Turning Mono Monotony Into Stereo Seduction With Your DAW

There are times when a mono track just won't sit effectively in your mix, and you need it to be in glorious stereo. Simply duplicating that track and panning the results left and right won't do anything - to your ears, it's still mono. You could duplicate the track and then invert, delay, or re-pitch the new track slightly. But if a mix using these techniques is heard in mono, the track will sound thin and weak, or in the case of polarity inversion, simply disappear altogether. Fortunately, there are methods that will yield decent results and still sound good in mono.

A studio client recently brought in an ADAT tape filled with seven tracks of vocals(!) and one track of piano. The piano was originally recorded in mono onto a consumer-level cassette recorder and then dubbed onto the ADAT - a sharp contrast sonically to the clean vocal recording. She wanted a fresh mix for an upcoming CD, and while the vocals sounded great the piano left a lot to be desired.

To give it breadth, I turned it into stereo by making a copy of the track in MOTU's Digital Performer, panned the two pianos tracks hard left and right, and applied different EQ settings to each side. Mimicking the normal left-right spread of a piano, I rolled the highs off the left-panned side, the lows of the right-panned side, and brought the midrange frequencies down 3dB on both channels to avoid midrange heaviness. The result was a nice stereo spread and some left-right motion to the sound.

Another approach to creating stereo from mono is to simulate Mid-Side miking and decoding. Start by duplicating the original track twice, panning the first track to the center (simulating the Mid mic), and the two remaining tracks full left and full right (simulating the Side mic). Select the two "Side" tracks, and nudge them so that they are delayed from their original start point by 5-30 milliseconds (your ears will be the best judge of this). Bring the center (Mid) channel up to volume, and then bring up the L-R (Side) channels to taste. The louder they are, the wider the spread. Take care to keep the Side levels identical so that mono listening won't be compromised.

Of course you could always use a mono-to-stereo plug-in, but where's the fun in that? Happy mixing!