FUQ (eff -yu - cue) - FAQ's with an EDGE

Tagged As: Parts Of An Acoustic Guitar

Question:
What are the advantages/disadvantages of recording in Stereo or Mono? I'm using Cakewalk 7 and Cool Edit Pro recording just an acoustic guitar and vocals - two to three tracks. I do some compression and add a little reverb, then mixdown and burn to a CD-R. Does it make a difference to record in stereo or mono?

Answer:
its really all personal taste. It should sound fine in mono. Also, unless the signal is in stereo don't waste hard drive space by recording a mono signal in stereo because then all you would be doing is getting two tracks of the exact same signal which would only make it a little louder. Now if you, for example, are running the guitar or vocal signal through some type of stereo effects processor and you have a stereo signal going into your soundcard then yes record that track in stereo. However even if both the vocal and acoustic guitar are both mono tracks you can still pan them a little bit to give a little more stereo spread to the song. One cool trick that I enjoy doing is to keep the vocals panned center and then record one rythm guitar track which I pan hard left, and then record a second rythm guitar track (where I'm playing the same thing I played on the first rythm guitar track) which I pan hard right. This will give you a wonderful rich stereo guitar sound because it basically sounds like two guitarists playing. This works well for both acoustic guitar parts as well as for distorted electric guitar parts The trick is that you must know your guitar parts very well in order to play the part as close as possible as the way you played it on the first track. Thats why some people prefer to just use digital doubling which is less of a hassle. On Cool Edit Pro this is real easy to do (digital doubling). You just take your mono guitar track that you recorded and copy and paste it to a free track (preferably right below the original track). You then Zoom in very close to both tracks so you can compare the wave-forms. You then move the copied guitar track either back or forward just a hair. Then you pan both tracks hard left and right and WALLA:Instant stereo guitar sound! You might experiment with different amounts of delay as well as this can effect the stereo width. If you can hear the delay very noticably then you've moved that track too much. You can do the same thing with the vocals or any instrument track. The trick in getting that fake stereo sound is the tiny amount of delay. This tricks your ears into beleiving that your listening to stereo sound which in a way you are. This is the same method that guitar effects processors use when they turn your guitar signal which is mono, into a big wide stereo sound except that with Cool Edit Pro it's not done automatically so you have to do it manually. This trick by the way also may work on stand-alone hard disk recorders and MiniDisc recorders that allow for very precise movement of tracks.