Stereo the WRONG Way #phase

hey this is Joe Gilder from the recording Revolution want to talk about a problem that I keep seeing in people's mixes and it's something that I don't see a lot of people talking about but it can really like literally probably more than anything else sabotage your mix in other words you've got this beautiful guitar that you mixed and then it completely disappears when somebody listens to your mix what am I talking about today I'm going to show you how to hear that problem how to spot that problem and how to avoid that problem altogether here's a mono acoustic guitar track that we're going to use as our guinea pig today now I'm gonna do something to this track I'm not gonna let you see it and once I've done the thing to this track we're going to listen to it again and I'd love if you want to play along listen to it then pause the video and let us know what you like or dislike about the track what you think happened alright here we go now here's the question do you like it or do you not be honest now if your answer is that you like it I hate to inform you you've made a terrible decision let me explain let me explain this is one of those it's a trap that people fall into so before I show you what I did let's just let me just demonstrate why this is terrible one of the cool things about Studio One is that it actually has this button here at the bottom of the window which is a mono button so some people have external boxes that you can press to hear your mix in mono instantly you can still do that but Studio one has it built in so I can click on this to make it mono so just to be clear it's taking the left and right side of my entire mix right because all mixes are stereo and it's instead of panning the left and the right it's making the Mono by panning them both to the middle so listen to what happens to this guitar when I hit the mono button what's happening so let me zoom out let me down check out the mixer here you can see that there is signal hitting my mix bus plenty of signal but when I switch to Mono that signal disappears signals there Signal's not you've probably already spotted what the problem is and the problem is I put the left and right channels out of phase in other words I clicked this cute little button right here which made one of the channels it flipped the polarity or the phase of one of the channels now technically phase and polarity are different we're not going to talk about that let's face it this is a bit of a boring topic but if you don't understand it you could really shoot yourself in the foot so I'm going to get back to at the end of the video I'm going to show you a specific mistake people make it's not as dramatic as what I just showed you but it can be almost as detrimental so stick around for that so what is Phase first let's take this audio track and duplicate it completely so we have two copies of the exact same piece of audio on this second one I'm going to use something called event effects to throw a plug-in just on this piece of audio itself this plugin will invert the polarity AKA flipped the phase so if I hit render it's going to render this audio with the face flipped so instead of just flipping it in real time it did it to the actual raw audio file and we can see that because the way audio Works a basic waveform just goes up and down and up and down nice and evenly everything else we record does a version of that up and down but it's a lot more spiky and weird but as you can see here in this selection right here this top waveform is moving down and this bottom one is moving exactly in the opposite direction now these will both sound identical by themselves but if you think of this as a positive and negative number these will add up to zero so this one goes down minus minus this one goes up plus you add those pluses and minuses together and they're exactly the same number just positive and negative the result the sum is going to be zero why am I getting into math I know you were thinking there would be no math because that results in that silence that we heard before so if I just play one of these by itself it should sound completely normal but if I unmute this second one I'm expecting to hear silence yup and this is where it gets really interesting we can look and see hold on I'm seeing signal here but I'm not seeing anything on my mix bus why is that because those two are combining together and they are what's called phase canceling each other out this is called two pieces of audio being completely 100 percent out of phase they are completely every single frequency is getting canceled out by the other what's the problem here what are we trying to solve that takes me to my next point now before we continue I have a free guide that I'd love to give to you if you struggle with not just

getting great sounding recordings but let's say you can get a great sounding acoustic guitar recording but you just don't know what parts to play or what to record next I've created a free guide it's called My ultimate recording checklist it's a single page and it'll give you a bunch of prompts and ideas for what to do next so if you're stuck this thing will get you unstuck with probably a couple of dozen of new ideas of what to record to keep you going you can get that for free at recordingrevolution. com checklist let me introduce you to my good friend phase meter if you've probably seen one of these before this is what the phase meter looks like when you're playing audio a fully mono audio signal looks like this if we were to pan this to the left or the right we can see it look like that a big like a full stereo mix of something will be have lots of like width to it because it's showing the stereo feel but right now it's in mono now if I were to flip one side of this of the two sides of the stereo sound it becomes out of phase like we talked about and you'll notice down here there's this thing called a correlation meter um when it goes this meter goes all the way up to 1. 00 and all the way down to minus one rule of thumb if this thing is going in the negative you've got phase problems right now we've got complete phase problems meaning the whole thing goes to silence if we switch to Mono but oftentimes more often than not it doesn't go completely to the left but you'll have the occasional track that is moving into the left probably because you tried to create some width that just wasn't there to begin with here's the most common way I see people messing this up and causing phase issues when there weren't phase issues before they listen to the guitar and they say hot dog that's two mono I want it to be stereo and then they try to get clever so first thing they do is they duplicate the track then they say well I know I'll pan one to the left and one to the right let's hit play and see what that sounds like okay it doesn't sound any different why is that because taking one signal and sending it to the left i. e1 speaker and then also to the right I. E the other speaker that's just mono it's no different than what we had before it's just a little bit louder because we duplicated the track so then the person thinks well if that's not going to make it wide I can take this second track here and I can come in and I can just like move it down a little bit so just delay it a little bit then when I hit play that should sound wide sounds cool even I think at the start hey that sounds kind of cool but I see that correlation meter it is popping into the negative and it's only occasionally popping into the positive that's the first sign also it's the exact same thing on the left and the right that's the second sign and then if we listen in mono we'll hear the truth I hear two things in mono it doesn't Disappear Completely that's not usually what happens but a lot of the frequencies get canceled out so full cancellation right 100 cancellation is silence every frequency got canceled more often than not you're getting partial cancellation where some frequencies are being cut here I'm hearing some weirdness in the upper mids that's kind of like almost like artifacts from like a bad MP3 encoding I'm hearing some of that and then I'm noticing most of my low end disappeared entirely foreign if it sounds way better in stereo and it sounds terrible in mono that's a big red flag that you did something wrong now to be fair everything sounds a little worse in mono than it did in Stereo but it shouldn't fall apart in mono if it does you've probably done something to cause that I know this doesn't seem like a big deal but for some reason people love to take a single track duplicate it and then mess with each side pan them left and right and then think they've got stereo and I it's just not it's not stereo it's an approximation of stereo that may or may not work best case scenario it sounds okay worst case scenario the guitar all but disappears when you go listen to it in your car or somewhere else you may think well Joe I don't listen in mono yeah you do if you listen on a small speaker in your living room that's essentially mono if you listen in your car you're mostly hearing it in mono you're not hearing it in true stereo either way it's an age-old trick to check your mixes in mono so it makes sense that we want to check this in mono and make sure we're not shooting ourselves on the foot with what we're doing if you want to make your tracks sound wider I recommend one of the following first double it record the track twice play the guitar part on two different tracks and then pan left and right you'll get incredible width and you won't have hardly any phase issues because it's two completely different performances duplicating a track is not the same as doubling a track I know those words sound the same but in this instance duplicating a track means

making a copy doubling means recording it twice you can also play around with taking a mono track adding it sending it to a nice stereo Reverb or even a stereo delay to try to create some width having the core track stay nice and solid in mono and then adding some stereo-ness behind it can give you some of that width that you want but don't do this please for the love of everything that is Holy don't do this I hope this video was helpful for you if it was be sure to like And subscribe if you haven't otherwise I'll see you in the next one