Mixerman and mono??

omen80

Hi, I just finished the book "Zen and the art of mixing" by Mixerman. Great read and lots of useful information in it.
However, he is pretty adamant about leaving instruments such as acoustic guitars mono. He says that it's ok to have two different microphones and blend them to the same position in the stereo field. I've always thought that having an acoustic panned left and right was a bit unnatural myself as it's a small instrument, but a lot of mixing engineers still place them this way.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you prefer mono or stereo for an acoustic guitar in a mix? Obviously it depends on the song, but in general which do you think is best practise?

PaulBrewer

As always - this is one man's opinion - however the results he gets do suggest that it's a worthwhile one.

In the context of rock/pop/country I'd always prefer mono, or 2 mic mono at a push.

I'm always anxious for my mixes to travel as well as possible on all formats, from a phone to bangin' studio monitors, so keeping reign on the stereo field is important to translate well to mono.

I personally disagree with his idea everything has to be hard left or right.

omen80

PaulBrewer wrote: »

I personally disagree with his idea everything has to be hard left or right.

Yes I forgot to mention that, it seems a bit drastic alright.

DamagedTrax

it depends on what you want the acoustic to achieve, although i generally like to keep them mono as well. if they need a little width i'd use a widener fx. two panned acoustics just never feel right to me. as always though, YMMV.

Paolo_M

You guys wouldn't object to double tracking an acoustic left and right though, would you?
I mean if the player is pretty tight.

PaulBrewer

That would be a standard country music approach to rhythm acoustics - hard left and right .

To take a tangent - another old skool trick was put the high half of a 12 string set onto a 6 string guitar and track with that (known as Nashville Tuning) which gives a very airy chorusy feel to things.

To my ears an awful lot of 70s country was badly recorded and my theory is it was a technique used to 'beat' some high end into recordings.

madtheory

I'm with Paul on this. It's just one guys opinion. There are other mixers out there who don't write as well as he does ( or write at all) but just listen to their work...

I'd go further though. Seems to me stereo recording is widely misunderstood. Particularly where the guitar is the main instrument, to my ears XY gives the best results- it captures the real body of the sound. I sometimes MS process afterwards, but always leave it panned fully left and right. XY guitar simply sounds much more interesting and engaging to me, especially on headphones. I also find that it's easier to sink a part back in the mix if it's stereo, which again is often what a strummed acoustic is for. I also use the Nashville tuning thing a lot, being obsessive about chord inversions...