Video for Channel Tools and Mid-Side Processing

You seem to be using a specialized approach to M/S technique which is, for lack of a better word "non-traditional" and so I think it might be fair to say that here is nothing that you can do "wrong".

I would comment that the video left me with uncertainty regarding what the goal of your M/S patch-routing was.

The idea that you can swap between mono an stereo might benefit from some context of how you will use this in practice.

I'm imagining that you have some ideas that may not have been included in the video and I think it might be beneficial to viewers if we learned of that as well.

Thanks for sharing.

best regards,
mike

So, I had a lot of trouble making the video. It wasn't recording the sound from the interface until I hit the loopback button on the interface. So, I recorded it over and over and in the final left out a fair bit of things I had wanted to say.

Largely, I didn't have much interest in mid-side processing until I got my UCX interface which supports mid-side processing and then I started learning about it. It turns out I have one of those microphones that records out of front and back while using phase cancellation to cancel out sound from the sides (perfect for the reverb mic in a mid-side setup).

I really don't have a need to do radio broadcasts where I don't know if the audience is listening in stereo or mono, which I believe was the original reason for making mid-side recordings.

Really, it seems to me that the day of mid-side usefulness has passed. I mix everything in stereo and don't ever listen to my mixes in mono to see what they sound like.

Most mid-side examples I have seen focus on how to set up the microphones to capture the source on one track and the verb on another.

So, in my video, I wanted to just pretend we had captured the verb on one and the source on another, then process it using the mid-side button on the channel tools to show how as you flip if from stereo to mono the reverb cancels.

it strikes me that this is exactly the purpose of mid-side processing. The fact that you can use a pair of microphones to capture a live recording with the real life reverb and achieve the same thing for the purposes of a radio broadcast where listeners will be both mono and stereo.

My demo was only to show that the button pans one copy of the verb channel far right and one far left where the two are out of phase so when you listen in mono they cancel.

I think that this is all the button does. Do you agree? The purpose is for enabling recordings to sound good in mono as well as stereo where a large percentage of the listeners listen in mono.

FBB, so, in your posts and in your video you seemed to think that mid-side processing actually means processing the sound for the mid and side channels differently, which is valid in some ways.

Mid-Side is used to describe a particular technique as well for making radio broadcasts where you didn't know if the audience might be listening in mono or stereo. So, you make a recording with 2 microphones, one designed to capture the reverb and one to capture the source recording. You pan the source center and route the reverb channel to the far left and far right and phase invert. that way, if you are listening in mono, the reverb completely cancels out. That's what the mid-side button does in the channel tools.

I don't have any use for it personally, but I wanted to try to show what the button does. This must be used in an ongoing manner by professionals because it's built in to my RME UCX interface so I don't have to manually route the channels. It's not that hard to do, if you wanted to do it manually. If you want to do it at the interface level, it gets a little trickier.

I was only trying to demo that button. (which I never even showed in the video lol)

Totally agree, FBB. I wasn't saying you should have included it. I wasn't taking issue. I just wanted to try my hand at one of my own video that demonstrated it. Please don't think I was critical. I'm so not. I was only motivated to do it by crossing that part of your video in which you did say that it wasn't in scope. (This means I watched the whole video, btw. :-)

Best,

Geoff