No matter the style of music, the tracks in your Logic Projects are likely going to fall into 2 track types:
Mono or Stereo.
(Of course, folks in film or gaming might disagree. And while there’s plenty to explore in Surround and Binaural mixing, we’ll leave those for another day).
The differences between Mono and Stereo tracks are pretty straightforward.
Mono tracks are a signal channel that encapsulates all your track’s audio. We often hear Mono tracks from a single place in our mixes, usually straight down the center.
When we pan, we pan the entire mono signal from left to right.
While Stereo tracks are made up of two distinct channels. A left and a right channel.
Stereo tracks offer many more possibilities for panning and processing our tracks. And one single Stereo track can span the entire stereo field from left to right.
There are reasons to use both Mono and Stereo Tracks. And I’ll leave that decision to you.
But the big question is how can you change a Mono Track to Stereo? Or Stereo to Mono?
What about Software Instrument tracks? Can you change their orientation as well?
And what about when a track looks like it’s in Stereo, but sounds like it’s in Mono? What then?
Logic Pro’s mixer is incredibly versatile. You can literally change the mono/stereo orientation of a track on a plugin-by-plugin basis.
Even if a track starts out as a Stereo Track, you can:
- Flip it to Mono with the first plugin.
- Flip it back to Stereo with the second plugin.
- And then choose a Dual Mono instance for your third plugin.
So today I’d like to walk you through the complex and exciting stereo workflows of the Logic mixer.
If you’ve been wondering these questions for a while, wonder no more.
Option-click for changing a plug-in back to mono! Thank you so much for that one, Chris! I’ve been wasting too much time on throwing out plug-ins from tracks, because I couldn’t find out how to change them back to mono from stereo. The only way I could get around that was to re-put them into the track. But no more! Opt-click! Got it! Life an Logic is good again!
I’m curious to what Autofit plugin is that you have on some of your tracks and what it does.
Hey Cliff, that’s the Autofilter plugin, which can be found in the Filter section of the Logic plugins.
Hi Chris, I’d like to know what Mid Side processing options exist within Logic and how to get the most out of them.
Thanks in advance
Hey David, thanks for your comment! In a nutshell, any plugin you own can be used as a Mid/Side plugin in Logic. This post should help: https://whylogicprorules.com/dual-mono/
Is there an easy way to just right click on a stereo .wav audio track that I drag and drop and only use one channel of it like there is in reaper?
Hey Nick, sure thing! I assume you mean use only the left channel or the right channel of a stereo file? If you go into the Mixer, click and hold the little Venn diagram set of circles in the Input section of the Channel Strip of your stereo wav file, you should be presented with the following options:
– Mono
– Stereo
– Left
– Right
– Surround
If you choose the Left or Right options, your stereo Channel Strip/track will now only play the left or right side. And all plug-in processing you instantiate will follow suit with the input selection.
I hope this helps!
Hey Chris, thanks for the post!
I was wondering: what’s your guys’ experience when it comes to CPU or memory usage? I’ve been using neural DSP plugins and I’m not sure what setting is the most efficient one.
– having two guitar tracks (L+R) bussed into the plugin on dual mono settings
– having two guitar tracks (L+R) bussed into the plugin on stereo settings
– having one plugin on mono settings on each guitar track (L+R)
Glad if you could help!
Cheers from Germany
Florian