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March 13, 2019

Why Mixing in Mono is the Best Tool You Have For Achieving Great Mixes

 

If you haven’t guessed from my posts, I’m always on the hunt for a shortcut.

How complicated can it be to produce a song? How about VERY? Let me point out just a small list of some of the topics featured on WLPR:

  • Gain-Staging
  • Archiving LPX Projects
  • Pitch Correction for Vocals
  • Dialing in Compression
  • Managing Phase Relationships
  • Minimum Phase EQ vs Linear EQ

And those topics are just a teensy tiny taste from the HUGE list of questions and concerns readers have had.

With such a tremendous amount of info you’ll need to remember every time you open Logic, how do you not go crazy???

After a while of trying to learn everything I possibly could about audio, I decided I needed a different approach.

Is audio complicated? Sure! But did we buy Logic to become scientists, or artists?

Years ago I decided I couldn’t keep up with learning everything about audio. So instead, I decided to focus on core philosophies.

You know what has helped me more than anything else when it comes to mixing?

Mixing my tracks in Mono.

Mono listening is when you combine stereo listening to only one signal straight down the center. So if you pan your guitar to the right, you still only hear it down the center.

Seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? What good is panning if you don’t really hear it?

Mono playback forces you to focus. Your tracks aren’t able to hide in the peripherals of the hard left or right. So if your mix is muddy, you have to do something about it.

I myself spend 80% of my mixing time in Mono. While only reintroducing the mix in Stereo once in a while for double-checking my panning.

So in today’s video, I sit down and do a preliminary mix only in Mono. That includes:

  • Faders
  • Panning
  • EQ
  • Compression

And then I show you the before and after results (both in mono and stereo). Check it out, and let me know what you think of mixing in Mono.

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Comments

  1. jonah says

    March 14, 2019 at 7:57 am

    fantastic and it makes so much sense what good is panning if you can’t really hear

    thanks Chris

    Reply
    • chris.vandeviver says

      March 15, 2019 at 10:10 pm

      You bet jonah!

      Reply
  2. Jimmy says

    March 14, 2019 at 5:28 pm

    Great video. Mono mixing is the secret to great mixes. Widely misunderstood by most engineers, but totally used by the best.

    Reply
    • chris.vandeviver says

      March 15, 2019 at 10:11 pm

      So, so, so true! I think mixing in mono can feel claustrophobic when someone’s first starting out. But the results are huge.

      Reply
  3. Charles Moore says

    March 15, 2019 at 4:52 pm

    Great stuff, thank you Chris. I’m barely qualified to comment as I’m primarily a composer-arranger, but…

    Gotta get things sounding decent enough to advance the work efficiently, so I set plugins for mono and do zero panning. Hopefully I’m rough-mixing only in mono (though occasionally it seems LPX defaults have other ideas!). In any case I intuitively knew to keep things simple until projects are ready for mixdown and mastering. I figure if I can get all instruments sitting nicely in their own spaces in mono, final mixing/mastering should put the icing on the cake.

    Still have a *lot* to learn, so thanks – keep up the good work!

    Reply
    • chris.vandeviver says

      March 15, 2019 at 10:12 pm

      For sure Charles – not panning any of your instruments truly forces one to contend with the mud!

      Reply
  4. Brian says

    March 17, 2019 at 10:08 am

    True Two Mono L and R from Software Instrumentals

    How do you split left and right any software instrument in Logic Pro x into two true mono left and mono right tracks of the software instrument?

    Reply
    • chris.vandeviver says

      March 21, 2019 at 10:46 am

      Hey Brian, you’ll actually need to go into the Project Finder to split stereo files. Do the following:

      – Hit key command F to open the Project finder.
      – Select the audio region you want to split in the Arrange page. When you select the region, you should now see it highlighted in the Project finder.
      – In the Project Finder, go to Audio File > Copy/Convert File(s)…
      – In the dialogue that pops up, there will be an option towards the bottom called “Stereo Conversion.” From the dropdown select, “Interleaved to Split.”

      This process will create 2 new versions of your Audio File: one for the left signal, and one for the right. You may need to import the 2 new Audio Files back into your Project.

      Reply
      • Brian says

        March 21, 2019 at 12:12 pm

        Thank You so much Chris for Your Help with everyone God Bless and rock on

        Reply
        • chris.vandeviver says

          March 25, 2019 at 12:38 am

          You bet Brian!

          Reply
  5. Åge Eriksen says

    March 21, 2019 at 10:28 am

    I noticed you did some panning in mono, Chris, setting guitars hard left an hard right. Shouldn’t panning be done while in stereo, and then checked in mono? Or do you just anyway pan guitars hard left and right, so that’s why you did it in mono?

    Reply
    • chris.vandeviver says

      March 21, 2019 at 10:48 am

      I did! I’ll actually spend the first 30-60 minutes of a mix getting levels and panning in mono. I’ll periodically check in Stereo to make sure my panning is well balanced. But much of my panning I’ll conduct while in mono.

      Reply
  6. Roman says

    April 6, 2019 at 11:27 am

    Hi Chris. What do you think about a Waves NX plug-in? I have no good room acoustics and speakers, and I bought Waves NX for mixing in headphones. This plug-in helps to make something like “mono” mixing process. By the way, what can you say about mixing in mono with headphones?

    Reply
    • chris.vandeviver says

      April 7, 2019 at 1:33 pm

      Hey Roman, I personally was not enamored with Waves Nx plugin. But I also wasn’t really in the market to buy it.

      I think testing out mono mixing on headphones is good practice as well. You can always turn mono off occasionally and check to see how your mix is working in Stereo.

      Reply
  7. Åge says

    August 27, 2020 at 6:56 pm

    Hi, Chris. Got a mono-question which I hope you can answear.
    I tried to mix tremolo onto a guitar track. Did it by sending the guitar signal to a bus with a tremolo effect. It worked great in stereo, but when I tested the mix in mono, the tremolo almost vanished. Had to turn up the guitar signal to the tremolo bus, but when switching back to stereo the tremolo was of course way too loud. Couldn’t figure out why the tremolo seems to nearly cancel itself in mono, so I almost gave up using tremolo. But then I tried adding tremolo by using the pedalboard plugin with tremolo directly on the guitar track, and it worked fine, both in stereo and mono. So, the question is: why don’t tremolo on a bus pass the mono test?

    Reply

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