and wide (some psychoacoustics come into play here, sound can get seriously "widened" just by adding some little, almost neglectible stereo field coming from another source on it), yet in a club it'll still provide a good sound, since the mono pad will be dominating there, the stereo one will bite the dust, but the essential sound will remain strong, and that's what important.
Drums, vocals, goes the same for all, always keep a strong, center channel, don't pan drums off center too much, more than 20' off center and you're asking for trouble.
General idea is, before you get the absolute hang of it, first start with a mono sound, then add the same sound that's wide stereo sitting quietly in the mix with it. And I'm not saying layering, since the mono part must always be dominant.
After a while you'll be able to control and understand all those phattening knobs and how to still use them without having audible loss in mono, it takes some practice (as does everything of course), but for the love of god, don't produce phatt stuff out of the box that is simply gone-gone in a club, I'd bet that A&R guys check demos they like in mono aswell and if they know it won't work in a club, they probably won't even bother telling you that, you'll just stare in your empty email inbox and wondering "how come? it's a massive track!"
I believe this issue was never debated seriously enough, and that many don't understand the severity of the issue, and may cause some headaches (...it took me 2 years of producing to start making good sound, now it sounds crap in mono and i need to learn how to make good sound in mono too... back to the drawing board..), but it's all for glorious benefit of kazaks... oops, all aspiring producers everywhere :) |
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| the-sixth |
| Can you recommend plugins that you could perhaps use inside the DAW on the master bus without having to bounce it out? |
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| sixofour.604 |
| What club still uses Mono only? Why? |
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| DigiNut |
| quote: | Originally posted by sixofour.604
What club still uses Mono only? Why? |
Almost all clubs do. If you stop for a minute to think about it, the reason is pretty obvious - in a packed club, the majority of people will be standing nowhere near the center of the stereo field and the sound would be awful.
Also if you've got 10 speakers in various locations all bouncing their sound around, the result for any listener is going to be practically mono anyway. |
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| Tarpex |
Plenty of clubs are mono, because of the simple placement of the speakers around the place, if the place isn't a form of a square, you can consider it mono, since it's difficult to provide true stereo image from any standpoint in the club. Unless of course club is top notch designed, but there ain't that many :)
Got speakers over sitting sections? Circular areas? 99% it's mono :) Main dancefloor might be in stereo, but unless there are 2 amp stations, one set stereo for the main floor and one mono for the rest, that ain't the case. Good clubs will have it sorted, but there's still mono placement everywhere else beside the main floor, and chances are pretty good that it was a " it, let all be mono" for the main floor also :)
That's generally the difference between clubs which have "zomg awesome" and "good" sound ;) |
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| sixofour.604 |
| Hrm, the prospeckt of making tracks in mono seems steep. I guess it boils down to who is your intended audience. I doubt I will ever make a track in Mono, as I never intend to be played in clubs. Almost all of my tracks have heavy reverb, chorus and unisonm, and all of its wide. And of course I always have a phasor or 6 in my tracks. |
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| Tarpex |
That's another story then of course. My point was, if people are making tracks aiming to hit the clubs, they should ensure full mono compatibility.
For home projects and stuff that won't get played in clubs, then you could /care about it, no problems with that :) |
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| DigiNut |
| quote: | Originally posted by sixofour.604
Hrm, the prospeckt of making tracks in mono seems steep. I guess it boils down to who is your intended audience. I doubt I will ever make a track in Mono, as I never intend to be played in clubs. Almost all of my tracks have heavy reverb, chorus and unisonm, and all of its wide. And of course I always have a phasor or 6 in my tracks. |
:rolleyes:
The point is to TEST in mono, not to MAKE it in mono. Do you even read the full titles of threads, let alone the posts?
Anyway, it's really a moot point as your tracks aren't going to get played anywhere. |
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| sixofour.604 |
Sure, but the difference between mono and stereo is the difference between a drawing with black and white, and a drawing with color. I am sure most of my tracks work in mono, as I rarely pan sounds. But If I am working to make it mono compatiable, , then widness and phasors go out the window. So does PingPong Delay and most of the reverb. I might aswell make a dry track right?
This is interesting, I never knew clubs played mono, maby that has to do with why I find modern EDM atrocious. How long have studios been doing mono setups? |
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| Borbus |
| I started checking my tracks in mono but only out of curiosity, I'm not going to make an effort to get them to sound good in mono. I think the mono issue is not as great as you might think. Downmix Sandstorm or Airwave to mono and they sound terrible, you can't even hear the mid bass bit in the second climax of Sandstorm and you can barely hear the supersaw over the kick in Airwave, and, well, those tracks didn't do too badly, did they? |
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| palm |
| i used to before as my monitor-level-control/headphone amp had mono button but not anymore as ive switched some gear. really miss that option. i could also mute or switch L or R with that one which also was a fine way of controlling the balance between L and R (people normaly listen better on right ear). |
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