Making a mono rhythm guitar stereo

[Chris WalkerParticipant]

Hi, I was wondering if anyone could share any insights into mixing rhythm guitar... in particular, whether or not there's a 'recognised' way of making a mono guitar stereo. If I use the same guitar and amp settings, when I record a doubled track, and check for mono compatibility, the tracks seem to cancel each other out, which I guess means that if I go down that route, I ought to try using different guitars and amp settings. The problem is, I like the sound I already have...

The way I have been doing it, would appear to be frowned upon as it plays about with the phase. I send the mono guitar (centre-panned) to a stereo aux, which has a mono delay of about 25ms followed by a plugin which allows me to switch the phase of one side. The thinking is that the original signal will be 'comb-filtered' on both sides because of the delay, but they will be out of phase with each other - so you get the width in stereo, but when you sum to mono, both sides on the aux feed cancel each other out, leaving the original signal intact. It does work, although the guitar is a bit more buried in the mix.

So, is there a good way of 'stereo-ising' a mono signal?

Thanks in advance!

Chris

[Guido tum SudenKeymaster]

Hi Chris,

there are some plugins that help with that, but if you can, always record two separate tracks.
If you only got one track you could try the following:

If you still have more than one take for comping, make two different tracks from it, even if one is not played perfectly.

If you have more than one chorus or verse, swap e.g. the tracks from the choruses to get two different tracks.

Or even, if you have some same chords within one chorus, copy single bars to other places to get two different tracks.

If you can't any of that and you have to use the same track, make the copy also different in other ways than just with delay. Change it with EQ a lot, use saturation on both but on different frequencies…

Guido

[Arthur LabusModerator]

Hi Chris,

there are several ways to get it done.

Plugins (free):
Voxengo Stereo Touch (very useful presets) - delay based
Izotope Imager - frequency panning based

Plugins paid:
Waves Brauer Motion - more than just widener
Soundtoys [Little] Microshift
Boz Digital L8R

Hand made:
1. double the track, move one track at 12ms, pan opposite, check perceived volume
2. double the track, pitch one track at 0,02%, pan opposite, check perceived volume
3. double the track, cut and move/replace the "equal" parts in patterns. Its literally like double tracking.

One of them will work for sure 😀

[Chris WalkerParticipant]

Brilliant - thanks for the replies guys - definitely things to try out there...!

[Martin Østervig LarsenParticipant]

If you play the parts and don't just copy, you shouldn't have phase issues. Not in my experience. But it's nice to change the tone bit. Dial back the drive a bit on one of the tracks, for example, can often work well. Or just change guitars.

One of the best tricks of getting wide guitars is to pan a fairly loud short reverb to the opposite side. Warrens does this a lot and it works really well.

Best,
Martin.

[Simon BrownParticipant]

PreSonus posted a tip of the week about this a little while ago, on using a multiband compressor on two copies of the signal and crushing alternate bands on the left and right copy.

http://blog.presonus.com/index.php/2018/08/17/friday-tip-delay-free-stereo-mono/

[Devin UnderwoodParticipant]

Hand made:
1. double the track, move one track at 12ms, pan opposite, check perceived volume
2. double the track, pitch one track at 0,02%, pan opposite, check perceived volume
3. double the track, cut and move/replace the "equal" parts in patterns. Its literally like double tracking.

I kinda do that but I'll add one more thing and process the guitars differently. Usually record through a DI and have an amp mic'd and have a clean signal going into the interface. Depending on the song I'll leave one dry or add different effects to it so it sounds like 2 completely different guitars.

BUT NOW...

That presonus tip seems pretty hot. Def gonna try that.

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