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Recording guitar tracks... mono or stereo?

5.9K views 19 replies 12 participants last post by  Drew  
#1 ·
I've been recording my guitar in stereo, mainly because I have stereo emulated outputs from the back of my amp and my interface & DAW and will do stereo. The guitar being a mono device... Should I be recording in mono? Does it make a difference?

Probably a dumb question, but I read something about recording in stereo being responsible for odd frequency cancellations and causing poor quality recording. I've been chasing a good recorded guitar sound and I wonder if this might be a factor?
 
#2 ·
Unless you're using a stereo effect - ping-pong delay, stereo chorus, whatever - just go with mono. It PROBABLY doesn't make a difference.... but to your point the guitar is a mono instrument so it's not likely to help things, and mono is half the filesize of stereo, so you may as well.

For whatever it's worth, I track everything mono (except acoustic guitars, which I usually do stereo... but with two mics, each recording to its own mono track).
 
#4 ·
Unless you're using a stereo effect - ping-pong delay, stereo chorus, whatever - just go with mono. It PROBABLY doesn't make a difference.... but to your point the guitar is a mono instrument so it's not likely to help things, and mono is half the filesize of stereo, so you may as well.

For whatever it's worth, I track everything mono (except acoustic guitars, which I usually do stereo... but with two mics, each recording to its own mono track).
Thanks Drew... I read a bit more regarding this last night and the way you record is pretty much what was recommended in a couple of articles. Apparently with too many instruments in stereo it can really water down the mix and nothing has it "place" in the mix. Recording different tracks in mono and using panning of individual tracks is supposed to bring more focus to the sound. Maybe use a couple of stereo recorded tracks for a spatial effect, mostly drums were recommended for this. I went back and played with some of my past recordings and just switching the master bus to mono did sound better in some ways. Especially my guitar sound. I mean, a poorly recorded guitar sound is still bad, but at least it wasn't so washed out.
 
#3 ·
Here's a quick and funny way to understand phasing. Record twenty or thirty seconds of guitar onto a mono track. Create a second track and copy/paste the sample from the first track into the second track. Line them up perfectly. Now when you hit playback the overall signal will be slightly louder since it will have the effect of two guitars playing perfectly together. Now, move one of the track samples fractionally out of sync with the other. On playback you will find some frequencies will have 'disappeared' and some will remain. The sound is usually thin or tinny. This is called phase cancellation. Once you recognise phasing/phase cancellation you'll never not hear it! This is why you need to be careful when using two mics for one instrument, drum overheads for example. If one mic is fractionally out of phase with the other you may end up with a dreadful snare drum sound! For a visual representation of what I'm talking about see the graphs under the Mechanism section here;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interference_(wave_propagation)

Good luck with your recording and rock on!
 
#5 ·
Thanks for the clarification on that. In my original post I said "frequency cancellations"... but after reading your reply I realized that "phase cancellations" is what the articled had mentioned. Sometimes I read too much and things get a bit mixed up. The link explained it very well. I can correlate this to the "thinner" sound you get when pickups are out of phase, some frequencies must get cancelled.

I would think that the stereo emulated outputs from my amp - to the stereo line level inputs on my interface - to Reaper, would still be synchronized and give a more prominent sound. Who knows though... maybe there is some stereo or latency issues that can affect the recorded sound. I'll try some experiments when i get some extra time and see if I can improve the sound quality. If I can ever get myself to back off the gain it may help that too... especially with the lower frequencies.
 
#9 ·
These are actually really good questions! True stereo recording involves at least 2 microphones usually arranged in particular stereo pattern such as ORTF, NOS, DIN, etc. Solo classical guitar is recorded this way. These recordings are usually not mono compatible due to phase issues but they sound more natural when heard in stereo. The reason for this is quite simple: you have a head between your two ears. Your head causes small differences in the arrival time and intensity level of a sound source; stereo recording emulates this. In fact, "phase issues" are how humans localize sound sources in their environment. Now onto your questions...

Solo guitar - Stereo
Guitar in a mix - Mono

I have a preamp that has stereo speaker emulated outputs as well as a stereo FX loop. I think it was built this way to cover as much ground as possible, not to record everything in stereo. I would recommend finding other guitarists that have the same preamp and ask them how they record with it. Also, in the end, if it sounds they way you want, it does not really matter how you did it.
 
#16 ·
Solo guitar - Stereo
Guitar in a mix - Mono

.
I''ll second that. I have two mics "parked" against the cab, and for rhythm parts, I'd do use one or another, and for lead parts, I use both, panned L/R. Each mic goes to a separate mono audio track. Sometimes, I print delay to track, or certain mod fx, and as I run the rig in stereo, it simply must be two mics, anyway.
Of course, if you're recording a single guitar part, or play a capella, you can go with stereo no probs.

From mixing perspective, it's easier to deal with single guitar track per each part or double track, unless you have a lot of time on your hands and really want to try and mix/pan several mics for a certain effect. For an average rock recording, recording two identical rhythm parts, panning them hard to sides, and overdubbing leads on top of that is a common practice.
 
#11 ·
Depends on the source, somewhat, but generally when people are talking about double-tracking (I assume that's what you mean by dual track), they're talking about two seperate performances.

Using more than one mic on a source would be done for two reasons - one, because you want to mix it in stereo and having different mics in different positions capturing different timbres can help increase that feeling of space. Or, two, because you want to treat the results as effectively a "mono" signal, but you want to flesh out the sound of one mic by using a second mic to capture some stuff the first one is missing (similar to the idea behind stereo micing, but trying to capture different tones, and not to pan them seperately to make it sound more spacious, left to right).

The former is something you'd do a lot on acoustic guitars - using either a matched pair of condensers, or like a small diaphragm condenser for brightness and a large diaphragm for body, and then panning them separately so make a big, lush stereo space. The fact that the mics will likely be slightly different distances from the source can potentially cause phase problems if collapsed into mono/panned together, but can help create an illusion of even more space and depth.

The later is typically done on electric guitars, usually a SM57 and something else (a Royer 121 ribbon mic or a Sennheiser MD421 dynamic are popular here, though some times you'll see a large diaphragm condenser put to work like this), where you'll have one of the mics (typically the SM57, which is a classic on guitars for a good reason - it sounds awesome on them) producing the "main" part of the tone, but a second mic recorded as well at the same time, and mixed in with the primary mic to fill out the sound a little - either add some more depth, or some added high end, or whatever. The idea is to make the single take you've recorded sound richer and fuller, and not to make it sound double-tracked. Often, you'll then go back and double track that first performance (captured with two mics) again, to get that "double tracked" sound.

Personally, recording instrumental guitar music, I don't necessarily WANT huge sounding guitars, since the guitar is both the rhythm and the lead instrument all at once so I don't want the two parts fighting each other for space. So, I usually just use a single mic, and double track my rhythm tracks (but not the leads).
 
#12 ·
I favor the true multi track option. That is I play my guitar tracks as separate performances. You can just duplicate a track and then marginally shift one slightly and try to get the same end result but I feel that separate performances will give a very wide and full guitar sound. Panning them to opposite sides gives a very full sound. I typically use a neumann TLM 102 large condenser mic because it is my preference. Dynamics and ribbons are equally acceptable choices.
 
#13 ·
You want separate performances left and right. Copying and "sliding" tracks will just give a weird (unless you want it) chorus type effect. Basically giving phase issues with sound and it's not good. Record your performance multiple times and edit what you like. Pan it hard left and right. Pretty much the gold standard of a million hits.
 
#15 ·
Allmost all intruments should be recorded in mono in most of the cases, keyboards can be an exception, but for guitars they should be mono 99% of the time, for heavy rhythm guitar tracks the old double tracking method with one track being paned to right and the other to the left, works really good.