Stereo Recording

The old phrase - recorded in stereo. I understand that stereo can be a very deep subject. I have a book titled Sound and Recording which devotes a chapter on it.

When I recorded the concert band that I teach using two mics, I got two of the desired stereo effects, both an open and spacious sound.

At home I don't use mics, just virtual instruments. Turning pans alone does not yield a satisfying stereo sound. Some of the samples are stereo, like piano and drums. The bass guitar, guitar and sax are mono samples.

Would it be a good idea to double the mono samples and pan them in opposite directions, and perhaps eq or add delay to one of the two? Any techniques on recording virtual instruments in stereo would be appreciated.

ORIGINAL: Musikamole
Would it be a good idea to double the mono samples and pan them in opposite directions, and perhaps eq or add delay to one of the two? Any techniques on recording virtual instruments in stereo would be appreciated.

No. Or rather, almost never.

Doing this on more than one source gives a sound people call "big mono," it's just a washed out pile of excrement.

Use mono sources, and find them a home in the stereo spread. It'll sound better.

Musikamole: Turning pans alone does not yield a satisfying stereo sound.

That's because miking in stereo captures much more than the directionality of the direct sound.

Two basic things:

1) There is directionality of the first early reflections. The brain uses these to reinforce the localization
of the direct sound. This is not as simple as adding some reverb. Google "Haas effect" if you really
want to get into this.

2) High frequencies are attenuated faster than low frequencies with distance. Miking captures
this front-back depth, panning does not. So these reflections, which travelled further, will have
attenuated high end.

So, in addition to panning, try to play with some subtle echoes. Sound travels at 1 foot per
millisecond, so you can figure out how soon the first reflections arrive in any real room (don't forget
the ceiling!). You also need some gentle EQing to push the apparent sound source back.

An effective, but admittedly complicated way to do all this "at once" is to use a convolution reverb with a
properly positioned impulse, for example one generated using Voxengo Impulse Modeller (check "Direct
Signal Level" on). This will have everything bult in. This method assumes that the initial mono source is
perfectly dead dry, but that should be fine for synthesised, non-sample-based sounds.

Another tip...

Don't pan the reverb for an instrument with the instrument... If you pan an instrument 80% left, to sound natural, the verb should be centered... to expand the stereo sound, you could even push the verb to the opposite side.

Be careful when panning stereo instrument. Unfortunately, when you pan you maybe killing part of the sound, if the samples are truely stereo.

So the authors use the terms illusion and impression to inform the reader that stereo was not trully being reproduced fully most of the time in professional recordings, at least before the 21st century.

They did it before by re-amping. It is still a fairly common practice: Put some full-range speakers in a really good room, place a stereo pair of mics at the listeners location and orientation, and play back the mix/tracks to record the reverb.

re amping is not the same as ambient miking but they can be related. In ambient miking you use the microphone only once. Room sound is captured by allowing the ratio of sounds reaching the microphone to increase the room sounds and decrease the direct sounds.

Re amping, on the other hand, usually requires using a microphone twice. A sound, either previously recorded through a microphone or recorded directly from an electronic source (not requiring a microphone) is played back through a speaker. Another microphone is then used to record what comes out of the speaker. That second microphone can be used to merely capture the speaker sound or can be ambiently miked to capture a room sound not a part of the original recording. These two techniques are only related when the re-amping is used to ambient mike an existing recording.

By way of example: I have on occasion plugged a guitar direct into the board and into the DAW. I would then playback the recording from the DAW into a variety of different guitar amps and record those results. That is a form of reamping. It allows me to decide later how to best amp a guitar part that when first played did not depend upon what amp sound would eventually flavor it.

AMbient miking is a one step process. re amping is a two step process one of which might be ambient miking.